shawnb576

I moved from US to Australia a couple years back, some notes on tipping.

- Not only is there no tipping here, things cost what they say they cost. Taxes are always added in. Worst case you pay 2% for a credit card fee. - There is basically no tipping. I see jars occasionally but it's not a thing. - Service is often not as good but fine. If you want a second drink, go up the bar, mate. - However you NEVER self-bus your table here. I've seen almost no restaurants with bussing stations, which were very common in Seattle.

The wages are higher, healthcare is covered, taxes are higher. When I went back to US earlier this year the tipping culture shocked me - POS 22 / 25 / 28% -- wth?

Agree there is no way to change this as an individual consumer. But I sure don't miss it.

Because LLMs don't understand anything. That's the tech. They can only predict what they have been trained with and fail daily at the most basic tasks. Granted they can do amazing things, no question there. But they are not "smart".

For example, it seems that even at Fable scale, simple concepts like the passage of time or (gasp) timezones elude them. I live in UTC+10 and with any RFC8339 data LLMs are constantly confused - is it Sunday the 10th or Sunday the 9th, etc. I have tried many solutions for this and every time it finds a way to get it wrong.

No definitely not true. It was in Source Depot if not SLM.

Honestly sort of all of them.

The Seal looks almost exactly like a Model 3 with better range Atto/Sealion are the SUV shapes that barely exist as EVs in US (Equinox maybe)

100% this

I noted below that I have recently moved from US to Australia

The Chinese cars are taking over here: it’s a product people want at a price they like

GM wants to monetize yesterday’s market, and are just going to fall farther behind.

When these cars eventually come in, EV mandate or not, the US car companies will get crushed

I have recently moved from US to Australia and it is 100% clear to me the US automakers will get absolutely crushed by the Chinese companies if/when they are able to access US market.

Especially EVs and PHEVs. This place is awash with them, they are cars people want at the right price.

This is the best comment I have ever seen on HN. Nailed it

This has been a concern for me too. But the agent is just a statsd receiver with some extra magic, so this seems like a thing that could be solved with the collector sending traffic to an agent rather than the HTTP APIs?

I looked at the OTel DD stuff and did not see any support for this, fwiw, maybe it doesn't work b/c the agent expects more context from the pod (e.g. app and label?)

Temporal is designed for industrial strength flows and scale. For example an HTTP based push mechanism can overload workers hence the queue.

And its jusr code so not sure about the DSL reference (of course thats common with other systems)?

What use cases is this designed for? Easier to learn and build usually has tradeoffs

This seems very similar to Secret [1]? IIRC there were some competitive apps at the time, YikYak maybe?

Secret sounded scandalous, and maybe that was the goal, but it actually did a really great job of anonymous Q&A, and was full of posts from people saying "I have this private/odd/embarrassing situation what should I do", and more often then not the thread contained some really insightful and thoughtful stuff.

I was disappointed when it shut down, is the idea of this to be similar?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_(app)

OK well then, we'd better not do anything about it! <s/>

I don't think this is strictly true. Oil production is not fully fungible due to all kinds of issues including sanctions and production capacity.

But this is also a strawman - this isn't saying "we should shut them all down" or even begging that question.

At a minimum it's saying "there were people and companies who intentionally chose to mislead the public on a potentially existential issue - perhaps there should be some reckoning for that?"

We followed the book The Contented Little Baby Book for our kids. Others recommended to us and sleep has never been a problem after a few months old.

Kids thrive with structure but it takes discipline to maintain consistency.

It’s not magic, in a nutshell it just makes sure your kids have a very reliable routine and they are never super tired or super hungry.

Goodness springs from there.

I worked at a large valley based company that had their own data centers and badly wanted to decrease infra spend.

It's WAY harder than it sounds.

Remember Twitter is not a profitable company which means the likelihood of a bunch of low-hanging fruit for savings is very low. That's been done already.

There are not likely "oh look we found a whole DC sitting idle, oops" sort of savings. Any vendors they use are ALREADY giving them huge discounts.

I'm not saying Twitter is efficient or that this is physically impossible (tho it might be), I'm saying its not easy and takes skilled people a long time to iterate to lower-cost systems or designs that don't have massive stability or performance tradeoffs.

It's not a few people.

Twitter runs their own data centers, which means they own all of the THOUSANDS of machines in them. These machines, and all of their parts, have shelf lives and CONSTANTLY need replacement.

When they are replaced you can't just go to Best Buy with a credit card. At scale VERY SMALL changes matter: oh look they changed something in the disk firmware and haha now your databases corrupt data one out of 1M writes.

New machines need to be tested, burned in, installed. Old ones need to be cycled out.

Same goes for power equipment, networking, all that.

Because you built your own data center, and you were an early scale company it ALSO means a huge percentage of your systems are home grown - asset management, deployment, health checking, metrics, you name it. There are no articles on Stack Overflow. There is no blog post. How that shit works is mostly a function of what people knew about it and, well, at least half of those people are now poof - gone.

This hasn't even gotten to the services themselves, many of which are now running without an owner or any person at the company who has ever looked at them before. The remaining people are now up to their eyeballs in drama, survivor syndrome, fear, and, oh yeah, the work of many of their laid-off peers.

Few people, pfft, give me a break.

Remember that time FB was down because they had lost access to a core server and everyone was like "STAY DOWN"

This is 1000% true and this thread really underscores now non parents simply cannot fathom parent behavior.

I couldn’t, I had these same ignorant ideas based on my fleeting, non-accountable contact with small kids.

Now let me tell you about the time my 10 month old, in the blink of an eye, managed to get a handful of her own poo into her mouth.

The struggle is real.

I think the hydrogen-electric [1] development is more promising here because it has the potential to deliver long haul flights with no emissions or contrails.

While H2 isn't great for decarbonization at scale, in specific industries like aviation it might be applicable assuming it's made cleanly.

[1] https://www.zeroavia.com/

Tldr: solar engineering by blocking sun at L1 with big bubbles.

This doesn’t reverse anything. It slows warming, but doesn’t de-acidify the oceans or decrease the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Solar engineering is a radical, risky Hail Mary that should only be considered as a stopgap emergency measure provided emissions are being managed. Without that the problem is not solved and if the mitigation (sulfur, bubbles, whatever) is removed the snap back will be extreme.

We need to stop putting CO2 and methane in the air and start removing what’s there, period

Not having a replaceable battery is a real problem.

I have a circa 2018 Xps13 9370 that I’ve used regularly for non-work coding it generally still works great. Recently it was only lasting 60 minutes on a charge, but $50 to Amazon got me a new battery and now it’s great.

I don’t really need a new computer and the battery is the one thing that is sure to fail. The CPU and 16G memory are fine for Windows 11 and WSL2 (or Ubuntu).

It’s a waste to build machines that are designed to become trash, especially in todays world where hardware improvement curves have flattened so machines are usable for many years.

I really enjoyed The Long Dark. There is some violence and it has some adult (non sexual) themes, but it’s not primarily about fighting, it’s a wilderness survival game.

I played it for months and am anxiously awaiting the last chapter.

It’s rich, engaging, and the visuals are gorgeous.

This is exactly right.

At the start of the pandemic, my company (a large well known Bay-Area tech company) saw improvements in our developer productivity metrics.

Over 2020, they faded.

I'm at a new company now, we have done a lot of hiring, seen a lot of churn, and it is really hard to get "think big" projects running.

THIS

Work that has low ambiguity and needs execution - awesome for remote work.

Work that requires trust and deep collaboration - very difficult remotely. It doesn't it mean it can't be done but the communication fidelity is MUCH lower over Zoom and this cost has to be paid somewhere.

And, yes, employee churn makes all of this worse.

I've been of the opinion that the rush to remote work is unavoidable but the industry will regret letting it get out of hand.

Which I still think is the case. I think we are reaching the point where we see the big limits in WFH show, we see generally lower engagement, more difficulty doing big difficult projects, etc.

> I heard this from other engineers and from managers not directly in my chain.

OK so this is hearsay, your original post did not frame it as such, and you walk it back further here.

In addition other Amazon people seem to not agree, maybe don't post something like this next time.

This is correct.

And there will need to be some other mechanism to replace vested with payouts over time.

Just saying “you’ll keep vesting” isn’t good enough. People will say ok I’ve got a good grant in 2023 and then my comp falls off a cliff.

They’ll either leave when that vest happens or sooner.

This is all theoretical tho.

In a situation like this you likely won’t retain those 25%, assuming you can identify them (it’s not always clear who is really making things happen and why).

Those are top performers used to equity based comp. Many will leave.

Scale like Twitter does takes a lot of people to keep it running. You can always trim low performers but that too has a major morale implications. See: Uber

Exactly this

Every time I try this I go thru standard stages:

1. Ugh I want to run docker natively, Ubuntu looks good, I’ll do that 2. Install latest Ubuntu. It’s great! Love the shell. Hardware works. I can run Windows in Virtual Box for odd apps. 3. Why is my battery life so bad? Why won’t Bluetooth stay connected? 4. I am full Linux. I am living the creed! 5. I am so tired of constantly fixing something. Why is Spotify rendering weird. Why doesn’t mouse scroll work in Firefox. 6. I don’t have time for this. Back to Windows.

I think now that WSL has matured, it’s just hard to justify going back. Everything works and I get real Linux.

Same. I bought an XPS 15 last year and the thing didn't work that well with _windows_, let alone linux. All the same thigns, the touchpad clicked (I even had them come try to repair), it got so hot I couldn't put it in my lap, and even with light usage, battery life was well less than 4h. Just garbage. It's too bad, the screen is lovely and I actually liked the keyboard, but I saw that I had a made a mistake and sold it while I could. Never again.

In comparison, I have a 2018 era XPS 13 9370 and it runs Linux pretty well. I think Dell is trying hard to come up with nice hardware but they don't have the chops to make it all come together including heat management, assembly, power usage, etc.

I'm sticking with my XPS 13 and interested to see what a MS Surface Laptop 5 looks like when they come out later this year.

I think Dell

The threshold is typically 106F "wet bulb", above which much exposure will kill people, literally begin to cook them. Many parts of the world are hitting this.

Examples:

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/rising-temperatures-dying-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/clim...

"Today 1% of the world is an unlivable hot zone, by 2070 it may be 19%"

There is a pretty major flaw in this write up, which is the assumption that the changes we may see will be linear, be it sea level rise, temps, etc.

There are at least 4 tipping points that could upend this. If the Gulf Stream fails, Europe will be much colder than it is now, for example. Rapid breakdown of ice shelfs could quickly raise sea levels.

“It won’t be bad because it has not yet” is thin.

The middle latitudes are set to be in large part unlivable. Just imagine the geopolitical and humanitarian impacts of hundreds of millions of refugees. Just imagine when a country that is the source of a water source decides they need it and more than others downstream and reroute it.

These are massively destabilizing types of things. And not far fetched.

Sea level rise is the least of it tbh.