1,581 karma · joined October 22, 2022
Nonsense. MIT engineers don't waste their time thinking about assembly instructions when they are tasked to design a distributed system. Competent engineers know how to switch to high-level concepts where they make sense.
But if you're aiming to provide the best education to future professionals so that they are able to excel at their field, you'd serve them far better if you taught them how to effectively use Wolfram Alpha.
The truth of the matter it that the bulk of the work in software development, and what makes more economic sense, lies in growing a system through accretion and adopting higher level components developed and maintained by third parties.
Isn't it also survivorship bias to claim that scalability is overrated because a non-scalable system didn't broke in a particular case of a local deployment with residual demand?
Meanwhile hikes in demand hitting an unscalable system can and do break businesses, and when it happens is already too late to rearchitect things.
I find this blend of comment unproductive and intellectually dishonest. "Often" and "too much" are weasel words that remove any objective meaning from the verbs they qualify, to the point where stating the exact opposite is also valid.
The truth of the matter is that scalability is only not important when you don't need it, but it's already disastrously too late if you failed to scale when you need to.
To me this sounds like these firing spirals have zero to do with results and revenue and the economy, and everything to do with conspiring against their own staff.
That would only explain drops in future investments, but we're seeing profitable companies with astronomical revenues from their cash cows diving into a massive firing spiral.
More importantly, growing interest rates is not exactly the definition of a downturn.
That does not sound factual at all. Where did you picked that up? According to Variety, Alphabet's revenue on Q4 2022 was $76.05 billion and up 1% in spite of a 8% ad revenue drop.
https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/alphabet-google-q4-202...
Are 1% increases in a massive revenue of $76.05 billion now passed off as bad results?
What downturn?
I understand Amazon is reporting poor results, but they seem to be mostly due to reporting losses from past investments that didn't panned out yet, like Rivian.
But it's not like each and every tech turn in the world has invested in Rivian.
Not really. Trying to conflate the role of a subreddit moderator with a company employee does not make any sense. I've became a subreddit moderator automatically when I created subreddits, and I assigned the role of subreddit moderator to other users because I could. I'd be surprised if anyone argued that reddit owed me something.
It was my understanding that was the bare minimum, corresponding to times when workload was low.
Crunch time would naturally go way beyond that.
Not what I describe decent working conditions.
I don't know what your personal tastes are, but personally I prefer buying good things. If instead you prefer to look for crap and order crap then why are you complaining you search for and ordered and bought crap?
I mean, you have a say in what things you pick for yourself, don't you? Why are you complaining you buy crap when you intended to buy crap?
It boggles the mind how some people try to pin on a store their personal responsibility of deciding what stuff they purchase.
Isn't the average tenure at Amazon less than 3 years? "Most" of the people who you'd ask would be fresh from the interview rounds and with only one or two performance review rounds under their belt.
I'm not sure that's a reasonable take, and it reads like a gratuitous putdown.
Where you live matters, and an urban center next to a local distribution center will always have better service than a rural area where barely anyone lives. It is absurd to use areas with bad coverage to complain that the whole service is bad, specially when you add the regrettably conspiratorial excuse that only influencers get a reasonable service.
The truth of the matter, that even your comment with an axe to grind admits, is that Amazon does indeed provide fast shipping services in some areas. These areas are naturally urban centers where a lot of people live per square meter, which means large numbers of people in that area benefit from fast delivery services. It's like economies of scale apply. In some other regions with small markets and residual demand, Amazon even falls back to standard postal service. Is this supposed to mean that the company provides a poor service. Well, no.
The truth of the matter is that Amazon has been growing it's distribution network, and it shows in it's quality of service. Those of us who live in urban centers that benefitted from these investments are privileged to have access to overnight delivery and some times even same-day delivery. Others who might be stuck living in an area with poor coverage don't. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the service got worse.
You make me suspect I might be using Amazon wrong. Amazon's search is notoriously bad, but if you know what you want them you can go there and buy it. Just don't do stupid things like buying a 20 dollar item whose cost is 1 dollar price with a 19 dollar shipping fee, or buying weird things from shady sellers who just dropped by out of nowhere.
But that's just me. Perhaps I'm using it wrong. Who knows.
Stick with official stores from reputable brands. Don't order shit from sellers like GoldenRandomBrand24723. Don't buy shit from shady stores with 10 reviews. Don't buy shit from stores whose pricing model is based on charging high shipping fees and low prices. Don't buy shit you can't return.
Basically, don't do deals where you know upfront the odds you'll be screwed without any recourse is high.
Online stores sell products, but you need to get your head sorted out and do the thinking.
A projected revenue drop is not the same as a loss though. You already bought that computer.
Less so if it's your own company who was using their stuff.
Worst case scenario: they have stuff idling and more headroom to accommodate demand.
Heck, why waste more money building yet another data center if the ones already in place have already plenty of cycles rand bandwidth to spare?
It's all an accounting trick. You don't waste more power. You don't have to but more hardware. Turning off your lambda saves nothing.
There were a couple of times where the time I had to wait between clicking "buy" and receiving the package on my doorstep was not measured in days but hours.
Amazon's logistics network has improved constantly. The shopping experience is getting better, not worse.
Sure, sometimes I can't spot the difference between Amazon and AliExpress. So many cheap, shady products with autogenerated brand names and obviously all from the same factory. Low quality stuff whose seller is eager to bribe you to not get a bad review after you return the item. Yes, that's a problem. But if you stick with Amazon-managed products you always get refunds.
And you know what? You also can decide to not go for the cheap stuff and buy things from reputable sellers.
So knock-offs are a problem but you can actually avoid those, and the ones you didn't you can always return them. And with Amazon's logistics, things get resolved in a few days.
It's a shame about exploiting every single worker though.
The interesting thing about cloud costs for companies like Amazon or AWS is that in the short term it's only an accounting trick. The company is not spending money if there's a lambda deployed somewhere, or a EC3 instance idling. It's nice to erode revenue in the books from these expenses, but it's not like Besos needs to reach out of his wallet to cover the cost of a container launched by some random team at Amazon. At most he moves the cash from one pocket to the other and there's that.
It was Besos that drove Amazon's growth until basically now. I don't think it's fair to suddenly badmouth him for one bad year in what? Two decades worth of unparalleled growth?
If you bought a mid-end Android each ear for the past year, you'd spend half the cash and you would always have up-to-date software.
The hard truth about iPhones is that they are way overpriced, and are a Veblen good.
Think about it for a second: Apple sells it's phones for a higher price than their fully featured and also overpriced laptops.
It's as much collusion as it would be if two victims of fraud agreed to go together to the police to press charges.
> If an employee is getting 40 hours of work done per week, then I don't see the problem.
You're not.
> Because it's none of their business.
What they put in the contract is unequivocally their business, don't you think?
It's funny because I automatically drop a job prospect if they mention cover letter. If they request it right in the job ad and the job description is interesting, I send my updated CV and my contacts, but leave out anything resembling a cover letter.
If you care about getting to know me, set up a meeting. I already sent you a doc with what I did and where I did it. I'm not going to waste significant amounts of time on a document that I'm not even sure anyone will read. If your rationale is that it saves up your time, well it wastes mine, and mine is more valuable.
And finally, anyone can write anything about anything in a cover letter. It boggles the mind why anyone would think this sort of document has a critical role in figuring out anyone is a decent hire.
Apparently, both companies cared. Cared deeply. Hence the coordinated firing.
> If they're getting their job done, who are you to tell another man what he can do with his body?
Quite literally, employment contracts stipulate Basic requirements such as working hours and availability.
If an employee says he's pulling 40h/week but he's actually pulling around 20h/week, if that, then the question of fraud is up.
If this was supposed to be a non-issue, why go through so much trouble to hide it?
I'm under the impression that most job ads out there are actually fake job ads, or ads from companies who have no job and/or no immediate plan to offer one to any candidate. We have HR types trawling candidates for their CVs to build up impressive-looking portfolios to showcase as who they have in store for candidates, and use that to catch potential customers.
It's not Qt6. The same goes for Qt5, which has been around for what, close to a decade?
And what's your point, exactly? That things are hard if you purposedly ignore all the examples that prove that things are patently easy and trivial? Because it seems evident to me that if you want to quickly setup a C++ project to try out stuff, a CMake project with single-digit lines of code that get you a window with an OpenGL context going is right what you'd be looking for.
But instead you complain that the choice of build system and framework made things easy? And that's why things are not hard
What exactly do you think is your point?
Taken straight from Qt's page on OpenGL support:
find_package(Qt6 REQUIRED COMPONENTS OpenGL) target_link_libraries(mytarget PRIVATE Qt6::OpenGL)
https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtopengl-index.html
Do you feel this is too hard to setup?
All language communities care about their language. It boggles the mind how anyone could imply that only Rust cares about this stuff.
The Rust community is renowned for being problematic. Time and again it's called out on the grief it creates.
Not really. When people talk about setting up a new project, they talk about starting a hello world project and build up from there.
Anyway, I'll bite. What would it take to add a dependency? If it exports a cmake config file which exports targets, all it takes is this:
find_package(MyDependency),
target_link_libraries(bar MyDependency::targetA MyDependency::targetB ... MyDependency::targetZ )
If it doesn't and it is instead a system library then you can even pass the library instead.
add_library(bar systemlibrary )
If the library exports no cmake config and you have anything exotic you can put together your own cmake find modules, and proceed to follow step A.
Alternatively, you can even bolt on something like Conan and just follow step A all the time.
> Differently put: a phrase "metabuild system" has (...)
Sorry, but do you actually have any concrete example of any difficulty setting up a C++ project?