megaframe

After fighting for years to work from home full time (and loving it now). I see one big problem I have no fix for, training new grad / junior engineers.

Feel free to correct me if you have tools to do it, but I found training someone new like that over Video calls way too hard. It slows them down it slows me down, and their time to become productive goes up 4x. While I don't want to return to commuting I'm willing to compromise 1-3 days a week (at my discretion) to make training possible.

There's also the same price but more complex issue.

Hybrid engines and washing machines are far more efficient but significantly more complex. Prices are roughly the same +inflation but the added complexity reduces lifetime and repairability.

I think this is similar to sitting in a coffee shop doing work with a coworker. The game is the work you're primarily focused on. Your coworker is there but only occasionally engaging between thoughts. The Video is the background activity of the coffee shop, it's there but you're not that focused on it unless something unusual occurs.

I don't think it's that they "prefer their current provider" it's that they prefer not to think about it or go through the hassle of changing. Like if someone got an oil change and it works for them every time and you sent them a flyer telling them there's a better place with better oil that's slightly cheaper. The product they buy serves their need and they don't want the work of having to try a new place out.

I'm not really surprised by this. In my old building, out of 6 units I was the only to get fiber and after a few years someone new moved in they were up to two people. I know for a fact 2 other units were work from home business sales folk who did regular video calls (even before covid) and they continued with comcast despite slower up/down at a higher price. In my new building again the same thing. This time 10 units, only myself and one other with fiber despite the same issues. Even with multiple household having a very compelling reason to switch (work from home and home schooling).

I asked an older neighbor in my old building why they hadn't switched and their response was that comcast was good enough for them, I explained it was also cheaper, they said they'd "look into it" and 3 years later still on comcast.

I wish they'd just pushed for TSMC to open a fab in Europe, with incentives and protections.

Micron has one in Italy that is basically shut down. I was once told that to avoid payouts, required by Italian Law, for letting employees go the factory had been put on a sort of "pause" everyone sent home but not let go. If things like this still go on I see no hope for a European electronics/Semi manufacturing industry to ever take hold.

I've been doing the no car thing for 4 years now after my last car was totaled in the middle of the night while parked. The thing that worked for me was to compute out the total cost I was spending per month on the car and set that as the cap on my car rentals and zipcar. I never even come close to that limit, and knowing that limit lets me feel free to spend.

When I did the math the insurance was close to 50% of my cost. Rest was depreciation, then gas, and maintenance.

I agree, and argued as much. Going so far as ask what their policy would be if I rent a cheep room, return every few months, and pay local taxes.

My argument being that If I remain local but because of a long commute and choose to be full time remote, how would they really know the difference.

Yeah I get that, the further east you go the worse it is, and my experience working with Indian coworkers sounds like a nightmare for them.

I'm from Portugal so I was thinking of being there, 8am here is 4pm there, and 5pm here is 1am there. I kind of like the idea of having my morning to myself, and working in the evening. With lock down that's been my work schedule now. I do exercise, chores, and cooking in the morning, and actual work in the evening (the occasional meeting tends to occurs as I bake/boil/chop something).

Similar observation, on my tiny stretch of street I've seen 7 moving trucks since SIP started, far more than I've ever seen. I get it, If you just moved or been here 1-2yr I'd leave too, the costs would make no sense.

I'm right on the fence. I've been at my current place ~6 years, prices have just started to get to about what I'm paying (rent controlled). I'm hoping it drops some more so I can negotiate a reduction.

...with permanent WFH I too want to leave, head to Europe (I'm a citizen). With travel restrictions in place, and my employer saying they'd adjust my pay to reflect local cost of living I'm not sure what would be best.

You estimate.

Look at past 1yr then 5yr. get average per year. Then look at forward growth potential, maybe read the last two quarter prospectus... and kind of guess/ballpark. You could be wrong so come up with a lowest case scenario even if it's negative and a top and middle, based on best judgment.

...this all goes out the door if they are so new as to not have 5yr of stock performance or if their revenue is negative. In this case, if it was me, I wouldn't even count stock in the compensation unless I plan to sell right at each vesting.

Yes, I manage a set of tools and libraries written in perl that are pretty large and service the whole company. That said we're re-writing them all to Python so more people can contribute... Saddens me a little I like Perl, but I'll get over it.

One big one is farming, think harvesting machinery. There's a number of startups trying to get that going. I think most are not at the scale to be successful the way the market themselves, but their collective learning will eventually lead to some consolidation.

Why AI for that, it's vision AI to know when fruit is ripe or vegetables are ready for harvest. Then hand eye coordination to not bruise the fruit/vegetables and adjust force/sensitivity as the equipment wears down.

Scaling that will put likely many workers out and transform the business of harvesting. What I think is most plausible is one large manufacturer will consolidate designs and rent the equipment to do the harvesting much like the contract labor used now, but at much lower prices than humans could do.

> ...salaries will be adjusted to reflect the local cost of living.

So if the employee where to move to say Hong Kong where cost of living is higher will they also in turn increase wages? I think not.

If they keep a local address in some random apartment they never stay at but live elsewhere how would one check on that?

If you're willing to pay California taxes but live elsewhere I find it hard to see how they'd plan to enforce this. You could always argue you were temporarily traveling hence the local address you intended to return to and pay taxes at. Friends of mine do this, returning to the US every 6 months or so.

While still an issue, many of the really bad offenders leaked chemicals for instance doesn't happen much anymore. Mostly because fab materials are expensive to get and purify. Simply dumping them is wasteful, so anything that can be salvaged and used on the next batch is big savings.

... https://blogs.intel.com/csr/files/2019/11/Circularity-at-Int...

Re-industrialization of America*

*With extreme automation and minimal employees. Modern Fabs have very few assembly line employee's. They use positive pressure rooms, overhead rail car system, robotic arms, and machines drop down from the fab floor to a maintenance floor when a human is actually needed.

Qualcomm/Broadcomm/Nvidia/AMD use TSMC

AMD does make chips in the US via their spun off Global Foundries, and so does Intel. AMD switched some production to TSMC because they had much better defect rates at 7nm. You can buy US made AMD today if you want it just won't be the latest GPU's.

I personally love this idea and I hope it spreads to other bay area companies, but I also worry we'll see a repeat of IBM https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-tho...

I don't get how they plan to compete, do they have chip designers? or deals with SOC manufacturers because AWS/Google/Microsoft are fast because of custom chips that link NVMe directly to the NIC and skip the CPU and some of the network stack

Sometime back Uber added this $0 delivery for a set of rotating restaurants. In my mind what I figured they were doing was clumping orders together to drive down costs... in practice I don't know what they're doing, but I like that idea.

Maybe when this price war ends normal delivery will be something much higher and they offer some kind of flash or pre-order pricing deals on clumped orders. Like $5 delivery for pre-ordering a pizza for that evening from this one restaurant so only one driver needs to go out there. Uber-Pool for your food if you will. Or you place your order at a higher price and if some more people hop onto the order from the same restaurant they cut your delivery price a bit.

I think it depends on your data / query patterns. Self Inner/Left/Right joins are one of my most common queries. I often need to chain joins in various ways to get the desired output.

I routinely write in no less than 4 languages for work... comfortably in all of them. Each certainly have their own nuances but the skills translate and made learning the others easier. At worst I (have had to and do) sometimes look up syntax or end up using a design that's less than optimal for that languadge, but that still works.

Among many other issues is connectivity, in the bay area on 280 or 101 there are dead zones and when there's heavy traffic all those cars/people/phones connected to the towers and swapping as they move along overload the connection at each transition point. It wouldn't be possible today to reliably maintain a connection for such a human critical situation. Even with 5G a small interruption would likely be too risky for consumer projects.

Good review.

A related good piece of advice I got early in my career was to do the tasks no one else wants to do. Less risky than "do the hard things". You quickly become invaluable and those tasks become less painful the more you do them.

This is so funny I just had a similar bug yesterday and named it our y2k20 bug, just a path name change that someone forgot to map correctly

>what happens if iot LTE connections get cheap enough that the choice is removed altogether.

Tinfoil or an ESD bag over the transmitter or MB should do the trick. It'll be the new version of putting a sticker over the camera on your laptop.

Same but I've also been in places where they do look over your shoulder and I ended up fighting the tide. Everyone around me was in a constant panic mode, so I slowed my work output for 2 weeks (most I could get away with without ending up in a room talking about my work performance) where I studied and optimized the tasks consuming most of my time. Then automated them (this involved working what felt like two jobs at once pushing well over 80h a week)....

When I finished I had so much free time I could finally start doing the interesting projects and my work output was consistently 2x my co-workers. I considered explaining this to management but they had just admonished a co-worker for not doing the thing they asked and trying to improve process. So I kept it to myself.

Obviously this was a bit of a toxic work environment (early in my career) and I was luckily switched out of this group.

My point is that you can fight bad management to make a better working environment for yourself but it takes a lot of effort and you need to be strategic in what you tell them as it can backfire.

People can be friendly to your face and still vote for and support laws and political leaders who want you out of their area or worse.

Look at how they fought gay marriage or how they treat Mexican-American's. There are pockets of safety in that state (Houston/Austin) but as a whole it's not that great.

I lived a number of years in Idaho which has the same problem. I'm "OK" in Boise (even there things can happen) but I'm genuinely concerned for my safety when I have to drive anywhere else in that state.

Ran an ML model years ago had a number of great months then out of no where no trade I or the ML would make, would work. Looked like someone was front running my orders and messing with my trades. Weird delays, trades would take to long to go through all, and all sorts of odd events on Level 2. Ended up shutting it down took a good 2 months before my manual trades started going through at a normal rate again.

This is why the whole $0 trading fee and robinhood concern me. I'm paying for the trades and someone is still messing with me.

Oddly enough I was asked once to determine if there were any differences between Perl Regex and Python's implementation in an effort to convert a tool I wrote into Python (so other developers could help)

I found only one very weird edge case worth noting, in Perl the regex "s/ a* / x /g" (spaces added to prevent formatting) will turn the string "bac" into "xbxxcx" because the "a" technically means zero or more so it matches the spaces between the characters, not so in python it creates the string "xbxcx" because it matched the a in between one time and didn't count the empty spaces. Slightly less accurate results since * does mean zero or more so the space between counts as zero characters.