throwaway8291

My brief analysis tells me that there will be some grinding down in Q2 with a negative peak in Q3. While the virus seems to be "managed", the consequences of millions of people dropping out of the workforce in the first world is not that pronounced. We will see bank failures and maybe dozens of cascades, all leading to the point where someone has to stand up and swallow it.

Solid states go into deep debt today, previously failed states will chew on it for the decade to come.

I looked at the data flow paradigm a couple of years ago. Back then I thought that the difference to just a "ordinary" functions is not that big, and for performance (which is important for my data work), you do not want to deviate from the traditional way too much.

Anyone felt the same or can provide a real-world problem, where data flow is actually working better that other solutions?

Thanks SAP for letting me feel like it's 2010, when everyone fell in love with REST (again).

I've used Eclipse on and off and always found it to be a bit clunky. Unhelpful error messages coming from the fifty layers of abstraction you did not know about before.

Back in the days, I always preferred netbeans - it was just more of a product, less of an exercise in object-oriented abstractionism.

Today, I am a happy user of vim (and vscode, if I need to) - I left behind the heaps of design patterns, thankfully. What this feels like to me is a trying to jump on a train, that's long gone.

It's an artificial scarcity, though. We have the most productive technologies ever - we are just not very good to put a better part of them flow towards common good.

The amount of senseless applications and waste is staggering.

I understand that it's a very broad spectrum.

However, what I am observing is that 'capital' gets its hand in any aspect of life, the formerly family owned coffee machine maker, lingerie producer and the outdoor specialist went through couple of private equity hands - for what? For injecting capital to trim down ops, expand, then get out of a position?

After watching hundreds of hours of investing conference videos and interviews there is one thing, that really got me: why is this field so sad? I believe it's because all they ever talk about what they "own". The cannot make, invent, heal, fight, cook, write, harvest or any other human activity - all they do is "own" something that is valuable to others.

Imagine kids playing in the playground and all the talk about is what each of them owns. They cannot read, write, play an instrument, tell jokes, do tricks, etc. - no, but they control those who can and are productive.

I am not sure why, but I'd rather have a kid with talents than one with lots of "assets" (even though in this world talent does not matter, if you've got the assets).

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Warren Buffet was once asked by the audience, what you should do, if you have artistic talents and want to live them out, but you do not want to starve? He did not really care, understandably.

Why pretend and cloud the idea, that the main reason a person has a "job" today is to accumulate capital for capital.

As long as this notion persists (which will be for many more decades I fear) power inequalities will just mean that some will suffer more (those who do not have resources in the first place).

Hey, you know, I am really sorry, but thanks for all the capital you helped us to accumulate - which we own and not you. Bye!

I imagine the most profound societal change will come from getting rid of this notion and the resulting reduction in power asymmetries.

No, not stupid. It's one scenario, but the time span is absent: do we reach 0.7 in three years or three months? At the current rate probably the latter, which might increase the 0.01 as well, because of a certain overwhelming of the health care system in the US (e.g. a young boy in California has not been treated because he could not pay, so he died).

Nobody knows what is coming, but I'm in the 1M+ camp as well. US is so ill-equipped plus administration is very aware, how devastating the economic consequences are even now (2T stimulus and infinite FED liquidity are already in effect today). Let this spread for two more weeks and the administration might loose their countenance and will declare: "we cannot save both the infected and our country, so we will save our country".

At current pace the whole US will be infected by May (I wonder, whether the market have priced that in already).

I hope for the best.

How true. I believe the US will see an even worse fallout than Italy - because people who can afford private medical personal tend to question whether healthcare is a business model at all ("Is curing patients a sustainable business model?", GS).

America has the most uplifting and free-spirited legacy, but it has been transformed in the past decades into the most primitive form of greed and selfishness possible. Covid-19 is only the eye-opener.

FTR: I believe the US will lose 5% of its population to the coronavirus in 2020. Not being panicky, just multiplying.

Spot on. As a consumer of a newer generation: I do not care about 90% of the stuff that's in a modern car. I could not care less about the manufacturer. If it drives and is relatively safe and clean, cool. Best case: I do not even need to own a car.

The best counterexample for the R&D spree of western automotive can be found in Russia. The Lada Niva is car that is extremely useful and mostly unchanged in structure since inception. People can repair them with their own hands. I wish we had robust clean cars like the Niva in the west as well.

I leave this here for future reference: if we paint a worst case scenario, by the end of summer 2020, we may have 1M+ casualties in Germany alone.

It's hard to assess the global consequences of hundreds of thousands of flats getting vacant (increasing real estate supply in an overvalued market), labor shortages (which is high even today) and economic output reduction and the all the societal costs.

The only positive thing I see is an event, that unites the whole world - you will be able to relate to strangers - and this is actually a very good thing.

Agreed.

I remain amazed until today about his progression. He founded a startup to solve a white upper middle class "problem", raised millions for that, was lucky to get a little bit more when he sold out his startup's users' data to the greater fool and now runs around and tries to get rich off other peoples creativity and sweat through the VC vehicle. When I learned that he actually founded OpenAI that org lost almost all appeal to me.

So yes, it might not be too much of a stretch to picture him as the embodiment of the current silicon valley mindset and all its tech-hybris and duplicity.

Anecdata: A guy bought a small usb fan for his laptop, inserted it and bricked this laptop. Not worth the 50% discount in any way.

As other comments mentioned, we are entering a hyperfake decade - and we are only at the beginning. I am virtually certain, we will exit this decade with a profound experience of more and more private universes (which may deteriorate what is left of civil societies even more).

Investors care about making money, period. Whether you burn coal until the planet is inhabitable or John Doe data is sold and packaged up for the next couple of decades without him knowing does not matter at all.

It's a strange world for sure, and one that I am virtually certain will come to a crashing halt in this century.

Nobody is required to buy facebook stocks. If you do not want this company to continue it's operations, just get rid of it (if you owned it in the first place).

I'm using Firefox for years, after Chrome started to ask me for a login (at around version 40). Never looked back. One day I woke up to a chart showing browser market share of FF at around 4%, which surprised me - as I thought many people would understand the implications and directions.

Maybe I'm too optimistic.

Update: Loved chrome, used it for years, I also love most Chrome engineering and all the innovation they added to the field - it's just good to have alternatives.

That surprised me, when I first saw it. If someone takes a minute to read the docs (e.g. Python), one would never build something knowing that order is not guaranteed (e.g. order in dictionaries). But seemingly people do.

In Germany there is a saying that translates to something like: "SAP sucks the blood out of the Mittelstand" - Mittelstand being the SMB up to 50M revenue p.a. There has to be yet a moment, where I hear someone emphatically speaking about the mess that SAP is.

They claim machine learning, but I'd guess their workhorse is a "grep -f badwords tweets.json | makepdf | send boss@employer" kind of thingy.

Related to that: On many people's mental maps, programming seems to be closeby other things like installing a driver, changing configuration and such. That it is an powerful tool for anything that you do with your mind completely escapes the bystanders.

Germany.

I met two FB engineers a few years back. They seemed average, at most. But one quality stuck out (we spent half a day together at an event): They seemed to be excellent at following company rules.

The max I negotiated in Europe was $125000, an ok start up salary was maybe $80000 and I am currently - with lots of non-money benefits at around $70000.

What makes me most sad is that fostering the web tracking industry - tech + marketing - is so lucrative. I have such a hard time understanding this world - it does not make much sense any more. This lying and scheming around collecting all your data and activity for the next VC funded ad playground.

And I'm kind of irritated, how people can spend their lives working for mostly investors, who benefit much more than every (even well paid) gear in the machine.

Aren't we as a society smart enough to start treating humans with a bit more respect and not just seeing them as wetware to extract value?

I found a couple of old scanned mathematics books on the archive, which I could not find elsewhere. Many times a web.archive.org link cut short a journey to an old blog post, that might have been lost in the ether.

Thanks archive, I'm glad I can support you a bit.

It's also the beauty of capitalism and the creation of new types of work, that can provide value. For every like factory there is a fraud detection startup, so everyone's a winner.

Never mind where the "problem" came from in the first place.

Or become senior and apply for that Haskell job in five years.

I'm using paper notebooks of various kinds and I am happy with that.

This is great advice and would be even better, if our industry was not that hype driven. Tell someone, you are a JavaScript expert and you had great success in the past with jQuery and knockoutjs. People will reject you, you won't have a job and no money.

And if you are one of these poor fools, who depend on work for income, than good luck not at least partially follow up on trends, them being silly or not.