satyrnein

In theory, insurance is the polar opposite of gambling. It's supposed to be reducing your risk, while gambling increases it. Like "do you want to gamble on that TV lasting, or do you want to buy the extended warranty?" But in practice, the pricing is so terrible that it's not worth it.

Not to be glib, but I assume you're not quitting your Western job and moving there. So isn't this romanticizing it?

This has been the prevailing advice all along, and yet we have security vulnerabilities everywhere that LLMs are good at spotting and exploiting. I think we need more options on the menu.

This is a curious choice of fields for you, if the last technology you think was a net positive was literacy!

For folks who are not familiar, this is "The Library of Babel" by Borges. There is no creating, just selecting among characters sequences we already knew were possible.

If other people didn't have children who grew up to be doctors, nurses, etc, there would be nobody to pay.

You need schools, pediatricians, daycare, other kids, etc. Cities (and suburbs) have those, not sure about every rural area. Certainly not the village in the article.

Bush was 8 years while Biden was only 4. Biden was much higher on a per year basis than anyone else since 2000, but obviously people believe what they want to believe.

I think the graph you linked obscures the issue a bit by showing total immigrant population by year, which would change much more slowly than arrivals by year.

I found a graph of arrivals by year here: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-u-s-net-immigration...

It certainly seems to be a big increase under Biden, compared to the last 25 years. Anyway, I personally favor immigration, I just don't want to use statistics to lie to myself either!

I thought that was basically accepted truth? For example, the New York Times described it as:

Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/us-immigration-s...

I was wondering about this, but digital versions are typical DRM-encumbered and actually a license (not a true purchase) whose terms probably don't allow this. The court's decision was that training is fair use, but in practice, it seems many avenues are blocked.

It reminds of the theoretically public beaches that are blocked off by privately owned land.

I'm on the distributor side, I used to fantasize about using XSLT to produce all the different XML formats (beyond DDEX, like Apple, etc) from one house format, but that was probably a bad idea!

It's almost more of a warning to founders and VCs, that an AI developer that replaces a $100k/year developer might only get them $10k/year in revenue.

But that means that AI just generated a $90k consumer surplus, which on a societal level, is huge!

This is how non-engineers have always lived! The code is a black box, but Product Managers develop a sense of whether the developer really understood what they meant, the QA team verifies the outputs, etc.

From the docs:

Users exclusively belong to Organizations; every User belongs to exactly one Organization.

But I also see a screenshot where, after login, the User has to choose an organization or to create a new one. It seems to me that you support Users and Organizations in a many-to-many relationship, is that correct?

At my work, we landed on the terminology of Users, Memberships, and Accounts to describe this (a User can have Memberships to multiple Accounts, an Account can have multiple Members, etc). As a result, you don't "delete a user", you "revoke a membership".

It's the latter, but is there any effective difference, really? Say that lowering their their staff level from X to Y would result in a 15 minute wait for a smaller, undeterred group of callers. Putting an artificial floor for wait time of 15 minutes would mean that (X-Y) agents are sitting idle while callers are artificially waiting. I assume HP would not continue to employee them, since cost reduction was the point, after all. So it seems like the only difference is order of operations.

Sounds interesting, I'll have to look into that. I'll say that the shared TV was better in one respect: it was right-side-up for more than just one person!

In this specific case, I bought it during a long overseas trip and our physical games were back at home!

That said, while I love physical games, some digital aspects seemed potentially appealing: automatic scoring, rules enforcement to prevent mistakes, not taking up space, ability to try new ones out easily, etc.

This is very cool! Somewhat similar, I recently bought a Nintendo Switch version of Ticket to Ride, which supports using a "companion app" on other devices to show each player their private hand.

However, one unfortunate bit is that the board (in my case, the TV connected to the Switch) is "read-only" and you don't interact with it, unlike real life. You pick which card to play on your phone, and then place it onto the board also on your phone. So basically, all the action is on your phone, and the central board is kind of an afterthought. It doesn't feel as much like interacting with a shared space as I was hoping.

I'm not really sure how to solve that. I thought of some weird stuff (like, maybe after you pick your card, your phone is just a touchpad controlling the card as it now moves around on the big screen) but nothing seemed practical.

I would recommend updating your resume (or at least thinking about what you would put in it) and considering how attractive it is to other employers. The situation you want to avoid is being comfortable and respected in your current role for reasons that are not transferable (like knowing how to maintain some legacy stack), and then finding out you have poor options when your employer has layoffs.

Well, you kind of assumed it away in your second sentence, but alignment is more important than individual productivity. And unfortunately, meetings, interruptions, and other communication are the best tools most teams have for that.

I did a quick search, and there are generators that I guess you bring up on your phone, like so:

https://code-names.netlify.app

Sorry, I'm not following, how is getting paid less the same as getting a higher percentage?

Artists have always been in competition with each other for the same consumer attention/dollars. Indie artists often undercut prices of popular artists on CDs or downloads to try to incentivize discovery. In the streaming era, the marginal cost to the consumer is zero (which is great for discovery!), but Discovery Mode is bringing back pricing as a means of competition on the supplier side, for better or worse.

So you want new artists to be promoted and you're willing for those artists to be paid less to make it happen? Spotify Discovery Mode seems to fit the bill. Artists agree to take a lower rate, and Spotify is incentivized to include their music more often in their algorithmic playlists and radio, so they can be discovered. Of course, this was not exactly uncontroversial!

I agree that people have creative impulses, and not everyone wants to be a couch potato. However, I imagine a lot of people would rather noodle around on a guitar (or try to be a YouTuber, or mess with RPGmaker, or write a blog, etc) than haul trash all day. If we subsidize that, we might end up flooded with physical trash and digital trash.

Great example of how taking people's money leads to new expectations!

Indeed the culture you describe does not sound healthy! In theory, Engineering does not report to Product, it is a partner with an important perspective, and can negotiate prioritizing certain projects without subterfuge.

In low trust environments, all engineering-led projects that Product/"the business" don't understand are assumed to be low value. Sometimes this is unfair, but sometimes it is warranted. Poor engineering leadership will green light all sorts of counterproductive "silver bullet" projects.

You don't think the local water co-op would raise water rates 10% to give themselves 10% raises? Unless literally every user is an owner, there will always be the incentive to extract as much from the general public as possible to distribute to the owners. Same with unions, they exist to benefit their members, not the general public.

In practice, trying to satisfy everyone's target for perfection took forever and immediately after launch the vision of perfection was revealed to be incorrect anyway; this is the classic "waterfall" failure mode. It also (incorrectly) perceived the cost of delay to be zero.

If you are optimizing for something like "actual business value delivered over time" in most typical business contexts (maybe not SpaceX), you are better off putting a ceiling on everyone's idea of perfection, whether that's stakeholders, designers, devs, etc and focusing on launching quickly. From there, you can choose whether to continue to iterate, or move to something else, based on real world feedback.

It's not really being against perfectionism; there are just many projects and diminishing returns.