unfocussed_mike

At least you're honest in your nihilism.

I prefer to live in a world where people at least try to navigate grey areas.

Oh god. Look. I'm sorry. You're right, obviously. And I am wrong and of feeble mind.

But please, make the libertarian Gish galloping stop.

Well done shoehorning all of that in.

> I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one.

There was for a time a micro-industry of people taking flights to this location on Youtube -- it's one of the most fun examples of this that I've seen.

And yeah; really quickly people discovered that he genuinely had options.

There is a question I've not seen answered yet. Did the wallet guys know he was doing this in advance?

> It may be a huge difference, but the problem with asking Youtube to take that kind of decision without a court order is that you're expecting them to have expertise in aviation law.

This is a bit of a silly way to look at it, I'm sorry to say.

What if they just remove the video on the balance of probability that it involved, in the FAA's judgement, a deliberate dangerous plane crash without permission?

This is not a challenging precedent. House-flipping is not smashing a plane into the ground without planning and without regard for safety, is it?

> The only difference

If you're pinning your argument on this, then fine. But it is a huge difference.

Honestly this whole idea that Youtube should willingly be a party to this sort of thing is a libertarian take too far for me, but then I'm British.

This is what I thought at the time. It just goes to show that guys like this project their own stupidity onto their audiences (this is not always an unsuccessful strategy)

You're not factoring in the "He's the guy that crashed a plane!" impact on all his future earnings.

He was speculating to accumulate.

There may be no meaningful legal sanction for this.

This guy crashed a plane for profit. The fact that US law doesn't seem to have any meaningful sanction for him is not a reason for it to stay up.

They should delete the video. And I really don't understand the argument that they shouldn't stop him using their platform; my goodness if Youtube was mine he'd be gone and I wouldn't for a second wonder if there was any meaningful free speech implication for removing it.

He is dangerous, and the allure of more views on youtube made him do a dangerous thing. I'd be like: "OK, you're not my customer anymore".

He is a fairly skilled parachutist and was wearing a skydiving rig. He also knew where he was putting his plane down.

So he might have got to it.

But on the other hand he's also an idiot.

Nevertheless he at least thought he might have to do this.

5. Quit and do something actually worthwhile for education with whatever sum you earned from this blend of entitlement, carelessness and greed.

No, this happens -- in really horrifying situations.

This is a fair assessment.

There is another strategy than asking them to remove it, though. Ask them to qualify it. I've done this in the past (a long time ago, mind you, and in the UK, where employers are still somewhat bound by decency as well as law). I was asked to sign an extensive NDA for a short period of employment, and I agreed, on the condition that I could decline to join any meeting that wasn't strictly related to the project I was hired on, and that the same NDA bound them when discussing my personal projects.

I think that for example good designers are usually good teachers, so maybe.

Good design and good engineering explains itself; especially engineering that interfaces with other stuff. Well-designed things need less documentation.

Both, I think, require the same focus on clarity of intention as a good teacher.

My take: Uber is a libertarian economic crowbar.

All of its backers, all of its investors, imagine an Uber world where no individual matters except themselves.

They wilfully break laws expecting to be able to overturn them before they are punished; they destroy markets knowing that the regulation will have to adapt to allow them to continue.

The Uberisation of everything is the tech sector's most disgraceful product.

I tend towards the view that I do not understand any given thing until I can teach it.

Thank you.

And yes -- navigating the line between the endings/beginnings bit, the loss (which it is), and tragedy (which it isn't) is difficult but this time around I am finding it easier.

One of the things I have already realised is that explaining-stuff-to-my-Dad is portable. I can do it in my head. And when I can do that without tears, I'll be able to add my Dad to any audience in the future, and hear his questions as well as theirs.

It is an outstanding movie. But I think this particular scene is one of the finest scenes in any movie ever made. It could stand alone as a short.

Right.

You can't hide the detail with a wave of the hand, you can definitely overcommunicate detail that is unnecessary, but the art of it is finding a way to explain the bit that matters in a way that makes it clear to the users that you're eliding detail that isn't important, without misleading them.

There is a very fine example of this in cinema -- the senior partners meeting in Margin Call, where Zachary Quinto's character has to explain why the firm needs to sell all of a particular asset class:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhy7JUinlu0

One day I will use the line Jeremy Irons uses in this clip. I don't want to spoil it by quoting it.

> So while doctors needs to be able to talk to laymen, the chemists working in medicine factories don't.

But they for sure need to talk to lawyers, accountants and doctors occasionally. All of those (especially the doctors /s) are laymen when it comes to chemistry.

You are missing one of the great untold truths of engineering: non-technical people can be just as brilliantly intelligent.

They just don't speak your language or have your experience.

You do not particularly need to dumb it down. You do need to think about which things they actually need to know, and provide some backstory that helps them contextualise it.

Get good at this and your life will be enormously better. Keep this attitude and you will find your world shrinking.

This was my telephone life with my Dad for thirty years, all of his later life and almost two thirds of my life, even well into his dementia (because his memories of his professional career were really untouched by it).

After only one month I already miss it enormously.

I am very glad you find these calls rewarding and I am certain she does too. I am going to have to find someone to fill this role in my own life again.

All very deeply true.

Many moons ago I worked in a briefly-successful UK "dot com" integrator, and then took a break from work for personal reasons.

When I came back, I rejoined in the design department, rather than return to a role in engineering, where I had been mostly front-end. (I described myself whimsically as a "pet engineer".)

What we realised then is that the design team needed an engineer on their side of the divide to act as a go-between with implementation, but also to translate requirements in both directions, explaining what each side thinks (as well as urging some respect for the designers' craft).

Nowadays this is reasonably commonplace but at that time it was pretty radical.

Technical teams often make the mistake of thinking that their knowledge, their language, and their problems are supersets of or at least the essence of the problems of the business. They are quite wrong.

And they are not good at certain kinds of colour subtlety -- even the Foveon sensors struggle with the colours of dim, diffuse light (sunsets etc.) and deep muted colours (the grey-green of ivy leaves for example).

Amstrad's last great PC series (the 3x86 series made with very standard components, unlike the unusual 2x86 series) used this strategy for the 3386, I think.

Enjoyably deadpan :-)

Not going to respond to the unnecessarily rude tone here generally, except to say that any argument you want to have taken seriously is better not couched in terms of "hardons" and "jerking itself off". If you are a teenager, consider trying not to sound like one. If you're not a teenager, consider trying not to sound like one. Either way, this kind of communication is why you're likely still not taken as seriously as you could be.

Also you're taking it all off on an angry tangent about the HN audience when I am talking about buyers (I meant including institutional buyers, not end users, and I didn't clarify that enough but I would have thought the focus on architecture would have made it clearer) but:

> I don't give a single crap if my workstation uses up 600W to run a 5900X and an RTX3070 (or, well, if I could find one, but shhh).

I would. Between this April and next April my energy bill will double, and it is unlikely to ever fall back to where it is now. Power consumption matters A LOT in Europe right now. Corporate buyers will have to care about that, for the long term.

> 3/ People actually upgrade their hardware and don't rebuy a macbook pro every two years like half of this forum does.

No, they really don't upgrade their hardware, in fact. Almost no computer buyer upgrades through anything other than replacement.

But I'm using a seven year old, secondhand MacBook Pro, so I'm not the target of your comment.

There was a small measure of satire/hyperbole in what I said. But you have separated that one sentence from the second sentence that provided context, so I don't think I particularly need to defend it on its own.

Perhaps I should have used a semicolon to defend against you.

The point was that in ten years time, I think people will look back and say: 2022 is the year x86 really ended as a forward-looking architecture. Ergo: dead, they just don't know it yet.

But to expand: one of the things that is very striking about tech stuff is how quickly the energy in any one system can deflate.

Looking at the Apple competition, do you think buyers will think:

1) Intel simply need to make x86 a bit better to compete, or

2) It is about time we started looking at architectures that can scale up to compete with Apple Silicon on all levels (absolute CPU power, power consumption, mobile to server)

Architecturally, x86 is in serious trouble and this isn't just something I -- a random non-chip-designer -- think. It's what Intel think, or their entire recent push would not be to become a fabricator for other chip designs, built on an unhealthy amount of anti-asian supply chain FUD.

Well... you are eliding the one, rather decisive way TSMC could indeed end up in Chinese hands.

We just have to hope that the Ukraine conflict has convinced China not to try to pull it off. We certainly would not be able to find economic sanctions that could possibly work if they did.