andreskytt

Underneath that high-level hand-waving there’s still a pretty simple concept. If I buy T—Bonds, I bloody well expect them to be cashed at maturity. Otherwise, who’d buy them? And I am under no obligation to buy goods and services from the US for the dollars received.

Oh, but dear sir, you forgot about the AI!

Yes, exactly. The gender-driven questions have been replaced by a general (and imho more important) question of how to be a good person. That question, however, is also much more abstract (I can measure my body fat, how do I measure “good”?) and, logically, people will struggle more to find answers. Particularly if they lack good humanitarian education which should, fundamentally, provide a deep insight into all of the accumulated thoughts on the human condition. Given men tend to gravitate towards STEM and the ideologization of humanities, the situation kinda makes sense.

Read Nancy Levesons work on system safety and you’ll see things are not necessarily so

A very interesting case where the design of the system stems directly from the design of the team designing and building it.

What Thiel is describing is a feedback loop: more people of x in a region means more people of x in a region simply because they will feel more comfortable among like people. These sorts of mechanisms certainly exist (Forrester on city planning), but with dynamic systems it’s always more complex than it would seem. Landlords definitely benefit from whatever feedback is making cities grow and are definitely interested in it continuing (thus probably investing in it), but its unlikely they are the ones behind the structure.

Let’s see what the classics say about this. Mr Conway says, that an organization creates a system in its image. Thus, if the system needs to be very distributed, so does the organization. So unless there is a singular monolithic thing built by a focused local team, a singular monolithic team makes no sense. And a team that’s not like that benefits little from their physical location, as a large chunk of their work is non-physical communication anyway. Even when the other team sits in the same building, who’s going to spend 10 minutes going to another floor when they can just message?

Office architecture is seen as ideologically driven. People like open offices so we do those. People like working from home (or office), so we do that. But office structure is as much part of the architecture of your enterprise as is database or microservice structure. It should aid progress toward a particular goal of the organization and not be subject to any hype in any direction.

Ah, the old shaman argument. The dude living in an essentially black-and-white wasteland up north with months of darkness. He strongly believes in the need to go consult the ancestors, moves in a hypnotic fashion, beats a monotone rythm on the drum for hours staring into a fire. And thus needs a minuscule plant-based push to have a profound experience. And still the old stories always have the element of being very careful and struggling to return from the other side. And then there’s a modern everyday flashing-lights-and-technicolor life kind of dude just looking to have some fun. The context is too different for “they did it thus it’s natural” argument to work.

You did not, in fact, stumble upon information. You stumbled on a person making statements. There’s a difference, especially when lives are at stake.

People consistently fail to properly assess the system architecture aspects of things. Iphone is not a standalone device but part of a complex system including hardware, software, organizational processes working on the app store etc. The device can be copied and improved upon with ease. The entire architecture of how these thousands of elements supporting the device fit together is much harder to copy. Consider Russia. They are, to an extent, capable of copying US technological devices from cruise missiles to aircraft. But they have, since 02.22, consistently failed to demonstrate their ability to make all the parts work together like the US has been able to. This despite US being their biggest strategic adversary and the considerable material and intellectual resources available.

Architecture is not about technology. It’s about how to structure a system to best aid a given organization to achieve its strategic goals.

And then there’s guys like mr. Rainger (https://www.raingerfx.com/shop/p/minibar) just casually inserting an actual pod of liquid into the signal chain to replace a resistor and drive an eq (via its transparency). Coke sounds different from single malt and a protein shake is different again…

Former head of IT at a tax authority of a small EU nation here. We get 95+ percent of online filing for private income tax (and have for 20 years), of course there is no fee, and you can have your refund on your account in a few hours. The whole process takes around 30 seconds. AMA.

FSD is not happening in the sense I mean it but it might in the sense you mean it. I mean “single-lane three-dimensionally-twisty-motorcycles-do-40mph roads covered in literal ice in complete darkness”. Because that’s what a large chunk of driving looks like around here. Even assuming no traffic and perfect understanding of the placement of the vehicle on the road (there’s no technology currently that can do that - no roadside markers, snow everywhere etc.) keeping it moving in the roughly the right direction without crashing would be a miracle of automation. But on a well-maintained California highway - sure, why not.

Firstly. The range does not work for me. I need the car for long drives in the cold winter or hot summer. In the latter case, I need to have a bike on the roof and there is unlikely to be charging where I go to. I do not wish to sit and wait for the car to charge after a day full of sports. Secondly, the boot space does not work for me. I need to lug sports stuff and guitars/amps on a regular basis. Unless I go for the truck (and I don’t want to), there’s not enough space. Thirdly, the Tesla is just an awful car from the inside: the seats follow the worst US traditions of softness without comfort, there’s the bloody screen (the lack of physical buttons has been moaned about elsewhere in this thread). Fourth, I do not like the trust model. Somebody being able to fully control my car remotely? Nope. Fifth, I do not like the ecological footprint of the batteries. Sixth, it’s bloody expensive. I can get at least two fully loaded lightly used under-warranty bmw 530i tourings for the price of a model X. Which are better cars for me as a user. I could also go on about dubious engineering choices both physical and software, the antics of mr. Musk etc. But paying double the price for what is a worse car along every dimension?

I had a really bad chronic headache. Had it for most of my life. Came with bouts of over-eating, sensory overload. In the end there were months with few days below 5 on the pain scale. Nobody could find anything, nothing was wrong, but I was in pain. On a whim, on one of the bad days, I decided to “drink until I was no longer thirsty”. The thirst was not strong, but I was desperate. 6 liters of heavily salted water later I was better. And I’ve remained better. I always have a bottle at hand - mostly tap water, some mineral water or sport hydration thrown in for salt retention. When I feel a headache coming on, the day will include more (and more conscious) drinking. Not sure why this is or whether that’s only me. But it is something quite safe and quite accessible that might help someone.

Nope, not at all. Your hardware wallet is useless without the bitcoin trust frameworks and the implicit agreement among many people that these particular bits on your hardware denote anything of value. Both of these are completely beyond your control and reliant on mechanisms not fully understood. It’s a system boundary question: yes, your wallet is under your control (how do you know what’s baked into the silicone or firmware, I do not know), but the whole system is not.

There is a huge amount of vested interest in persuading people bitcoin or ethereum require no trust in third parties. This is not true, as illustrated by this case: the person writing code that’s supposed to secure your money made incorrect assumptions about security and was thus robbed. If you own bitcoin, you necessarily need to trust this person and his colleagues are neither malicious nor stupid. Why that’s better than making the same assumptions about state institutions and banks is, to me, not clear.

This is not what happens. Trust is moved from institutions to code and math. General public has no chance to evaluate the trustworthiness of either while there is a mechanism to certify the first and not the latter.

Wait, what? The problem to ve solved is giving people money without PayPal being involved? You guys need SWIFT…

Ask yourself two questions. Why is it that the things are the way they are? What can I realistically change? Then determine the overlap in these. If there is none, walk away. It makes no sense to go for a rewrite without the underlying causes being addressed, you’ll be in the very same mess very rapidly. It makes no sense to replace the team without understanding why these folks have endured, who has hired them etc. Understand first and then make changes.

Yes, battery life is good on Garmins. But, amazingly, the UX is even better. The Apple watch does many things well while a Fenix does the sports thing very well. I don’t think I’ve ever owned a watch I’m that happy with from the ux perspective. The tiny things like metronome and custom alerts and the way it does timers but also the big things like pacepro or workouts. Garmin understands the needs of an athlete on a much deeper level, I think.

Back in the 90s I enjoyed Nethack and Perl sources, had a hard copy of both. Both looked somehow human, with witty remarks and outright quotations from holy texts in case of Nethack.

Exactly. Anything novel is, by definition, risky. Therefore any and all research has the potential to harm people. What the article says is, that there is an apparently all-knowing group of people, who will decide, where an article lies on a scale between abstract algebra and direct calls to genocide in terms of its impact on people. Oh, and the same group of people is also directly interested in publishing (so they’ll have to let _some_ papers through) as well as being part of the scientific community preparing the papers. So a massive conflict of interest. What could possibly go wrong?

Managing complexity is the job of an architect. Possibly the only job. Who is the architect of Google? The CEO. Thus, this is a really bad sign: shop-level complexity he is after commonly grows out of organizational complexity (the work of DeWeck at MIT) which is _his_ responsibility. Also, where is the complexity coming from? Fine, we do this sprint and make some things simpler. But if the graph is still trending up, we’ll be back where we started in no time. Finding and breaking mechanisms that breed complexity is the job of the CEO simply because nobody else has the authority. Of course, the CEO can delegate, but it’s still their job.

Plus, they miss a key point of architecture: sustainability. You might take the 30’ somewhere and draw a high-level model like the ones depicted in the article, but who has time to continuously validate that devs actually follow the blueprint and make decisions should a need to change emerge? Nobody. And that’s OK. Architecture is not a magical ding an sich to be pursued but a way to organize things to achieve specific strategic goals. And for a startup, that goal is to survive until the liftoff. This survival very seldom involves investing heavily into architecture. Some experienced devs are going to be fine, neither the business nor the organization nor the system is going to be complex enough to merit dedicated attention to architecture. And if they are, something is wrong elsewhere (typically leadership)

And this, kids, is why it was possible to do fun things to computers of other people when their os did not tell the modem to stop accepting incoming bytes when the line was dropped and then picked up again. It just accepted bytes from wherever they might come…

Some of this feels a bit artificial. Maybe it’s just me but I feel mostly like that at _all_ parties. And I dont’ belong to or mingle with elite in the sense she means. Also, it would seem there’s a simple lack of context: would she have a fundamentally different experience at a gathering of, say, biochemists?

I always recommend to read the classics (in addition to other excellent advice given here). Brooks, for sure, but also Vitruvius is _very_ relevant to designing large software systems. Then jump into the MIT System* ocean: system architecture (Crawley) gives you a framework for thinking about large and complex things, system safety (Leveson) a good framework for making things safe. Add some MIT product design and a ton of failing on your arse and you should be understanding you don’t still a thing in no time at all

Your hardware might either leak the private key via a non-internet connection (bluetooth, nfc, physical interface, some non-standard protocol). Also, it might use weak crypto to generate the private key (see ROCA vulnerability). Trusting non-trivial hardware is hard as it takes very little to have it behave maliciously under very specific circumstance.

Don’t be discouraged. You appear to be a very goal-oriented systematic person, maybe lacking some reflective skills but what do I know. But life is not systemic and goal-oriented. You kinda can’t force it. The differential equations underlying the complex tangle of feedback that we call society care little about what you want or need. So maybe just let things happen and try to enjoy whatever is happening? I’m not saying letting yourself go or giving up but rather accepting the world does not follow a checklist and neither does it do what you want. Besides, seeing someone, by your description, perfect, with a laser-like focus on something would be quite terrifying. I’m not perfect, I don’t have that sort of focus and I would not even know how to start with trying to keep up with you.