strange_things's comments

strange_things | 4 years ago | on: Ten Commandments of Salary Negotiation

Me too, and also everyone else. A healthy discussion is good and especially if you change jobs you should try to make sure you know where you want to end up money wise. Also, if you feel undercompensated for the work you do you should tell your boss and demand an increase. But the fact that we have now a whole industry consulting on how to optimize for compensation is cringe to me: if it is normal to other people, so be it, but I don't like it. I think the whole "optimization process" is a combination or people skills & politics (win hearts & minds as the article author said). Also what people seem to forget is that this whole negotiation phase is just at the start. If you have a very good job, your compensation will grow over the years with a very high rate, otherwise you are at the mercy of team politics and people relations. I think the FAANGS know this and that's why they pay relatively low(as a % of TC) base salaries and even lower cash bonuses and pay with "promises" i.e equity. So far the party (bull market) has been going on and on so that's how people get the TC growth and that's why people negotiate so hard at the start: I get it. It's just not for me. I also feel cringe about it at the personal level: I often talk to talk to people at those or similar companies and some (not all) are ultra focused on their TC, but then we chat about technical stuff and they don't even know what zero-mq is (not my litmus test for developer ability but it's illustrative: they spend their time on levels fyi more than wanting to improve their job). Long story short, if people are happy to be paid in equity that you only get 1/4 of by definition then it leaves less competition for me in my field, so I should actually be grateful and not cringe. Thanks for making me realise this.

edit: I never even touched on factors like productivity and its main explanation factors: intelligence and hard work. If I have more intelligence, and I work ultra hard, I should be paid more than you. That's why compensation is mega hetoroscedastic: that is why we have bands and why the bands are so wide and there are outliers. What made me also cringe is the people who are clearly not the "cream of cream" negotiate and get to such places: if the "process" did not exist and they were just interviewed technically for 5-6 rounds they would have flopped and the company would save itself some troubles. My 2 cents.

strange_things | 4 years ago | on: Ten Commandments of Salary Negotiation

I have a feeling everyone at the FAANGs only cares about money and their TCs and levels and bands and... Just reading about it makes me cringe. We all want a lot of cash, me to, but being obsessed about it to this level makes me think people are forgetting to do their job... Also if you are not in a role where you are directly generating money, your compensation will always be based on politics and people relations. I dont know: just reading about it makes me sad and empty on the inside. If people were less focused on their TC and more on their work, we would live in a better world.

strange_things | 5 years ago | on: “It's Not Cancel Culture – It's a Platform Failure.”

It’s not Platform Failure, it’s culture failure.

I never have and never will use twitter as it it too toxic for any well adjusted human to use. This applies to all social media: facebook, instagram, twitter, tik tok, ... If people just stop using these abhorrent apps all of these issues will be diminished as never in the history of humanity has each single human had so much access to ... other humans which are not well composed together and are ready to jump and argue on anything for a bit of dopamine (same as me actually right now, arguing against twitter. I’m part of the problem)

strange_things | 5 years ago | on: The Expansion of the Universe

Good to know, The part about spacetime created within galaxies is clear bs on my end so I take it back.

For The rest I am not advanced enough to say !

strange_things | 5 years ago | on: The Expansion of the Universe

The following seems to be missed by many anons:

* spacetime itself literally “creates itself out of nothingness”. We say it “stretches”, but don't picture a string of cheese “thinning out” but rather something of constant density being continuously expanded.

* local groups (of galaxies) are gravitationally bound i.e they won’t scatter around and they attract each other with gravity so they will stay together even though more spacetime is created inside of them.

* in the empty “space” between local groups something (dark matter? Dark energy? ) causes this steady continuous creation of new spacetime

* this creation of spacetime is itself accelerating, but this is not speed, so distant local groups are not “moving away from us” but are being “displaced away from us”. Hence the displacement rate is allowed to be faster than the speed of light (since it’s not a speed)

* every single object in the universe moves at exactly and precisely the speed of light c through spacetime. Objects at rest (a completely stationary astronaut stranded in the empty space between local groups) is also moving at the speed of light in spacetime: he is moving only through time.

* A photon is moving only through space and has no time

Sources: The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene, ScienceClic YouTube, and my memory of these

strange_things | 5 years ago | on: Initial M1 support merged into Linux SoC tree

This is very anecdotal but every single laptop I have bought in the last 10 years (4) worked perfectly out-of-the box with either Linux Mint or Ubuntu (which are the same on the inside). I only vaguely remember once I had to change some conf file for my trackpad to work after a dist update but that was it.

Not sure why everyone in this thread is so hesitant about Linux on a laptop? It literally just works (tm) for me and I haven’t used windows for 10 years and will never have a personal Mac.

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