1,350 karma · joined July 1, 2021
At my last company, I joined as their lead developer and discovered they already had another developer in the pipeline they were thinking of hiring. They thought the guy was super senior, and when I read his CV sure enough he came across that way. He emphasized on his CV that he was not only a Java expert but an expert on the internals of HotSpot itself.
Probably he'd been saying that for years, and given how many firms use the JVM it's probably a great line. Unlucky for him he got an interviewer (me) who actually was an expert in the HotSpot internals and liked to relax by reading its source code. Guess what? He knew nothing about the JVM, not even stuff you'd learn by reading the user guide. I got the sense he'd read one or two popular press articles about it 20 years ago, put it on his CV and never updated it.
So we progress to some coding. He can't code. He struggles with even the basics of starting a new program in an editor and compiling it.
The guy was demanding a huuuge salary and great perks. After I wrote up what I'd found from the coding interview he was quietly dropped from the pipeline. They'd been about to accept because they were so dazzled by his claims but weren't checking them.
The "knew it once maybe sorta" problem is common, especially with C++ where lots of people were struggling with it in the 90s and then jumped to Java/C# as soon as they came out. But they still list C++ on their CV. Ask them to write a C++ program (that does anything at all) and they'll just refuse or state point blank they'd feel really uncomfortable doing that.
Lots of people lie about their experience unfortunately. They probably don't think of it as lying. They just write down every possible thing they've ever thought or read about and exaggerate, gambling that they'll never be called on it. And, they're probably right. That's why coding interviews took off.
People who break down and cry in interviews are rare but if they do it, they are best avoided and it was good that the interview revealed this. You cannot have that happening on the job but if they can't handle being asked to program something whilst up against a time limit or being watched, they're going to have breakdowns in other situations too.
Notoriously, a few years ago a former advisor to Blair went on record to say that New Labour deliberately encouraged as much immigration as possible in order to "rub the Right's nose in diversity", and:
"He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/641845...
It's really difficult to reconcile this history with the ideas you're expressing above. Far from "carefully mining the anti foreigner vote for decades" they were explicitly undermining it by hiding the true extent of what they were doing.
I've tasted university education very little ever since. Academia is just flooded with intellectual fraud of all kinds. The students sense the lack of seriousness and accountability and realize that no matter what is said, that'll get away with it because the profs don't really care and in fact depend on cheating to survive.
I couldn't see my family for Christmas this year because they freaked out over Omicron and insisted that me and my girlfriend would have to quarantine for 10 days before being able to visit them. This was driven entirely by "scientists" jumping to conclusions that Omicron would be as deadly as Delta but much more infectious and demanding more lockdowns, quarantines etc. They had no scientific basis for this doom-mongering, which appeared to be driven purely by some strange ideological desire for more restrictions.
I told family at the time - this is crazy. All the evidence about Omicron says it's a mild cold. There is no evidence pointing to any other conclusion. The people who discovered it in South Africa are communicating clearly that there's no crisis. Public health scientists are lying, again, because they're claiming there's no data when I was reading about that supposedly non-existent data in the press just yesterday and so you shouldn't listen.
Well, they listened to the "scientists" and not me. For a few weeks, at least. February comes around, nothing about the virus has changed but they suddenly realize that it causes a mild cold and nobody cares. The Queen gets it aged 95 and it's on the front pages for about half a day. She doesn't even stop working. Then they want us to visit so we can do the celebrations we didn't do at Christmas.
So the scores are:
South African doctors: 1
native_samples: 1
Public health: -a million, again.
The people from South Africa turned out to be completely correct.I've not disagreed with that. Are you conflating "strained" with "collapsed"?
Here's the definitions I'm using - very busy isn't collapse or near collapse. It's just busy. You want hospitals to be busy otherwise it means you over-built capacity.
The UK healthcare system is currently in a state of collapse. People are dying in ambulances because they're sitting in queues outside hospitals. They're dying on waiting lists because by the time the hospitals can put them into surgery it's already too late. Hospital managers themselves are naming precise dates for when their entire region will "collapse" and they're using that word specifically. The cause is a combination of the general backlog caused by lockdowns, bed-blocking caused by staff fleeing care homes (forced vaccinations etc), a new WFH culture in primary care doctors, and a refusal to abandon useless anti-COVID measures inside hospitals that reduces throughput. But that's a very rare situation, rather specific to the UK, and is also quite recent.
"here is a paper published in Science last year, suggesting various distancing measures produced significant reductions in transmission of COVID [1]"
It wasn't published last year. It is dated 15 Dec 2020 and uses data only from the first wave. If you're going to cite scientific papers at least describe them correctly!
Look, there are tons of junk science papers on this topic because academics are desperate to believe that their advice worked. This particular paper is of a genre popular just after the first wave, in which they take as axiomatic that any reduction in transmission was caused by their suggested policies and then build a model on that assumption. The model then calculates how much of the reduction came from each intervention.
These papers are all invalid because the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 acted like every other respiratory virus in the world, and comes in waves that naturally peter out, was ignored entirely. It's unscientific. Later on more waves came and this idea was destroyed by the evidence, but the sort of paper you're citing wouldn't have taken that into account.
No? You seem to like citing the New York Times, but they were previously absolutely sure you could compare them. I can no longer view this story but know what it said at the time: it said Sweden was a "cautionary tale for the world".
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c...
Back then there was no Nordic exception, because Sweden wasn't proving lockdown theory wrong. The idea that there is something special about it only emerged after their results became much better than elsewhere, revealing that public health had no clue what it was doing anywhere else.
By the way, please don't use the New York Times as a source for anything. It's both paywalled and notoriously biased.
"Are you willing to compare China and Vietnam with Sweden too?"
I already said this above: "Sweden's peers are rich western countries".
"The jury is still out about the effects of the lockdowns"
The jury went home a year ago dude, you just can't accept what they found. There is no correlation between severity of countermeasures and outcomes (when looking at countries with reliable data). This has been examined six ways from Sunday and the results are always the same - no correlation. You can tell people they should ignore almost all of the data to try and create doubt here, but those of us who actually are intellectually honest will ignore you, because that's not how science is done. Lockdowns were a catastrophe of stupidity, incompetence and malice by the public health community. They must never be allowed to happen again.
You're still scrabbling about to try and hide this with cherry picking. There's no scientifically valid reason to only compare Sweden with Norway, or Portugal, or Italy. That's why the blog post shows it relative to all European countries (and they could have included the USA, Canada etc too).
Moreover you have no scientific or biological basis to claim that GDP is the reason lockdowns weren't necessary in Sweden. No epidemiologist ever claimed some GDP dependence existed when justifying the policy nor have they done since.
"Italy's healthcare system was overwhelmed early on in the epidemic"
No, it wasn't. I kept waiting for news reports to switch from "hospitals are nearly full" to "hospitals are full and people are queuing outside" but it never happened actually (except maybe for one or two very small local hospitals? even then it's unclear). Certainly the whole of Italy was never overwhelmed. That was the impression the press wanted to give but if you watched carefully it wasn't the case.
"hospitals all over the world approached 100% ICU capacity at several points in the last two years"
Hospitals are always approaching 100% utilization because ICU capacity is flexible (it's partly a designation related to staffing levels), and having unused capacity is wasteful. Again, this is a talking point that was spun to try and justify the catastrophic policies, but they aren't valid. Hospitals weren't actually overloaded and especially not in Sweden which didn't bother with most of the mitigations.
"It's basic logic: if we had to use lockdowns in the most extreme cases where hospitals were reaching capacity, then these countries would have experienced a higher death rate regardless of what they did."
Huh? There's nothing logical about what you just wrote. The whole point is that we did not have to use lockdowns because they don't do anything, and comparing places that used them vs places that didn't (not just Portugal) shows this clearly.
It's logical that lockdowns don't work. SARS-CoV-2 spreads like a gas and can hang in the air for hours. Lockdowns didn't stop people interacting nor did it stop airflows. SARS-1 could spread through drainage pipes in apartment buildings, it literally didn't matter if nobody left their room, they'd still be exposed. And of course even in lockdowns people still had to pass through places recently vacated by the sick, like shops, apartment building lobbies etc. The justification for lockdown was the droplet model of spread, which is wrong.
It can work for simple stuff. For anything more complex the underlying widgets are too different, you have to go with the lowest common denominator and the results just aren't good enough.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
A consultation isn't an opinion poll. It's something anyone can write in to because they invite responses, so you get a biased sample. There's no evidence in this report on which you could make claims about the British public in general (most of whom would not have any opinion on the topic). Not entirely shocked that New Scientist would garble this / lie about it so badly.
Moreover the 88% figure is actually for a different question:
"We asked whether organisms developed using genetic technologies should be regulated as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), even if their genetic changes could have been produced through traditional breeding"
"Most individuals (88%) and businesses (64%) supported continuing to regulate such organisms as GMOs"
Not quite the same thing.
"Unlike Sweden, most of them reached a threshold where further spread of the disease would mean hospitals exceed capacity"
No they didn't. Epidemiologists and their models claimed such thresholds would be reached but those models were wrong about everything. It never actually happened. Look at Switzerland for an obvious counter example. Lockdowns happened, then they didn't, but hospitals never went above 80% utilization no matter what. Or at the UK. Freedom day came and the experts said it was an unethical experiment on the entire world because cases would surely soar. They dropped dramatically and immediately.
"It's simply incorrect to use the number of deaths as the single measure of effectiveness of lockdowns"
Reducing that one number was the entire justification for lockdowns! Now it's "simply incorrect" to observe that there is no link between them. Absurd.
The Ukraine banners are dumb. They have no place in technical docs. Like everyone else I want them to win their war, but spamming blue and yellow flags everywhere isn't going to help achieve that. Moreover the murky nature of their military alliances (Azov etc) makes it hardly a Disney movie-esque conflict with pure good and pure evil.
You see no complaints because why bother? The sort of people who do that never care if their actions are unpopular with other people, in fact they take a perverse joy in it.
The giant banners say this: although these are technical docs you may need to do your job, the most important thing you must see above all is an announcement of how morally pure we (think we) are. Once isn't enough. On our blog isn't enough. It must be the biggest and most eyecatching thing on literally every single page of our documentation. This indicates a lack of respect for the time and attention of devs. The implementation is also incompetent - the banner text appears to have leaked into search result snippets, thus reducing the utility of their docs search engine.
When Steve Ballmer jumped around on stage yelling "developers! developers! developers!" he was ridiculed because the outburst of energy seemed absurd and out of place for a CEO. But many of us appreciated the sentiment - that if you're developing an operating system then developers matter and their time/attention matters. Ballmer knew that. Platforms aren't chicken/egg situations where it's unclear what comes first. Apps come first. Users come for the apps. Then more apps come to follow those early adopter users, but ultimately, there had to be some apps to kick things off.
When the first thing you see at the top of the Fuschia docs is something totally unrelated to programming / the reason you were at that site, and which is irrelevant to most of the world as well, this sends a powerful message that the Fuschia devs are:
a. Staggeringly US centric. Their mindset isn't international at all. This is offputting to those of us outside the US. Fuschia's front page claims it's "an inclusive, open source effort". Not only have they never even tested it with a non-English locale, but they ignored the critical locale bug for so long other people had to fork the project to even make the emulator start up for non-English users [1]. That's about as non-inclusive as you can get yet is also absolutely predictable. Did we really need the blog to tell us that? Not really, we could guess it quite easily. The sort of people who demand such banners always seem to be hypocrites. It's called virtue signalling for a reason - people who do it announce their principles but never seem to live by them.
b. Not really rewarded for making developers happy. It reinforces a general impression about modern Google, that the personal success of the employees and executives is tied to things like the size of a giant black banner as much as whether their kernel is secure or their API docs are actually accurate.
c. As such extremely likely to manipulate their platform to prioritize the happiness of activists over that of developers. It's a bold statement of ideological allegiance. Who in their right mind is going to write an app for Fuschia that's braver than a shopping cart when they see that? Nobody smart, because you can guess what will happen if Fuschia actually does get apps: half of them will end up banned for some inane, impossible to understand reason, probably related to mundane use of language that's inexplicably become unacceptable since yesterday in California. The financial risk of developing for this platform is huge.
BTW: the Google doodles are pretty political these days, but in the beginning they were mostly reflecting things like national holidays.
Perhaps more importantly, both of those are complete and have real users who found value in them.
It's hard not to feel like maybe Google has lost the ability to develop operating systems. Fuschia has been in development for years now, it has no users outside of Google yet if you flick through their docs you'll notice a whole bunch of pages talking about deprecated components, migrations, etc. When I last looked at their docs, they read like it's been around for 20 years and has millions of apps, even though that's not true. Oh yeah and of course the giant BLM banners everywhere they have/used to have. Just checked, now those banners are replaced with "Honoring Asian Pacific American Heritage Month", lol. Apparently their vision of a futuristic OS is one in which every page in the docs has some random totally US centric bit of virtue signalling in it. No wonder they somehow can't even finish a microkernel, a design that reduces performance in return for a much smaller syscall surface area.
This is a language/tooling issue, not a local Vs remote issue even though it may seem that way to people using languages that are only barely working on non-Linux systems.
It's worth considering that this problem isn't necessarily symmetrical around the centre of the political axis. There have been experiments done on this that show conservatives understand the left far better than the other way around. They come up with a large set of "How much do you agree with on a scale of 1-10" type questions on political topics. Then they recruit people from across the political spectrum (self rated) and split them into four groups. Two groups are asked to fill out the survey in the usual way, directly about their own opinions. The other two are asked to answer the survey as they imagine someone from the other side would answer. Then the answers are lined up to see how good each group was at predicting the answers of the other. The results are always the same: conservatives can play 'pretend leftie' much better than the other way around.
I'm always quite suspicious of social science these days but the methodology in this type of experiment seems simple enough that there can't be much hiding in it, except maybe, the exact nature of the questions used. This experiment has been replicated however.
This provides empirical support for what has probably been the real world experience of many of us, that people on the right are much more willing to interact with and be exposed to left wing views than the reverse. Example: I've encountered people in the past who threw tantrums at work because they discovered that someone else was reading right wing news websites (in their own time). The idea of a conservative person going to HR and filing complaints about other employees because they read the Guardian is laughable, and it's not because the Guardian is somehow better or more moral than other newspapers (very much not so). People on the left are just drastically more afraid than normal people of exposure to non-left wing thought, and this problem gets worse the further left you go. This is also why communist countries always rely heavily on censorship and speech control.
Unfortunately the experiments can't illuminate why this effect exists, only proving that it does. The rest is in the realm of speculation. They do leave one clue though: the left wing participants usually fail to predict right wing responses because they're picking answers much more extreme than those people actually hold.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/peter-ridd-record-coral-cover-o...
There was data from many flu pandemics. It led to the standard public health recommendation being against school closures. One more thing that just got tossed out without a moments thought for COVID. And no, COVID is not so novel that all prior knowledge of viruses and respiratory disease became irrelevant.
Regardless, there is a serious problem here. It doesn't actually matter if you agree with the rationales for editing the data or not - even if you are 100% on side climatology, the fact remains that they have radically changed their opinions about how the climate was changing in the past, and have done so multiple times (the long period of cooling that triggered the global cooling claims in the 60s and 70s is now no longer visible in the historical data either).
The existence of these changes are simply documented facts. By implication, despite studying climate for many decades they still don't have the ability to accurately measure current temperatures. Again this is not really controversial or up for debate, it's their own telling of the situation. To predict the future you have to be able to at least accurately measure the present.
To wit: what they label as "observations" are not actually thermometer readings as they may at first appear, but rather data points after a complicated adjustment process. The averaging process then adds many more sources of modeled adjustment, so they keep changing the methodologies of both the individual weather station readings and also the composite averages post-hoc. About half of all warming visible in the (current) temperature record for the 20th century actually derives from administrative adjustments made after 2008.
You therefore cannot actually say how hot a particular year was, as far as climatologists are concerned. The past is not fixed. To make a claim about how hot it was in city X on date Y you must also reference dataset version Z.
This has a lot of strange effects. For example we often read about record setting temperatures. These records can be "unbroken" [1]:
"NOAA noted in a Friday press release that the previous record was set in July 2016, and tied in 2019 and 2020. But as Bill Frezza, a sharp-eyed reader of Retraction Watch noticed, the agency’s website tells a different story. This press release, dated Aug. 15, 2019, and still live on noaa.gov, proclaims July 2019 to be the hottest month on record for the planet."
Temperature datasets are like software (actually they are software). Some do occasional releases that make big changes. Others are actually continuously 'deployed'. As they explain:
"NOAAGlobalTempv5 is a reconstructed dataset, meaning that the entire period of record is recalculated each month with new data. Based on those new calculations, the new historical data can bring about updates to previously reported values."
For many years climatologists debated the nature and causes of the "pause" in global warming that started around the turn of the millennium. Many papers were published on this e.g. by the UK Met Office [2], many newspaper articles were written [3] etc. Temperatures had stopped going up and nobody knew why. No problem. The pause and all the many barrels of ink spilled on it, was simply written out of history. It was all just a big data mistake, they concluded.[4] Actually the pause never happened at all, and they proceeded to edit it out of the temperature databases.
They started removing the pause around 2015. By their own telling they can't even accurately measure trends in temperatures in past 20 years, but, for sure, they know what will happen in 80 years. It's not rational to treat a community that behaves in such a way as if they cannot make mistakes. They have repeatedly done so in the past, by their own admission!
[1] https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...
[2] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metoffi...
Regardless, the premises of both your and his argument are weak. The idea that Miami will be six meters underwater in 30 years is not based on actual observations about sea level rises (which are utterly tiny and very stable), but are based on computational models that are programmed to assume massive and very fast feedback loops that end with the poles melting all at once.
We all learned a lot about how much academia cares about model reliability during COVID (they don't care, at all). Although the HSBC exec doesn't directly challenge climate models (only central bank risk models and the priorities assigned to them), models of all kinds have long histories of being wrong. Climatologists tend to respond to this by actually editing the historical record to make it appear as if they were correct retroactively, which is completely unscientific. This sort of behavior might be why the markets don't seem to acknowledge climate risk existing, which is a part of the guy's point.
1. Claims are over the top. There have been so many wrong claims of apocalypse that it's now really hard to get people's attention. "Most of you barely looked up from your phones at the prospect of non-survival - it's become so hyperbolic that nobody really knows how to get anyone's attention at all". He compares to the claims of gold bugs and about Y2K.
2. Climate activists generate far too much banking work given the time frames and nearer term problems. "We've got the China problem, a housing crisis looming, interest rates climbing, an inflation crisis, and I'm being told time and time again to spend time looking at something that's going to happen twenty or thirty years hence. The proportionality is out of whack".
3. At the moment, markets agree with him more or less. The more often the phrase "climate catastrophe" is mentioned in the press, the more valuable risk-associated assets become.
In other words he feels like bankers have nearer term job related problems to be thinking about like the cost of living crisis, the lockdown induced recessions, and not claims the world is ending which, historically, have proven to be inaccurate as a general class.
If you feel like these views justify firing or suspending people then you're the sort of person he's criticizing.
Edit: Here's a summary of the rest of his arguments.
1. People claiming the world is going to end need to either present arguments for why the market is mispricing everything despite millions of participants, or, why there's going to be a massive boom if climate risk is 'solved'. But currently they don't do that, they're implicitly arguing that the market is seriously mispriced, without actually stating so directly.
2. IPCC figures for actual impact of climate change are surprisingly low, on the order of 5% by 2100. However even if you accept those figures, by 2100 the economy may easily be 1000% larger, so a 5% difference would not be noticeable. Also GDP growth is perhaps over-rated in terms of importance: growth has completely stopped in the recent past and it was OK.
3. People often make misleading claims about extreme weather increasing, without noting that weather related deaths and costs have all been trending downwards significantly. Thus not only dry financial/economic metrics seem impacted in only low ways, but also 'lifestyle' metrics. Humans have been pretty fantastic at adaptation and there's no reason to assume this will change.
4. "I don't doubt the science at all". California's fire budget is only 1% of their state budget, or .1% of their GDP. If economic growth continues as expected, even with more fires, that is solvable through adaption.
5. We spend way too much on mitigation financing and not enough on adaptation financing.
6. There's a difference between volumes and prices (this seems like a technical financial argument), e.g. revenues can fall without profits/prices changing because there's an indirect relationship. There will be winners and losers whose share prices go up and down, during green transitions there's going to be both and it's possible to build portfolios around both. E.g. at the moment coal indexes are outperforming renewables, but it's been different in the past and things will swing back and forth.
7. "Even if climate risk isn't negligible it's too far in the future to matter for most companies". This is again a technical point related to the priorities of bankers. He says company valuations don't really go beyond 20 years. Avg loan length is 6 years. Even if you assume the "Sharons and the Mark Carneys" of the world are totally right about everything and the world ends in fire and destruction in 30 years (not sure who Sharon is but seems to be a prior presenter), then from the perspective of a banker it doesn't matter because it's still too far in the future to actually be important for day to day financial activities.
8. He criticizes central banks for spending far too much time on climate risk instead of things they're meant to be thinking about like inflation and asset prices.
9. One climate risk that markets may not be pricing is the possibility of a giant unexpected carbon tax. Many claims by central banks about climate risk being high, are in reality when you check the fine print of the models, actually modelling implausible economic growth dynamics and massive interest rate shocks, which they then present as "climate risk" to make headlines. This isn't reported and he feels central banks are manipulating models in order to make headlines.
10. If we'd tried to model climate risk in the 1920s with today's knowledge of climate science, they'd have got it totally wrong as they'd never have predicted deindustrialization, the impact of greener technology etc.
11. Conclusion, summary of argument: humans are extremely good at managing change. We need to be less doom-mongering and re-focus / re-gain perspective on what investment bankers should be focused on. We need to not be caught out by opportunities like Tesla, and there's lots of investment opportunities in the green transition.
Overall his talk is not even debating or doubting climatological sciences or predictions at any point. It is mostly about what bankers should be doing with their time.
They make IDEs for many languages but the indexability of languages varies a lot depending on (mostly) how strong their type system is and how easily parsed the code is. Check out their structured search feature for an example of how to do semantic queries over the indexed AST.