gibrown

> The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.

The person leading it stepped down. Matt then stopped the initiative presumably because it didn't seem worth picking someone new.

Ya, I was expecting to see something not very impressive at that link, but was pleasantly surprised. My chair is about $7k and while this one doesn't look like it would work for me, it is definitely much better than the cheap hospital chairs.

No need to wonder: https://automattic.com/board/

This isn't true at all. The vacation policy is "Our time off policy is short: take the time that you need" and "There is no minimum or maximum, but we encourage you to take at least 25 days of time off per year".

Appreciate that you wrote this up. As someone just wrapping up a sabbatical where I have ignored a lot of what is going on this looks helpful. Thanks!

A bot scraping content will tend to go deep into the archives and hit all content systematically. Caching isn't as effective if you hit everything whereas real users will tend to hit the same content over and over again.

It can add nontrivial load.

Ya seems like it’s this and that’s an awesome name!

Sounds like there are 34 counts of falsifying business records so it is probably more than just that one payoff.

Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Strogatz

Chaos theory and deterministic systems are a fascinating vantage point for thinking about the dynamics of large computer systems. Thinking of them as stochastic systems is sometimes useful, but most of the systems are actually just operating in unstable periodic processes which are much closer to being a chaotic system rather than a stochastic system. This influences how I think about testing and debugging large distributed systems.

I will say, I'm not sure I could have learned it well without a class and a good professor. The author has a number of books though and is a professor at Cornell.

And there is a list right?

https://github.com/search?q=license%3Acc0-1.0&type=Repositor...

All repos with a particular license.

I think you are seriously overestimating the utility of these right now. It is not just about cost, they are more limited than wheelchairs in many ways.

This is basically https://www.beeminder.com/

(Started by friends)

In my experience (11 years fully remote/distributed growing from 90 to 2000 employees) my first impression is it sounds like you’re doing too much synchronous. Async is so efficient.

My team’s current systems: - Most deep discussions happen on blog posts including project status. We use (and built) https://wordpress.com/p2/. We don’t use email. - Start of week everyone prompted to post what they did last week and what they plan to do this week. Also have a kinda fun ice breaker question that is easy (e.g avoid asking about favorites) and sometimes generates discussion. Last week was “Pick an olympic sport to represent your life.” - Daily Slack prompt to give folks a place to report on yesterday/today. The most important thing is how people feel though. “Pick a red/yellow/green emoji for your status” and “What feels risky or a blocker?”. Create space for feelings. - weekly team meeting is then about discussions and never about status. How do we solve X? How do we feel about Y? - debugging and such does occur in Slack but longer discussions are on blog posts/comments and so can be long. - I do 1-1s weekly for new folks and bi-weekly for longer term folks. Encourage sync 1-1s between the team also.

A lot of the prompts can be automated. I dont consider them mandatory, if you get them right then folks will be happy to do them because they feel the utility of them.

https://ma.tt/2020/04/five-levels-of-autonomy/ Is a good read too.

Iterating is very important though (which you are doing yay!), I’ve tried lots of different cadences/systems but the above is the core of what my team has used for 3-4 years now and I’m pretty happy with it. I still try to make sure we reconsider if we want to experiment with something new every few months. Partly why I wrote this long comment is I’m thinking if there is anything to tweak.

Agree that this is an interesting line of discussion. I think you missed a few options of why USD are more democratic. You can also: - run for office - organize people politically

The open source point is important, but any individual crypto seems very hard to change once it is in place. Feels like it assumes you can predict how it will be used and what the consequences will be. The law isn’t easy to change but there is a clearly defined abs democratic process for doing so (assuming you are in a democracy).

> they are explicitly adding bias here.

All search engines are explicitly biased. That is the point, they generate a ranking of results. Heck even how you tokenize text is an explicit bias of what you match against.

It seems more naive to think search algorithms are ever "unbiased". The whole point is to find something by ranking them and applying a bias.

I kinda doubt the US govt cares about DDG.

Also, the US/UK gov is not an entirely unreasonable starting point for a list. There are also lots of academic researchers, media, etc. Better to apply some standards than none at all. I'm sure whatever list they have is not perfect, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have one.

The people writing the search algorithms decide, just like they decide what a "good" algorithm is.

Exactly. Every search algorithm requires making judgements about how and what to rank. Explicitly marking sites as "disinformation"/"spam"/"seo" is exactly a part of building a good global web search.

> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society?

Martin Luther King.

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Everything you just said also applies to amputating a limb. Or cutting out a cyst. Those seem like much closer analogies than a person in a coma.

Tumblr/Automattic (Tumblr, WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce) | Search Engineer | Full Time | REMOTE (Planet Earth) We're a distributed company with employees in 80+ countries. Tumblr launched in 2007 with the belief that people need a place to say what they want, be who they want, and connect over what they love. We continue to build out Tumblr as a platform for free expression, individuality, and human connection.

Help us improve our search and recommendations systems to make the web a better place.

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> Not sure exactly what you mean with social conservatism

"This is also why social conservatives don't like it when scientific progress makes sex safer or better. Sex outside of their ideal scenario (in marriage, at the husband's wish, for reproduction) should be punished, and steps to mitigate that punishment (STD prevention, pregnancy prevention) should be discouraged or lambasted as immoral."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/16/conser...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/why-the-pol...

Tumblr/Automattic (Tumblr, WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce) | Search Engineer | Full Time | REMOTE (Planet Earth) We're a distributed company with employees in 80+ countries. Tumblr launched in 2007 with the belief that people need a place to say what they want, be who they want, and connect over what they love. We continue to build out Tumblr as a platform for free expression, individuality, and human connection.

Help us improve our search and recommendations systems to make the web a better place.

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It is already happening. Just searching a bit…

Katrina displaced 1-1.5m immediately and about 200k never returned.

The upper estimates for 2050 is 1.2 billion displaced world wide.

Entirely speculation, but one reason I can imagine is that if everyone is sick at the same time then even basic nursing is not possible, and often just getting fluids into someone makes a giant difference. Has there been a place/time during the pandemic where millions got infected at once in a high density, poorer country?

omg omg omg

I played this so much on my pentium 100mhz as a teen. I think I broke multiple joysticks dodging xwings. My biggest concern is that it won’t live up to the memories I still have. I think I need to buy a joystick. I have much more disposable income and a lot less time… my six year old isn’t too young to join the Empire right?

Tumblr/Automattic (Tumblr, WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce) | Search Engineer | Full Time | REMOTE (Planet Earth)

We're a distributed company with employees in 80+ countries. Tumblr launched in 2007 with the belief that people need a place to say what they want, be who they want, and connect over what they love. We continue to build out Tumblr as a platform for free expression, individuality, and human connection.

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