opportune

It really depends on the structure of the suburb. If you are in a large planned suburb in some areas, it’s actually possible that driving out of your suburb takes 5-10m and you may need to get on the highway to get to the nearest supermarket. 40minutes is probably a rare one way scenario even with traffic but 25-30m is not out of the question. Haven’t you been in one of those kinds of suburbs? They were common in the Tier 2-3 city I grew up in in the South although I guess in the Northeast and West I haven’t seen it as often

One, this isn’t structuring. Just because you read what structuring is 5m before you read my post doesn’t make this structuring. 50k is way over reporting limits.

And also no it isn’t faster to pick up the phone, even if I don’t get out on hold at all. An ACH transfer takes seconds, it’s like writing a digital check. Doing it 4 times takes very little time.

Yes, my point is that banks don’t make it clear that maxing out their ACH quotas will get your account frozen and that you should do a wire transfer. You shouldn’t have to learn this the hard way by getting your account frozen (which is very stressful when it happens to you for the first time), and banks should make it clear what you should do, which is my point

Yes, but that involves talking to someone and waiting on hold. If there’s no rush, doing 4x ACH is easier, if you don’t know it’ll get you flagged. All I’m saying is banks need to be more prescriptive about telling you “we’ll put a hold on your account if you move large sums without telling us” rather than giving you some fake limit that actually utilizing will raise red flags. This is a common failure mode

One of the reasons banks have these restrictions (besides the obvious thing of making it difficult to take large sums of money out because it hurts their business) is to prevent fraud. They want to prevent the case where some criminal gets physical access to my computer, or my login credentials, and drains my account without my knowledge. So they want you to initiate a manual verification that you really do intend to move such a large sum to prevent that fraud.

If you do what I did, you usually get a temporary hold on your account and some very skeptical bank employee calling you to grill you on what you’re doing.

On one hand I get it. For every story like mine, where this is just a temporary frustrating inconvenience, there’s probably a story where grandma lost her life savings after talking to the nice man from Microsoft on the phone. But also they don’t make it clear at all what you are supposed to do as non-criminal to work around their restrictions, which is just bad for customers.

Completely agree that banks should provide prescriptive guides.

IME they really don’t like when you work around their eg 50k/day ACH transfer limit by initiating 50k ACH transfers on 4 consecutive days to move an account of 200k. But they don’t tell you what they actually want you to do if you want to move 200k - and for obvious reasons they probably don’t want to make these transfers fully frictionless. They just assume you’ll know to show up at a branch in person or get on a phone to ask about it and treat you like a criminal if you don’t.

You're right, I was just editing my comment as you posted that. I'm going to go be quiet now lol.

Not true. The prosecution agreed to only pursue criminal tax violations. See my other comment.

Man, I'm low on sleep and making mistakes. I misunderstood the cooperation agreement[0] to mean she would only be prosecuted for criminal tax violations. I see now she has plead guilty to fraud though [1].

[0] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23495436/crypto-coope...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/12/21/caroline-...

I really don’t think they should have let the rest of the executive team walk, especially Ellison. They knew what they were doing too, and I’m sure they could have built a strong enough case to convince SBF and the others through plea deals and such

Almost every time I run into an incompetent SWE manager they exploited this loophole. For some reason companies keep letting it happen.

I don't remember where I read it, but I'm pretty sure proposals to directly image exoplanets rely on pointing multiple telescopes at them simultaneously. So this might be ok.

The biggest win would be to convince the NRO to flip some of their telescopes 180 degrees

Nope. Maybe if you are a housefly, but humans spend considerable amounts of time and effort raising their children (and grandchildren, nieces/nephews, cousins…).

Also known as compulsive contrarianism

Not to be a dick but there is a pretty apparent correlation between being able to hold down high paying jobs and interpersonal/emotional skills as well. Which is not to say that all people with low paying jobs are unreasonable assholes, nor that all high income people are saints.

But in my experience highly difficult people who complicate living situations tend to struggle to keep jobs for the same reasons that make them bad roommates.

It was so close to SF that it was much more apparent than other earthquakes. For me, this was the most noticeable earthquake in SF this year.

One alternative might be “run as fast as you fucking can towards Potrero Hill” if you are close enough to be able to make progress towards it.

Even Google is doing this now.

I think it’s simply swapping one set of trade offs for another. With dedicated SREs you have true specialists in production operations and their accompanying systems (tooling, alerting, etc) with a clear mandate and ownership of outcomes; but they don’t necessarily have full ownership of what they’re keeping running, and that can cause organizational problems (we want to launch X, SRE says no, or vice versa) and make it so non-SREs take no ownership over their hard-to-support code.

Conversely you can have Eng teams without SREs and most of those organizational/social problems, at the cost of production reliability being only one of many priorities.

I think what’s really happening is that a lot of companies are deciding they don’t care about reliability very much as a business outcome, especially when it comes at the expense (at least in opportunity cost) of less features.

The company that uses remote work to pay salaries less than what a store manager at Arby’s makes?

For aircraft and long haul trucking, sure.

I think range anxiety is already mostly a nothingburger and as battery capacity improves and people realize being limited to X miles is hardly a limitation for their use case at all, it will become a non-issue.

Using electricity directly is just easier and more efficient than transporting hydrogen that was made from electricity, unless for some reason hydrogen truly is more economic than battery for your use case.

The growth in the US economy between 2000 and 2020 has resulted in many high-paying software jobs, including my own. Absolute BS that it’s all going to billionaires

Conservation in many places is about bribe-extraction and using it as a political weapon. The environment is just a useful cover

Not only can there be the obvious kinds of performance benefits (no Python/extra process overhead, more focused optimized libraries, etc) to implementing something yourself, you can also implement nice features like rolling window regressions that aren’t compatible with the mostly offline/batch APIs used in OSS and which can be baked directly into the production system.

This is probably non-obvious to most newer practitioners unfamiliar with the broader systems their model operates in, because their mental models of what’s possible are constrained by the tools they’re familiar with.

Completely agree, I hate it when people post college-sophomore-quality walls of AI text as if it’s adding to the conversation or is even the least bit insightful.

There is nothing wrong per-se with being a midwit; most people are midwits and I never said they have “no prospects”.

What I take issue with is the kind of idiocracy you get when experts are identified according to “an uninformed person’s idea of an expert” rather than actual expertise. Bureaucracies’ ideas of expertise are usually “objective” like a degree or certification. The thing about degrees and certifications is that they are not nearly as difficult to get or indicative of knowledge/intelligence as an average person thinks they are. Especially with regard to more practical degrees like business and engineering, they simply cannot really teach you the same kinds of things you learn from actually working in the field.

I agree with this generally for TPM and project managers. Even then it’s not that they truly do no work, but that the core coordination work they do (which requires very few, but no 0, man hours) could be done with higher fidelity and context by an EM without it really adding much more work to an EM’s job.

Engineering managers are responsible for their team’s output; they are often held responsible when their team fails to deliver. Product Managers are responsible for setting and prioritizing the product roadmap across a lot of stakeholders, often with specific business goals to achieve, and spending a lot of time doing stuff like talking to customers and helping with marketing/sales/planning/etc; they are also often held responsible when they don’t deliver on these tasks.

It is a very junior engineer perspective to consider it not actual work or for them to have no real responsibilities just because they are not coding. In my experience it has also been common for EMs to be at least staff level ICs skill-wise and PMs to have enough software skills (often having previously been SWEs) that they could be SWEs if they preferred that.

There is a wide spectrum of infrastructure (and platforms, frameworks, etc) from “allows applications to do just about anything, though it may be very complex” to “severely constrains applications but greatly simplifies doing things within those constraints.” To be clear by “just about anything” I am not talking about whether some business logic is expressable, but whether you can eg use EBPF and cgroups, use some esoteric network protocol, run a stateful service that pulls from a queue, issue any network call to anything on the Internet, etc.

If you are developing applications software like Uber 99.99% of the time you really do not need to be doing anything “fancy” or “exotic” in your service. Your service receives data, does some stuff with it (connects to a db or issues calls to other services), returns data. If you let those 0.01% of the things dictate where your internal platform falls on that spectrum, you will make things much more complicated and difficult for 99.99% of the other stuff. Those are where leaky abstractions and bugs come from, both from the platform trying to be more general than it needs to be and from pushing poorly understand boilerplate tasks (like configuring auth, certifications, TLS manually for each service) to infrastructure users.

Being unaware (of course not completely unaware, but essentially not needing to actively consider it while doing things) of infrastructure is actually the ideal state, provided that lack of awareness is because “it just works so well it doesn’t need to be considered”. It means that it lets people get shit done without pushing configuration and leaky abstractions onto them.

I’ll give you one example of something that does an excellent job of this: Linux. Application memory in linux requires some very complex work under the hood, but it has decent default configurations with only a couple commonly changed parameters that most applications don’t need much, and it had a very simple API for applications to interface with. Similar with send/receive syscalls and the use of files for I/O ranging from remote networking to IPC to local disk. These are wonderful APIs and abstractions that simplify very hard problems. The problem with in-house abstraction isn’t that they are trying to do abstractions but that sometimes they just don’t do a good job or churn through them faster than it takes them to stabilize.

I believe the dollar amount savings figures, they’re big and worthy of a congratulations to the engineers involved!

IMO, engineering man hour savings are a lot less trustable. This may eliminate or simplify some engineering processes but IME massive migrations like this simply replace them with a different set of processes; because they’re different and theoretically addressable they’re not counted against the hours saved as they can be bucketed into bugs/to be addressed by the roadmap/legacy behavior migrated from the old system (which is now dangerously-fragile-legacy and not ol-reliable-legac). Eventually someone will come along and decide this too is an inherently flawed platform that needs to be entirely replaced at great expense, and the circle of life continues.

This is still a massive undertaking not just from an engineering perspective but from an organizational/process one though. Whoever pulled this off essentially had to coordinate (or figure out how to simplify/explain things well enough to skip coordination) with almost every engineer and likely almost every production service in a company with thousands of engineers. Those in startups may balk about this kind of thing taking two years, but having done my own two year projects (at a smaller but comparable scale) in a big company I can say two years is what I’d consider a highly optimistic and unlikely outcome for a project of this magnitude.

There are broadly two places a corporation’s money goes: expenses and profits. Expenses are either paid directly to individuals as income, or to other companies, where the money still ends up as either expenses or profits. There’s also the fact that everything a corporation sells is generally considered valuable enough by someone else to be a good deal at that price, so all the revenue they generate also represents value being provided to their counterparty.

In economics there is a thing called deadweight loss, which is the value lost when some kind of policy (like an inefficient tax) distorts the quantity supplied:quantity demanded relationship. When you tax only income and profits, you generally avoid deadweight loss because you shift the taxation to be “after” the supply:demand has already been determined; by allowing for expenses paid to other companies to be deducted, value isn’t taxed twice because ultimately that money always ends up as someone else’s income or profits. If you’re purely interested in more taxes to capture value for the government more efficiently (and not as a vice or pigouvian tax) instituting more taxes introduces double taxation that shifts the tax before the transaction and introduced deadweight loss which lowers overall output and value generated.

If you do mean to suggest the tax should be Pigouvian, that kind of already exists. Corporations have to pay a lot of the costs for compliance and remediation. I’m pretty sure to avoid all the issues of the past, companies have to put a bunch of money/assets in escrow so if they fuck up the government doesn’t get stuck with the bill. It is true though that all taxpayers pay for eg the EPA and the fees paid by corporations generally don’t cover the full environment cost; generally this means the externalities of production aren’t being accurately priced and it would be better to shift those externalities into the companies.

But those kinds of pigouvian taxes have a major flaw in that we live in a global market economy, so without full international cooperation they just make your local industry uncompetitive and shift production to places with less regulations. Also, even though natural resource extraction generates some profits for private individuals, we generally all benefit from it. So it’s not too bad to tax some of the environmental compliance costs in a non-pigouvian manner.

What would be the purpose of hiking the fees except to make it more expensive to produce things? It would make sense if the low staking fee were being abused by bad actors using it to “squat” on things they don’t use - and I bet that does occur to an extent. But it seems like anybody else interested in the land economically could have also just filed a claim?

It actually seems like a good thing to keep the land in the commons and license it out. I think all land that’s not actively being used should belong to the commons instead of private individuals. To do otherwise allows land speculators and those engaging in rentiership to steal economic output from those who are actually producing value - if anybody’s going to do that, better for it to be the entity paying for roads and schools. The corporation will still pay income taxes on its labor, capital costs which are just income of some other entity, and corporate taxes - overtaxing the commons to try to shift more of the value-capture there is actually an inefficient form of double taxation that hurts international competitiveness.

One thing that really bothers me about this article is the tone about “ravaging” or exploiting the land as if all mining is this terribly evil thing. I for one like having inexpensive metals and energy. Until very very recently in human history in a small set of developed countries, all mining was done by slaves or the most desperate people in a society - it still is in the vast majority of developing economies engaging in mining, and it was even in the US until about a hundred years ago. I like having a 21st century standard of living and good but not perfect environmental regulations more than I like slavery or living as if I’m in the Stone Age.