stopping

After reading this comment a little more deeply, I've come to believe your views on methods of written communication are subtly, fundamentally wrong in a way which generally causes more harm than good.

If a sentence has multiple "valid" interpretations, then it doesn't matter what the "correct" interpretation is. If someone says that a sentence is confusing or hard to read, you 100% must believe them and fix it. Dismissing concerns about clarity and ambiguity as merely "pedantic" is one reason why people fail to develop written communication skills. I have been burned many, many times in my career by making charitable assumptions about another engineer's ambiguous language, only to realize much later, after significant cost has been paid, that they had a completely different (and often wrong) idea.

Teaching people to be better writers is a hill I will gladly die on. I don't care if you defend your point or not, just read my comment and try to understand why someone would care deeply about this sort of thing.

The extra "than" in front of "safe Rust" is superfluous and reads like an error, as if there's a comparative adjective missing ahead of it. I don't see any situation where "and than" should ever appear in any non-contrived English sentence.

You have completely missed the point of my comment. What do you think I am trying to communicate to you?

You really need to answer questions directly as asked, and not whatever question it is you think the other person is asking. Doing this only creates confusion. There are many occasions where I see this kind of miscommunication happening between users on this site without either person realizing it.

In this case I asked a yes or no question because I simply wanted to clarify and understand the nuance of your position. You shouldn't always assume that every person responding to your comments is immediately trying to argue against you (although I'll admit this a fairly accurate heuristic for internet discussions in general).

Instead of answering with "Yes, (I believe) it is impossible" or "No, it is possible", you answered with the following:

"You can always present a case history of one".

Because I asked you a yes/no question, I am going to interpret your response as a framing of a yes/no answer. I interpreted your comment as: "(No), you (one) can always present a case history of one".

Hence my confusion: it sounded like you were holding both beliefs simultaneously: "Yes, natural monopolies are impossible, but there are counterexamples".

In the future please just answer the questions as they are asked.

You said:

> To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition.

You were responding to a comment which was written using the present tense.

Switzerland perhaps? https://freedomandprosperity.org/2021/blog/according-to-the-...

Are you saying that it's impossible for a company to become a monopoly purely under its own power?

I think you have it completely backwards. A smaller genome makes small tweaks much more likely to produce measurable effects, which means your data quality is much better. A larger genome with more gene interaction is more likely to produce non-measurable or non-subtle effects with perturbations of a single parameter. If a positive effect can only be measured by simultaneously mutating multiple inter-dependent genes, and you don't have a data point with those mutations, the effect can never be predicted. The model may even predict the exact opposite: if you have a bunch of data points showing that varying one gene at a time causes the organism to die, the model will predict that the sum of those mutations also causes death. With larger genomes you need exponentially more data points to discover subtle effects.

In my old org the policy was to flag every change, not just new features and behaviors. I'd even argue that refactoring is often a higher risk than adding a new feature path, because the scope of a refactor can touch nearly every user journey. So I can understand why the policy applies to refactoring. I'm just lamenting that this doesn't seem to be well-trodden ground, and being a person who cares deeply about reducing system complexity makes this whole thing kind of a bummer.

I never found a great way to incorporate feature flags into my workflow without inducing significant mental churn managing 12-step rollouts over a dozen independent active flags. The changes I tend to make are sweeping, non-trivial refactors of base libraries with hundreds or possibly thousands of callers. These sorts of changes are exceptionally hard to flag (especially API changes), and it's stupidly easy for another developer to fat-finger a merge conflict resolution and drop one of my flag gates.

To this day I've never found any good guidelines for flagging changes like this without resorting to widespread file duplication, abuse of OOP, or an ad-hoc versioning system. It comes as no surprise that nobody in my organization was willing to do this sort of work.

Why are you asking? My hope is that you are asking this genuinely from a place of curiosity to better advance this discussion, as there is apparent confusion from people working from different definitions of the same word.

The term you're looking for is "surplus". The consumer sees a surplus of value because the price they paid is below the maximum they're willing to pay, and the producer sees a surplus because the price they charged was more than the cost to produce the good. In this economic system both parties benefit. Economic surplus is the thing that is "created" with every transaction. "Surplus accumulation" as a concept doesn't make any sense, and is isomorphic to what you think people are saying when they use the phrase "wealth accumulation." You should update your definition of "wealth".

Is anyone else having trouble parsing this comment or is it just me?

If the top 10% of people suddenly had their wealth double overnight, it would have absolutely disastrous effects for the lower 90% of people. Prices for scarce goods (e.g. housing) would increase dramatically. The price increase dampens the overall demand for housing since a large fraction of the 90% are now priced out. The wealthy homeowners have an incentive to maintain that scarcity, and freely use their resources to preserve the status quo by preventing desperately-needed housing from being built.

Those with wealth will tend to steer the economic system more towards their own interests in a runaway feedback loop, often in ways which create no overall net welfare for society.

I find it odd that so many comments here are fixating on the "AI can do my job 10x better" throwaway line.

I've been grappling with a lack of meaning in my software engineering job for over a decade now, well before the advent of AI. Working in a modern software organization means that most of your day-to-day effort isn't spent using your technical skills, but on navigating misaligned organizational structures in order to achieve even the smallest goal. The feedback loop is so drawn out that there is no feel-good dopamine rush at the end of a project, only relief that it no longer has to occupy space in your brain.

I'm driven by solving problems for others and seeing their lives improve as a result. But we're so disconnected from real users that it doesn't really make a difference if you reduce your product's crash rate from 2% to 1%; even with recognition ("You did good work", a pat on the back, a peer bonus, or maybe even a promotion), it just doesn't do it for me anymore, especially when any tangible positive outcome is completely hidden from me. I would rather have been ignorant to these problems and not suffered the stress in the first place.

Even when I try to help my fellow developers in a way where it's much easier to feel the impact, it's hard to make a case for a better engineering culture if means that everyone has to put in an epsilon of extra effort in a day and age where every team ascribes to a scarcity mindset. I actually believe I can have more impact building a medium-sized product by myself with the help of AI rather than fighting for scraps in a software organization which pushes and pulls randomly in all directions.

Over time, my tolerance for nonsense and systemic "injustice" (i.e. incentive misalignment) has effectively disappeared. Every time I rub against an unnecessary barrier that was put up by another person, intentionally or not, my motivation simply drops to zero. I constantly have to wear an emotional blanket to keep from feeling angry and frustrated, and it makes it hard to experience genuine emotional fulfillment in my life outside of work. I simply have no patience left to spend in my life outside of work, where it actually matters.

I 100% identify with this blog post. I feel more happiness taking a friend's kids to the climbing gym and listening to them tell me about their experience doing a difficult climb. I feel more happiness from mentoring a robotics team of goofy but driven teenagers. I feel more happiness when my writer friend tells me that she still uses a wooden tablet stand that I built every day. I want my life to feel like it's making a difference for other people in a way that is unique to my talents and skills.

Life is not an optimization puzzle where the goal is to maximize wealth, status, influence, or prestige. Yet it feels like that's really all that a corporate job can offer you these days.

It's worth learning from people even if we deeply disagree with them, but we still have the choice to not offer them our patronage. I see nothing wrong with pointing out how prominent figures choose to exercise their influence. People should be informed about what their spending supports. I would go so far to argue that this is one of the only remaining effective ways for individuals to collectively shift the cultural needle.

Very few people would agree that red hair is "abnormal". Why do you think that people in general are more likely to describe homosexuality as "abnormal" when the prevalence of homosexuality is roughly on par with that of red hair?

Abnormal isn't a good word to use here since it connotates an undesirable condition, implying a need for correction.

Atypical, non-standard, or unconventional are more neutral in tone, so given your desire for a non-subjective word I'd recommend these instead.

I've done the math on this many times, and it still puzzles me how anybody would choose to buy a house in the Bay Area today versus renting an equivalent one. When mortgages are over 2x rent, the calculation skews tremendously in favor of renting and investing the difference in an index fund. This considers all possible factors and even chooses favorable conditions for homeowners (high appreciation, low stock market returns, high rent increases y/y). The permanent costs of owning a home (property tax, insurance, HOA, maintenance) are typically around 40% of rent, but can be even higher for certain types of property.

My conclusion every time I've done this exercise is that you should only buy a house in the Bay if you have way more money than you know what to do with. The difference in opportunity cost is absolutely massive, on the order of half a million today-dollars or more for a 3-bedroom SFH. That's a huge price to pay for the "privileges" of homeownership.

2nd link contains no such information. Nowhere in the article does it say tech companies were paid to censor anything.

I honestly don't see what the issue is. "Pressuring" in this case just means "asking". Nobody was punished for not fulfilling these requests.

And funding research grants into studying misinformation doesn't really bother me either. Maybe there are better ways to spend the money but you could argue that about almost anything.

Also, none of what you linked points to the Biden administration paying tech companies to remove content.

This is a particular banh mi place in South Bay isn't it? I've been there dozens of times and seen the reviews you're referring to. For similar reasons I completely ignore all review scores because gamification ruins all signal. Same with the chaff driven by SEO. Synthetic information is way easier to produce than organic information, which means it's always going to be a losing battle over the long term.

This is a duplicate of the following reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1hp5r20/comment/m...

There's a difference between a company directly backing a candidate and employees of company backing a candidate. Most of the contributions you're referring to came from employees, which makes sense given that most well-to-do tech employees are socially liberal. It would be a mistake to attribute these donations to "big tech". You wouldn't attribute a donation from a farmer to "big agriculture".

I hate to say it, but that article is inaccurately reported, and I cringe every time I see it linked. It conflates the PAL codes with the presidential launch codes, which are two distinct layers of security. Even if the PAL is hard coded to all zeros, you still need presidential authorization to initiate the launch procedure.

Small correction: The PAL doesn't handle presidential authentication. It's an extra layer of security to prevent a third party from detonating a warhead should they come into physical possession of one, and is (presumably) a static code which is integral to the operation of the weapon itself. Changing it would require complete reassembly of the warhead. The presidential authentication is handled by the missile crew, and the codes rotate daily. The PAL code is fixed and kept safe in the silo, where it is only accessed and input after the presidential order has been authenticated.

Could you elaborate on this a bit more?

2020 vote count: 155 million

2024 vote count so far: 139 million

2024 vote percentage counted so far: 87%

139 million divided by 87% equals 159 million.

Voter turnout this year will be higher than 2020.

Well over ten million votes are still yet to be counted on the West Coast. Is there a reason why you haven't considered this? If you add uncounted votes then the total count is only 5 million less than 2020. Such swings have certainly happened before between adjacent elections, such as from 2000 to 2004.