toolz

There is a type of person I don't bother engaging. The type of person who has no qualms spending a lot of time talking, but is less interested in sharing the facts that inform their worldview. I hope you aren't one of those people and I hope even more strongly you're not content with being that type of person.

> Objective metrics are very hard.

I agree, but without them we all fall victims to our own blinding bias. Is there much of a point in making predictions or holding opinions when you don't have objective metrics to draw from? Sure, someone has to do it, but not the people in the comment sections of a social media site where we're all trying to learn more.

Do you have a link to anything that shows the data analysis on our voting patterns having less international backing in recent times? I see the data and can plot out a trend myself, but if someone has already done better analysis I'm curious to read more about what you're talking about.

edit: I did a simple chart over all the UN votes sorted by date and the amount of votes that match USA votes seems to increase over time, but the real issue is that the vote data only went through 2021. At a quick glance the only data I can find does not match what you're suggesting.

> We will see signs over the next Presidential term.

Maybe, maybe not. People who actually know what the future holds stand to make a lot of money simply with market speculation. As it turns out, very few people are capable of beating the market while many claim they know what will happen in the future.

I'm very skeptical of anyone who makes bold claims about the future. Especially while ignoring the question to whether any objective metrics exist today that show our credibility is in decline.

Do you have an objective metric that suggests the US has lost (or is losing) credibility? I don't see any signs of it.

being able to do that without significant time constraints isn't that bad imho, but inside of an interview?! That's borderline laughable, for me, as you're only going to be filtering out people based on whether they have any previous PHP exposure or not.

I'm not so sure this "race to the bottom" is a characteristic I want to avoid. The most competitive markets in the world are always in first world countries or in countries quickly turning into a first world country. Take south korea for example. They had sweatshops maybe 70 years ago and now they arguably have the best healthcare in system in the world.

I'll take a fast food job for 40 hours any day of the week over most of the options in poor countries. Sure, nothing but the best, fulfilling jobs for everyone is ideal, but until I see that exist I'm not informed enough to know whether it's possible outside of someones political ideals.

this honestly sounds like you're describing the most successful software on the market. I can't think of many social media sites slower than facebook or instagram, or chat slower than slack or email clients slower than gmail.

Strongly disagree with this sentiment. Our jobs are typically to write software in a way that minimizes risk and best ensures the success of the project.

How many software projects have you seen fail because it couldn't run fast enough or used too many resources? Personally, I've never seen it. I'm sure it exists, but I can't imagine it's a common occurrence. I've rewritten systems because they grew and needed perf upgrades to continue working, but this was always something the business knew, planned for and accepted as a strategy for success. The project may have been less successful if it had been written with performance in mind from the beginning.

With that in mind, I can't think of many things less appropriate to keep in your mind as a first class concern when building software than performance and optimization. Sure, as you gain experience in your software stack you'll naturally be able to optimize, but since it will possibly never be the reason your projects fail and presumably your job is to ensure success of some project, then it follows that you should prioritize other things strongly over optimization.

what am I missing? The article talks about apple failing to send consumer disputes, how is that on GS?

To that example though, is NASA really the pinnacle of achievement in their field? Sure, it's not a very competitive field (e.g. compared to something like the restaurant industry) and most of their existence has been about r&d for tech there wasn't really a market for yet, but still spaceX comes along and in a fraction of the time they're landing and reusing rockets making space launches more attainable and significantly cheaper.

I'm hoping that example holds up, but I'm not well versed in that area so it may be a terrible counter-example but my overarching point is this: overly engineered code often produces less value than quickly executed code. We're not in the business of making computers do things artfully just for the beauty of the rigor and correctness of our systems. We're doing it to make computers do useful thing for humanity.

You may think that spending an extra year perfecting a pace-maker might end up saving lives, but what if more people die in the year before you go to market than would've ended up dying had you launched with something almost perfect, but with potential defects?

Time is expensive in so many more ways than just capital spent.

Poor analogy imo. It's socially acceptable to talk about movies that were aired years ago with or without a warning. It's never socially acceptable to infect someones computer with malware prior to explicit consent. There's an expectation that someone writing about spoilers, will in fact detail the spoiler in question. Given that's an expectation you consent to being told about the spoiler by reading the article. If that isn't an expectation, I'm curious what you or anyone else had hoped the article would be talking about?

I found it insightful and pleasant to see that there are people inside of a an important field being intellectually curious and honest about the direction of their field of study.

I personally had zero expectations that a blog post around the subject of spoilers wouldn't talk about spoilers. So, not ironic for me.

In practice I agree with your points, but it's also important to consider that the open source model is alive, well and is directly and indirectly at the heart of employing many people. I won't make the argument that society is willing or could switch to that model successfully, but I also wouldn't be willing to say it couldn't work, either.

Of course I would, the second example represents some portion of a companies revenue. If that companies revenue is only $50 then that is their only customer and to continue existing they would need to keep that customer or they would have zero revenue. In that scenario many company's would change their entire operations to accommodate their single customer. That is control.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the first example. Are you suggesting the government would be 5x more cost efficient at producing tomatoes?! That's almost as outlandish to me as suggesting someone would spend the same amount of time driving to get tomatoes as someone else could spend growing them.

Explain to me how the US government spends twice as much as any other country on healthcare and you claim the corporations are _more_ in charge? There are entire industries in healthcare that would disappear if the government stopped giving them money. Control via funding is far more impactful than control via laws. Companies can bend laws, they cannot survive without cash flow.

the US government spends twice as much as the 2nd place government on healthcare and we rank pretty abysmally on developed nations for quality of healthcare.

Can the US government be competent? Sure. Do I trust it to be competent today when it's dropping the ball on arguably it's most important task? No, not at all.

I can stop giving corporations my money, I don't need to trust them.

I'm not sure I understand the metrics we could use to force companies to make things repairable. I certainly don't think it will be beneficial to make companies offer to repair _everything_ and if it's not everything, what criteria would be used to determine what is legally something the have to repair?

I've not thought about this problem very long, but at a glance it seems like something very difficult to get right and I don't trust my government to get even the easy things right most of the time.

Yeah, I know you can type that way, but I have a quest3 and after watching the video I would think no one is actually typing that way. It looks to be easily twice as slow and way more annoying than just using your fingers with hand tracking.

How many people are typing with their eyes to begin with? Aren't they using their hands far more often? Cool attack, but I'm not sure there's much real attack surface here if no one is typing with their gaze while using an avatar.

and given that the first rule still holds where he chooses hard numbers, then the expected value of the game is negative (aside from meta-gaming this, which is out of scope for a technical problem)

but you don't know. Only he knows that he's going to pick numbers the binary search will fail on and he states as much as his reason that you shouldn't play the game.

Title is wrong in implying Balmer is incorrect and the article shows that the title is wrong. If clickbait is misleading, then this is worse than clickbait, no?

> Ballmer states that the answer is "No" for two reasons: firstly, because he can pick numbers that'll be the most difficult for you...

The article goes on to show that there are numbers where a binary search always has the guesser paying $1

> I agree. That's completely not what I said.

I still misunderstand you, I think.

> Money is how we keep track of [...] output of others

How do I reconcile that you agree money doesn't represent the output of others, while understanding this comment that says it keeps track of the output of others?

> Spending doesn't make you rich.

I would argue that being rich doesn't matter at all. We can always print more money. The only part of being rich that matters is the influence your spending represents. Otherwise it's nothing more than numbers in a computer database and has no impact on the world. The fact that the government spends so aggressively is what makes their influence so powerful and scary. Unlike rich individuals, the governments wage war frequently. I would much rather see random people have obscene net worth rather than see major countries grow their military budget, building weapons that are even more efficient at killing poor people in other countries.

> Because there's a limit of how much control over others any single person deserves regardless of what they did.

agreed, that's why it matters so much as to where the money is going when you take it from rich individuals. Giving it the federal government grows their military budget, which the president of the US has complete control over. A single individual with the authority to launch a full-scale invasion tomorrow. Compare that to elon musk or bill gates. Their purchasing influence is infinitesimally small compared to the same money utilized by the federal government.

> sport takes a huge toll on the body and pretty much excludes those people from any useful form of activity for entire span of their career and possibly later only for our grotesque entertainment.

valid argument. I don't agree with it, but I don't find the argument to be inconsistent or without merit.

> Money is just a way of keeping track of to what fraction of future output of other people you are entitled to (as agreed upon by human race).

I don't agree with this definition of money. The vast majority of money doesn't represent human output/labor and none of it is created by human labor. Probably the simplest to understand example of that is crypto. It represents trillions of USD in wealth and has almost no human labor input or output. That's a simple example, but certainly not the only example.

> Is that true? Despite trillions of debt?

Yes it's true. It's not even close. The US federal government spends in a single year more than the largest companies in this world would cost to buy flat out. They could save up for roughly 6 months and buy out the most expensive company in the world (apple). A company that has been growing their wealth for 50 years. This is why I struggle to find a consistent value system that claims we are solving problems by taking money from big earners and giving it to entities that already control many orders of magnitude more money. Moving money from the grossly rich to the insanely unthinkably rich doesn't make much sense to me.

> Completely unrelated but since you asked, I have nothing against capping athletes at the top level of success.

What problem does this solve? I don't have anything much against it either, but I can't find any reason to do this.

If you have issue with the taxes they pay then you have issue with the tax code, but that still doesn't address any problems or apply any consistent values. How does moving money from one rich person to the richest organization in the world achieve any goal?

I find this mentality is always directed at rich people, but never applied consistently in anyone's life, so I have a hard time taking this opinion seriously. Hopefully, you can convince me otherwise, but I've never heard anyone suggest the best sports teams should stop competing when they've won enough, or that the best inventors should stop, or the best artists, and so on. Money isn't zero sum. We're constantly creating insanely large quantities of money. If the people at the top are accumulating that money from individual consumers making their own free choices, then would you suggest that the people at the end of the line be given things for free? Or maybe they should be disallowed from making the purchases? Or maybe you're suggesting the rich keep selling but they're forced to give the profits away? and who would they give it away too? The federal government controls more money than any entire private business, so obviously it controls orders of magnitude more than any individual. Should these wealthy individuals be forced to give their money to the largest money holders in the world? What value system would that make sense in?

They 'could' have a paragraph at the beginning to help potential users understand the purpose of the project.

It might seem inconsequential, but maintainers often deal with a lot of angry entitled users and it could be helpful to stay away from language that implies that the people giving away their code for free (and for fun) have any obligation to provide anyone anything.

All traits, psychological or otherwise are heritable. The hard question to answer is how predictive those inherited genetics are relative to other factors.