opportune

Good take. Just want to add that the problem is “how long things will take” is always a guess when formulated as a single number or date and in reality something more like a probability distribution subject to many foreseen and unforeseen forces.

That’s where the fundamental mismatch between corporate planning and Agile lies. Agile is supposed to be resilient to known and unknown unknowns, but corporate planning usually isn’t - as you mention due to very real constraints like cost and opportunity costs and so forth. It’s why you essentially can’t do “true-agile” in basically any corporate setting IMO.

Yeah. It’s the bullying feedback loop - there would be no point in bullying someone if you didn’t get a reaction out of them. If you reliably freak out in a grandiose way you’re just reinforcing yourself as a good bullying target by providing entertainment for your bullies.

If you want to preserve it, you should buy it. From my perspective, too many people in this country are exerting preferences on historicity/neighborhood character/style to the severe material detriment of others.

My impression is that’s only one half of the story. If you look at some of the subreddits where he’s mentioned he’s basically turned into a lolcow. Lolcows are essentially terminally online people that are made fun of (up to cyber bullying, real life stalking and swatting) on websites like kiwifarms and reddit. The most famous lolcow that you may have heard of is Chris Chan.

This is not to defend the terrible things being done to this guy, but if he just went dark people would lose interest/age out of fucking with him. What gives a lolcow longevity and notability is their continuance to post weird stuff and actively engage with their bullies.

One day we’ll collectively realize how damaging constant access to “news” (in the modern day, engagement-optimized despair/outrage/fear porn) is on our mental health. Until then we’ll never be able to square the circle of how things can be so bad while our actual immediate lives are perfectly fine

Banks these days often don’t hold on to those mortgages though. They can repackage them as securities like MBS and sell them to entities like pension funds. This type of thing is exactly how the GFC started

Ignorant American here. Isn’t Hong Kong supposed to be the HQ/money exit point for Chinese organized crime? And HSBC is the main bank there, but headquartered in the UK?

If I had to guess they are heavily involved with spooks and foreign assets operating in China (and if so, why not use them for non-Chinese intelligence-financial shenanigans?) and a lot of their “illegal” activity is unofficially blessed by foreign intelligence.

Thanks for the warning. My male cousin tried playing on Lichess once. She now wears knee-high socks and listens to catgirl-emo music while puffing “the reefer” and praying to Karl Marx

I like him because he is outspoken rather than because he is edgy.

I don’t know how amenable he was to his arguments possibly being incorrect, but I love working with/knowing people who are that combination of outspoken and not-overly-stubborn. People like that are a firehose of ideas and knowledge, even if not everything they say is correct. They also usually are “passionate” about their work and at least competent enough to have unorthodox opinions that don’t just sound blatantly stupid.

Most people are too timid or low-ability to be outspoken at all.

It also took me 5 years to recover from a bad trip - I believe it was so traumatic that it gave me some form of PTSD. I had actually tripped several times before and also tried other psychedelics. Completely agree that online you are met with skepticism and FUD at the mentions of these experiences, and also that maybe ultimately it did have some positives come of it (respect your body and mind and don’t be reckless? Develop mental resilience?).

After that experience, I believe that for most people the benefits do not outweigh the risks until the drug is better studied clinically. The exceptions would be those who stand to experience exceptional quality of life improvements from a treatment-resistant depression breakthrough or cluster headache treatments (which AIUI are already pretty clinically established).

That said, I am probably too curious about life and novel experiences to have ever heeded this kind of advice if it meant not satisfying my curiosity at least once. So if you’re dying of curiosity I get how it might be worth it anyway.

Personally, I do not believe the benefits outweigh the risks unless you have cluster headaches or treatment resistant depression (without anxiety).

Most of what people consider to be “profound” during tripping is just the drug making you think things are profound - in the same way alcohol makes you think it’s reasonable to get angry about an argument about a TV show or cocaine makes you think Uber for cats is the next trillion dollar company. It unquestionably does put you in a state where you may have ideas or thought patterns you won’t have otherwise so there’s a chance that those ideas are actually profound, just like your cocaine-fueled startup idea actually may be a good one. But people ascribe too much meaning and magic to this IMO, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Some people, like myself, have had panic attacks (“bad trips”) on psychedelics. Without going into detail these can be very disconcerting and leave lingering effects like PTSD/anxiety. If you are prone to anxiety I would not partake, and personally I think the benefits don’t outweigh the risk of this at all for most people. At the very least I caution against mixing LSD with cannabis, recommend you have someone with you that isn’t tripping, and ideally have something on hand to treat a panic attack (even if just strong beer/wine/liquor).

A lot of people will say that 1. This only happens if you get something else passed off as acid, or have a bad set and setting 2. You can avoid that if you are smart about where you get it. I think that’s BS because it’s a well documented phenomenon and testing can only easily rule out certain particular things anyway (you can only ever be certain about it if you made it yourself or got it from a regulated research source). Similarly, LSD has the potential to induce psychosis and schizophrenia, which many say is only possible if you were going to develop those conditions anyway (it was already latent) - which is nondisprovable and has no way of being identified. Personally I think these arguments are made from a place of wishful thinking that it can’t happen to them.

On the other hand single trips have been shown/known to help pull people out of depressive states in a moderately durable manner. You may not only process feelings or concepts you haven’t before, but the drug itself may induce a good mood lasting a few days called an “afterglow” which could bring you out of some kind of local optimum. If depression has been negatively impacting your quality of life for a long time I would consider the potential benefits to outweigh the risks enough to try it once.

Also, cluster headaches I believe are uniquely treatable by psychedelics. Those are the only thing that I think justifies adding it to a “regimen” because IIUC those headaches are so uniquely extreme and debilitating.

This is such a great succinct summation of my feelings on “psychedelic culture” as someone who has actually participated. It drives me crazy when people act like psychedelics open a window into deep spiritual truths and that taking them makes you some how more enlightened.

This culture is still pervasive - probably accounting for the majority of people who actively argue for decriminalization and research - and a bad spokesman. It reminds me a lot of the people who think Cannabis can’t be addictive, cures cancer, and has no negative effects. In some ways, it fetishizes and ascribes magical properties to drugs just as much as the “drugs are bad with zero exceptions” crowd does. Except, in many aspects it’s worse, because it downplays risks and pressures people to partake. Normal people notice it even if they can’t articulate it, and it does a lot to discredit reasonable people.

Conversely, I grew quickly over the pandemic because using a lot of written communication played to my strengths. I never learned much from my seniors. Being remote made it so I could create a working environment more conducive to concentration and fully develop self-sufficiency when it came to learning skills and solving problems.

With RTO I’ve found that people are communicating a lot less over chats/docs, but not communicating well in person either because half of the people are remote or in other offices. Personally I believe we need to all be remote or all on-site for things to work properly.

I think it depends on your colleagues and workplace. Most of my coworkers that go into the office are too shy and quiet for it to help much. My company also doesn’t really lend itself to collaboration so much as delegation or being delegated.

So when I go into the office, even though I’m pretty extroverted for an engineer and would love to collaborate on stuff, it’s just as lonely as WFH.

I have met many otherwise very intelligent people who get caught up in the coolness of the concept and technology without recognizing how efficient regular mechanized farming already is.

This article is trying too hard to be intellectual and incorporate artsy prose. A lot of it is just nonsensical or self-contradictory.

Basically the author is self-aware that others’ preferences and economic conditions have led to a built environment that’s incompatible with their tastes, and that they don’t actually have the right to dictate what others choose to build and buy. So they decide to snobbily denigrate them because… (makes them feel better? some kind of psychological need to establish superiority?)

Tastes change. There has been a pretty continual oscillation within architecture between more minimalist and austere styling and ornately decorated styling. Feels pretty pointless to get caught up in argument that boils down to red being a better color than blue

Completely agree with this. Did you work at Google?

Let me explain this a little more in concrete terms: are you passionate about what you do? Do you have pride in your work and want to create great, valuable (to users of course, but also profitable) software? You will probably dislike working at Google.

First, if you’re an engineer, you’re basically not going to be empowered to make important product-level decisions on anything people care about until you’re a well-established L6 or L7. Even then, you’re more of a voice in the room with the Product Managers and Directors/VPs (you might have 5 directors+ VPs who also are on your product) and business stakeholders for the little chunk you’re actually responsible for. Google is extremely hierarchical, not just in terms or a deep org chart but in empowerment, for a variety of reasons I won’t get into. Nobody will listen to you or care until you’re at this point, your ideas and suggestion will be treated like a child at the Thanksgiving kid’s table asking for a glass of wine.

Ok, so become a product manager. Well then you have to deal with the fact that you are amazingly constrained by things outside of your control, like the headcount and capacity of engineering teams who have to handle a bunch of internal migration bullshit, want to refactor or rewrite something for no business reason except because it’s easy coasting material, and handle requests from a dozen other PMs. You have to deal with a ton of bureaucracy and process bullshit just to get your product ideas turned into reality. You have no idea what’s easy and what’s hard because engineering at Google is different than at other companies (the “impossible” is just hard, but the “easy” is also hard). You’re not empowered to step in and code and design even if you can and want to. You are gonna spend a lot of time writing SQL and docs nobody cares about and still need to make it to a high “level” to matter.

Well what happens if you do get to that high level? Then you’re in charge of a million and one things and mostly doing performance management. You don’t have time to care about a product - you are the gatekeeper of it and can have strong opinions, but you simply do not have time to be passionate about it, because you have too many responsibilities and are too far removed from the actual work/product/users. You still have a deep management chain above you to contend with, you play political games for HC and need short term wins to secure it, you’re probably in a different stage of your life where your passion project is either career (not product) and/or family.

It’s still a great place to learn, the pay and benefits are still good, you still probably get to work on something cool. But your ambitions and passion will be crushed unless you can endure a decade+ of being a ~nobody. If you truly want to build something amazing you’ll have to go elsewhere.

I’m biased, as I am guessing you are too, but there is at least some innovation in infrastructure at Google outside of search and ads. Spanner, Borg/Kubernetes/GKE, PAAS, BigQuery and the successive internal query systems just to name a few. Sure many of these were funded by ads or motivated by their problems/use case originally - you’d expect that of a company that started with search and exclusively made money from ads for a long stretch - but they’ve all been developed to solve for many for workloads now, and even made available for external consumption as infrastructure products. For some they have made huge impacts on the entire software industry.

That said, yes there are a lot of SWEs and projects that are wasting engineering talent.

I’m guessing you were closer to the hardware than me, and also left at least several years ago, but I’m under the impression that the rest of industry has mostly caught up to where Google was in DC tech. They’re still at the tip of the spear with things like ML and unmatched in sheer scale, it’s just that the rest of the world has had a lot of time to play catch up.

Yes, regarding the metaverse it is. But I think even if they weren’t trying to get into VR they’d be doing the same thing. The existence of other tech companies with massive margins and employee headcount impacts Meta’s bottom line, because it has to compete against them for hiring.

One of the things I like about Meta is they didn’t play into the wage collusion of Google, Apple and friends. Their expansion drove increased pay across the board in tech - but because Google was also in the advertising business they had similar constraints on max revenue per employee.

If AI supports even higher revenue per employee than advertising, which is entirely possible, it would undermine their strategy of having the best pay among big tech companies to attract top talent, because someone would have deeper pockets.

Isn’t it obvious to anybody paying attention what their actual strategy is? They know they probably won’t “win” a commercial AI race vs OpenAI or Google, and presuming some other company does win the commercial AI market with closed source tech, they may be forced into a multitude of bad outcomes:

1. having to pay out the nose for licensing/SAAS of the winning tech vs shipping a noticeably worse second rate in-house product

2. Struggling to compete with the winning company for hiring, assuming the winning company makes a ton of money at high margins and can outbid Meta.

3. Having to continue building “applications” products on other companies’ platforms, something Zuck has repeatedly noted as a problem and is a major motivation for their investments in VE.

Also, they’d have a hard time commercializing the current iteration of AI products given their current products and business relations anyway. Even if they “won” in terms of superior tech they’d be in one of the worst starting positions for actually making money off it, given their lack of enterprise SAAS business customers, the potential negative impact on existing product lines in consumers’ hands, (what I expect to be) advertisers’ relative indifference to genAI, and being generally considered less trustworthy than most other big tech companies and so less able to pivot to enterprise software.

So for them the strategy that makes the most sense is to open source really good, but not cutting edge, AI for others to build on top of it. It probably costs a lot less to play permanent catch up because they can let others make the big investments in speculative research and don’t have to pay for the absolute top experts. Then by open sourcing it they make it harder for OpenAI and Google to commercialize their offerings at high costs, as many companies will build off Meta’s tech for more control, and what customers they do get will be constantly deciding if what they’re paying for is worth a slightly-worse but cheaper open source alternative.

This also allows Meta to more easily influence the AI applications space despite having less capable models, and make it easier for 3P commercializations to take off rather than ceding everything to OpenAI/Google potentially going all in on 1P, which would be greatly beneficial if Meta ever were to own a platform that benefits from GenAI (cough cough the metaverse).

It’s smart but transparently obvious because like, it’s Meta lol, they don’t spend this kind of money out of the goodness of their hearts.

Their forum has a nice UI too. Big tech companies have “public Q/A”/“knowledge base” forums for this kind of stuff that usually have terrible design. This is more appropriately dense and easy to navigate. Nice job.

Welcome to government in the South

It’s hard to understand the mindset of casual incompetence and corruption if you’re not from there. Local government runs on nepotism and good ol boys networks - it’s such a standard ingrained practice that it is not even surprising or cause for concern when you notice it. It’s part of why these areas stay perpetually poor and get brain drained to hell

And to further explain, if you don’t increase your near-term profits/shift priorities from future growth to present returns as interest rates increase, under the discounted FCF model your current value decreases. AKA the price of the stock goes down, which shareholders and executives tend not to like.

You’re probably right in general. But I was lucky enough to have some great middle managers during COVID who definitely had their fingers on the pulse of what was going on, clearly communicated goals and strategy, actually understood how the sausage got made. I had some poor managers/middle managers too, but they tended to get managed out and their damage was minimized by communication routing around them.

Maybe I’m just personally unlucky to have had some especially weak ones that didn’t get managed out and that happened to coincide with hybrid work.

That sounds great. I think I’d love something like that if, during in-office week, it was more than just half my immediate team that showed up.

I think one reason this isn’t more popular is that it’s harder for parents to plan around. Most of the parents I work with want the same in-office schedule every week - easier to plan around other weekly things like daycare and after school activities that way.

Yeah. My company is in principle set 2, in practice set 1. But even so, I’m on a team where almost half of us are fully remote or working out of other offices and so don’t go in on our “dedicated in office days”. I stopped going in on those days too because it felt pointless.

I think part of what’s so insanely demotivating about all this is how hard it makes leadership/management. Or rather, how it allows poor leadership/management to get away with doing poorly and how much worse the impact of poor management becomes in this setting. Because right now, even though I’m a TL I have absolutely no idea what the people controlling the purse strings want or care about, or what their goals are. I just wait for things to filter down through the org chart to me. There is no osmosis of knowledge or thought or strategy, and I feel like lazy/inattentive/unknowledgable management kicks up politics and siloing to the next level - when we were fully remote this didn’t seem to happen as much.

Definitely feeling this at another FAANG

I think there’s something about post-pandemic work in software that just isn’t working. I don’t think it’s just interest rates or a hiring downturn, nor immediate causes like founders leaving (because I see this sickness at most big tech companies these days).

Personally, I believe that hybrid work is not going well. Fully remote teams are good, fully onsite teams are good. With hybrid I feel like I never know how to contact someone and can never expect a quick reply (with remote, sure someone could go AWOL still, but there was less ambiguity on if they were just commuting or doing something in the office). I’ve had skip managers/directors who I’m almost certain are barely working and just milking out huge salaries while hiding behind their remote status. I’ve seen people join and leave teams from random offices all over the world, never onboarding fully and never truly getting it. It’s awful.

I want people to have flexibility and I think full-remote culture works just as well as fully-onsite works - everyone is in “one place” whether it’s in collaboration software or in person. But this sucks.

Basically I’m optimizing for viral growth, otherwise the business probably isn’t worth it. I haven’t launched yet but I estimate that at 100k DAU vertical scaling/using a single instance would become a nightmare because of throughput and latency rather than data size.

I’m admittedly using a strange architecture for my use case and I realize now commenting here opened too big a can of worms as explaining exactly what I’m doing would derail the thread. Suffice it to say, my db doesn’t contain just “Bob ordered 5 widgets to Foo Lane” data.

But yes, using a more horizontal database strategy makes it very easy to manage data across realms. That’s one of the main benefits. A single DB would be much harder as far as isolation and separating test/production traffic (assuming this is what you mean by views) than having multiple separable dbs that only talk to dev/staging. And I can easily wipe out and isolate dev and staging this way. I’m frankly shocked people would advocate a single db that doesn’t allow you to do this.

To elaborate, I’m using managed databases that abstract away scaling so that my UX as a developer is that they are scaling horizontally (in data, and cost).

While I’m pre-launch and doing testing, using a more traditional vertical model is money out of my pocket. And it’s not something I want to maintain after I launch either.

Also, I’m creating something (a freemium game) where as a solo dev it will only be worth it for me to continue working on the business if it sees explosive growth. If I’m lucky enough for that to materialize, there will be at least a few months before I can hire fulltime help for the product (while also being busy doing tons of other stuff) - it would be terrible to have to handle tons of db operations tasks or re-architect things to support growth during that time.

Basically, vertical scaling is optimizing for the wrong level of usage. It’s actually the same for many of the snarky “your startup doesn’t need horizontal scaling” comments here - if your states are {building, huge growth, failure} then horizontal scaling is perfect because it keeps your costs low while you’re building and handles the huge growth phase more gracefully. Yes, maybe you’ll never get to the huge growth phase, but the entire business is oriented around either getting there or failing.

As someone bootstrapping a business, my cost structure favors horizontally scaling databases with low/no fixed overhead vs vertically scaling databases with high overhead. And I don’t think this is exactly an uncommon situation - plenty of people, even within large well-funded organizations, would have a hard time justifying such a large expenditure if it were uncertain that it’d be fully utilized.

It’s also a lot easier for me to handle tenancy/isolation/different data “realms” this way. And I sleep better at night knowing a mistake (I have no dbas, and I don’t have time to invest in tons of safeguards as a solo dev when there are much higher EV tasks) won’t nuke absolutely everything.