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ekster's comments

ekster | 4 years ago | on: The Bitcoin mine with its own power plant

Well it’s waste in the sense that you are spending lots of energy to calculate magic numbers, which don’t have any other value except to prove you own bitcoin. It is or is very near a tautology.

In contrast to energy credits in scifi which is something like a promise to deliver a fixed amount of energy, like how a dollar used to have an equivalence in gold.

Like, do you imagine some future spacefaring civilization going around and blowing up stars in order to calculate hashes for their currency? I can, but really only as something that an evil civilization or runaway automation would do.

Why not build a dyson sphere and sell contracts on the energy instead, to people who will use it to be productive? Why is it better to burn all stored energy you can find off as quickly as possible to generate numbers you don’t otherwise need?

ekster | 4 years ago | on: Some career advice (2019)

I started at the very bottom (build engineer) and transitioned on the other end to management. It wasn’t SE0-SE10.

ekster | 4 years ago | on: Do we need a Scrum Master forever?

It sounds like you are conflating scrum and agile. Lots of companies are still doing agile, few innovative ones (including the ones on this list) are doing scrum. Given that scrum is defined by its very specific rules and quite zealous about “scrum-but” being heresy I don’t think you can count kanban, spotify, or other models as scrum.

ekster | 4 years ago | on: Do we need a Scrum Master forever?

You can be quite far from perfect and not need it. And they quite commonly can amplify the disfunction in a team with issues.

This is made worse at a lot of companies by hiring the absolutely cheapest person for the role.

ekster | 4 years ago | on: Do we need a Scrum Master forever?

The way I have seen the role these days is Agile coach, who teaches the principles of lean and agile as needed and helps teams diagnose problems they are too close to to solve, which is a valuable service. There’s usually one per few hundred people at a company, rather than one per five or so for the scrum master.

ekster | 4 years ago | on: Who Owns My Name?

Yes I live in the EU where we have SSI, I was more referring to all the magical and fuzzy thinking surrounding it on that page.

ekster | 4 years ago | on: Some career advice (2019)

I really think doing contracting and changing jobs every year for the first ten years of my tech career (receiving a raise and promotion every time) was the biggest single factor to my success. It ensured progression and allowed the dice to be rerolled, which is a great way to think about it.

ekster | 4 years ago | on: M1 MacBook Users Say Their Screens Are Cracking for “No Apparent Reason”

They should simply meditate on how Apple knows best and come to enjoy the feng shui of the crack, reflecting on its dorito crumb nature as a metaphor for the impermanence and fundamental cheesiness of us all.

In fact, if anything they should really have to pay more money for the opportunity to receive this enlightenment.

ekster | 4 years ago | on: One Tenth of a Second

I find it’s a bit dated now, at a high level interesting but he really zooms in on the details until it becomes a kind of nonsense. It was interesting to read and think about when it came out, but I don’t really think it is correct, predicts anything in any meaningful way, or even provides a coherent strategy to manipulate others if that’s the path you want to go down in the first place.
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