1,492 karma · joined January 23, 2024
YouTube had virtually zero enforcement. You could upload whole shows and movies and they were never taken down.
Other sites like Google Video or Vimeo did go above and beyond to comply and they lost badly.
YouTube started getting heat at some point and that’s only when they started enforcing, but by then, they already won.
Your average person doesn’t even take authority.
The next “level” per se (not that you have to take authority — only if you want to) is the person taking authority.
Then the next level above that is the person that takes authority but understands how it looks to other people, so they sure everyone else understands that they are taking authority to make things move along, not because they are entitled to it. They attack the problem head on.
My goal is to get good engineering done while also making sure everyone feels included and good about being at work.
If you’re about good engineering and respect for other people, you can get things done however you want.
Recently I pushed a change straight to production by myself with no approval and violated many rules but it saved us and carried us for weeks. Worse case if it broke, rollback would happen under in under 30 seconds.
I did it because not only did I triple check, I’ve kept mental track of the number of regressions and issues that have been logged against all of my work throughout my career. I’m good at determining risk and I know my bug rate is very low (I git blame every bug to find out who and why caused it. I don’t tell my coworkers but it does play a role in who gets what kind of tickets.) I did what I did because frankly I know it was going to work and no one was going to complain. And truthfully, I’ve done this at different companies several times. Of course, it’s still never a light decision and I rarely ever do it.
But if someone asks me if they could do the same thing, I would not be able to tell them. They would have to keep track of the same details and to be honest, if someone is asking if they can break rules, they probably shouldn’t.
This is the “tension.”
From what you do at work or say to your friends to whether you break a writing rule or whether you jump a fence.
When you observe people in their element, you can tell apart the people who know know when to break rules and who haven’t figured it out.
But without looking at the direct rules of the system, this is the best you can do.
It’s not like you can just open the source code of the universe. You observe and make a theory that explains the observations, then the theory holds at least until a new observation contradicts the theory.
Is the current theory wrong? Maybe. But everything can be wrong and the world is always welcome to hear a new theory that completely explains all current observations.
But to just say a theory is wrong without providing a completely explained new one adds nothing.
That’s why I started checking. If you don’t catch it early, you’re not going to find it.
Sometimes it also just gets stuck in some clothes and it doesn’t fall out on its own too. If I’m missing a sock, I give my clothes the ol’ shake.
I ended up having a place for everything as mentioned in the article.
In the last 10 years, I have not actually lost a single thing. I’m actually pretty proud of myself. I also haven’t lost a single sock, which is really where it matters.
(I do match up my socks every time right after I do laundry tho.)
There was one time I couldn’t find a tool and I was afraid I was gonna break my streak… but I did eventually find it.
That said, I don’t think you should really worry about that distinction.
My method of getting things done is a 3 step:
1. Constant checking in on whether I am happy at my progress. If I am, keep doing what I’m doing.
2. If I’m not, try a completely different approach entirely. Abandon the old approach for a week or however long is reasonable.
3. If I fail to improve or I failed to actually put in place the different approach (saying and doing are different things), I need a shock to the system. Moving to a brand new city-kind-of-shock. Throwing away half your belongings-kind-of-shock.
The key is frequently checking if you are happy with progress and realizing that if you are not, you need a change. And you need to be willing to try changes constantly.
It only takes doing index73.php and index_old3.php for a few months and then eventually screwing up (unless you’re perfect) to realize how dumb putting numbers and _old4 at the end of names is. Then at that point, you naturally go look if there’s a better way.
SourceForge had a messy interface and frankly I hated it. Google Code was like frozen in time, like most Google projects. Microsoft’s thing — I don’t even remember the name — felt half assed and like they were going to abandon it… and they abandoned it. There were also others… none of which I even think were serious enough.
Also Git won because SVN and CVS were centralized VCSes and you needed a server. I can just make Git repos before I even know if a project is serious.
There were other distributed VCSes of course, like Hg, but they either cost $ or wasn’t backed by a major user… like Linux. I admittedly just waited this one out and chose Git because it was more popular.
My local library did not exactly have access to journals either.
I don’t think scientific literacy has ever been high. Society relied on other publications and the government to interpret the information for us. For better or worse.
Just like with anyone you meet: you are the judge if they are trustworthy, nice, mean, funny, etc.
That said, I think tech journalism is the bottom of the barrel. I just feel like they focus more on tech than journalism.
Mostly concert videos and skate parts. We have an archive.
Or even here in the states and sometimes you can pay via PayPal or Venmo or QR code.
But at the end of the day, I can just tap my Visa card (or lately just Apple Pay) in way more places than anywhere else, from storefronts to vending machines, in Italy or Japan or Wisconsin, and it Just Works.
Building a network that is accepted anywhere in the world (if they want it, and short of sanctions) is a combination of engineering, marketing and management.
If you are building a new city, you do not start with high density. Individual developers start with the cheapest build out because no one will pay a premium for a multi-level structure until cheap single-level builds are exhausted. Then as centuries pass, because there is no more undeveloped land, the city is forced to redevelop existing plots and increase density.
Many Asian and Western cities are hundreds or thousands of years old.
America's transit woes is because we live in a new country with new cities in previously mostly uninhabited land.
Paris metro is 1,800/sq mi
London metro is 7,430/sq mi
Philly is 11,749/sq mi
Paris is 52,000/sq mi
US cities have very low density compared to other cities in other countries.
New York is the exception, and their transit isn't that bad. But it's still lower than other major cities.
I don’t mind meetings but being in a 4 hour emergency meeting because some due diligence wasn’t done is a waste of my time.
Life is easier when you do good work.
There are many federal agencies. One of them will fuck up.
Same with private companies.
If you have 100 people doing the same thing, at least one of them is going to fuck it up.
In this case, Snowflake was also the cause for the Ticketmaster and Lending Tree breaches according to the article so…
real lack of trust in Snowflake now.
Pretty much everyone gets breached.
The only ones I don't think get breached deep are the really big software engineering companies where most of the company are also software engineers... like Google.
Software is too complex to be secure without a massive team IMO.
Nazi Germany spent defense money to build defense products. The war was going to end eventually.
Like spending too much money on remote work products during a pandemic that will eventually end. It’s going to blow up.
Unfortunately an airplane building company has high upstart costs and is also not a cool industry to get into.
Sure, there is way more advertising and bots these days but there is WAY more content available today than 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Definitely way more diversity of content too.
I remember drinking half of a 1 gallon plastic water jug in an hour changing a tire in the middle of a desert when it was 110°F.
But most days when I’m out and about, I’m drinking about a gallon. And if it’s hot, it’s more.
There was a short and dumb period where I started buying plastic waste bottles and I was blowing through like 6-8 plastic bottles per day.