jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months
I see the value in a lot of these, but I also have to say one common thread across almost all tooling is bad interfaces clearly designed by backend/generalist engineers doing their own ad-hoc form of design. Having worked with an org that transitioned from bitbucket -> gitlab I also found the development/issues at Amazon to have some big headscratchers on missing features like crux diffs following some unintuitive ruleset, and countless smaller inconveniences.
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories
eh, you can buy a great hardtails for 800-1.2k, even less if buying second hand. the main thing to point out is that at $700 including all the electronic add ons the components will be worse and trail rideability/durability will suffer significantly compared to even a low end mtb at the same price range. I've let friends use my nice bike while I ride my crap "general purpose" bike and it works on easier trails... (probably) safe enough on those trails, but still wouldn't recommend it.
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: Internet addiction and the habit of book reading
adding on some recs that aren't necessarily 'good for the mind' but great from a gaming as art perspective and not designed for addiction -
co op: terraria, Deep Rock Galactic, and Magicka
various interesting games: Subnautica, Transistor, noita, hyperlight drifter, control
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: You click a link to a news site, to read an article that seems interesting
The New Yorker has always had high quality investigative journalism (albeit with varying levels of left leaning bias depending on the writer) in my opinion, and seems to be quite doing quite well.
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89
Why do you associate learning and diving deeply into topics exclusively with research? A phd program will only require you to dive deeply into your topic of research. You can get very far in many fields by reading through relevant texts and sci-hub papers.
In addition, even though their is a dearth of theoretical experience in industry, at FAANGs and similar you will find opportunities to learn a lot in areas such as systems design, networking, and machine learning from senior/principal engineers who are as savvy as professors, albeit with a practical lean.
Even the hands on aspect of a phd can be done on your own time with a little know how and income, see applied science[0] on youtube. Full time engineer who often tinkers and replicates scientific publications in his garage in his free time.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/AppliedScience/videos
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations
As someone who listens to numerous genres but is also selective with what I listen to, I am confident that spotify simply doesn't cater to my demographic. They are really about scaling to the masses, as is evident by their move into podcasts and constants frontpage ads on new releases, as well as aggressive song caching. From a business perspective, I believe its simply not worth the compute/development effort from their side to have a recommendation engine on par with say Pandora.
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: Tech compensation in 2021
Most trading firms such as susquehanna, citadel, and two sigma have London branches.
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: Tech compensation in 2021
At the risk of being trite, the response to FAANG employees being underpaid is also more or less 'you're underpaid, brah, go get another job!'. The bar for hiring and compensation is much higher, but management still wants to minimizing costs. This means systematically limiting internal salary growth, and hiring external rockstars at higher salaries to replace the internal rockstars that leave. Overall, it seems to be more effective to spend a couple months preparing/interviewing for the role you want than navigating the internal bureaucracy for an indefinite amount of time on the order of years.
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: Pandora papers: biggest leak of offshore data exposes financial secrets of rich
I think it's more simple human nature. When you have billions, it's so easy to delegate work that tax avoidance becomes as simple as flipping a switch that says 'pay less taxes'. And if your highly distanced from the effects of your actions, I doubt many people would not flip the switch.
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: I switched from macOS to Linux after 15 years of Apple
work on linux, daily driver is windows. how exactly to these commercial parasites 'spoil the original experience'? Sure theres preinstalled bloatware and telemetry, but you still have root access and I have had no problem tinkering to have my setup to do what I want how I want, probably much less than what I would have to do to reach parity on a linux system.
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
Okay, so if we're using energy consumption per unit 'utility' as a metric, how much energy should bitcoin consume to be in line with its utility?
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: TSMC hikes chip prices up to 20% amid supply shortage
Let's not commit the fallacy of comparing unrelated big numbers. How does the energy and time per usd transferred compare between btc and the traditional banking system?
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”
Even assuming this is true, this is just the 'if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about' argument, which has been shown to have numerous flaws and counterarguments.
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: How I Found a Vulnerability to Hack iCloud Accounts and How Apple Reacted to It
as a windows user as my daily non-development driver unless that percentage hits 98%+ AND can maintain that I don't think many people are going to convert
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: We’re all paying for someone else’s 4-hour work week, not ours
Thanks for sharing, props to you for getting out of your situation. I fully respect doing what has to be done to get by, but I think its still worth pointing out that achieving what you had done would have been considerably more difficult if you had stuck to the straight and narrow like society would have wanted - to the larger point that there are systemic issues that in fact do inhibit the agency of people. "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread-the rich as well as the poor."
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: We’re all paying for someone else’s 4-hour work week, not ours
Do you know down to the penny, how much credit you have remaining on your credit cards? Have you ever lived in a state of fear, wondering which thing you've been putting off – the toothache, the weird noises coming from your car, the surprise bill, will bring you over the brink into homelessness? Do you think anyone in this position can simply get out by choice? How many people do you think live in conditions like this?
jeffe
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4 years ago
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on: Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning
jeffe
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5 years ago
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on: How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)
the recent emergence of many quality games from china might start reversing that trend thouugh...
jeffe
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5 years ago
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on: How to Lose Money
eh, the 'truly rounded education' can generally be attained through the internet, and I've found those who aren't interested in them in the first place tend not to gain much from the classes anyways. Friendships are the main unique upside, but unless you go to an elite college the students who are genuinely driven in their field are hard to find. That's not to say your friends need to be "leaders" and whatnot, but it definitely differs from the narrative colleges put around their students and the price tag being worth it.
jeffe
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5 years ago
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on: Computer Science Curriculum in 1000 YouTube Videos
To be fair, python has many robust features beyond gc. For example, dicts, which are bread and butter for python abstract away 1000s of lines of C, which leads to very confused students when they first see errors like 'unhashable type: list'. Encountering leaky abstractions always made me uncomfortable when I took my first classes, but for a very first class its still probably better than dealing with memory allocation in C depending on what one expects from an intro class.
