timssopomo

I used to work at Cockroach Labs. The problem it's solving is fundamentally different. CRDB as a solution makes sense when you need to _guarantee_ that transactions are serializable and durable, and that your application can survive node or region failures while maintaining consistency. In a naive deployment it's significantly slower than operating on a single core, but that's the price that you pay for the ability to survive node loss without data loss.

I don't see anything that indicates how spacetime solves the core problem CRDB does, which is guaranteeing that single node failures can be tolerated with zero data loss or loss of availability. It sounds like transactions by default are required to be written to disk before completion, which makes them durable on a single node, but you can't ensure they're consistent across nodes without accepting the network overhead and losing transaction throughput (on writes, anyway).

Also, FWIW, in the several years I worked covering basically every incident, I can't recall seeing a network-bound cluster. Like anything else, there are tradeoffs. You give throughput, you get consistency and availability, and you don't need to engineer how to avoid data loss or availability with node failures. Unless I'm misunderstanding, spacetime is solving a totally different problem.

As biological beings, we receive and respond to input from our environment constantly, even while sleeping. LLMs only receive input from their environment when they are sent a query, but the fact that they're able to respond intelligently to input indicates (to me at least) that their processing must approximate ours in meaningful ways. They do not have an embodied experience of receiving bad news, they do not know what a sinking feeling in their stomach actually _feels_ like, but they do know enough to be sensitive to human needs. I really don't see how this could be meaningfully different than human empathy unless we want to draw an arbitrary line around "must be able to live autonomously" to be considered "intelligent".

Put another way: I think they _do_ understand the queries they receive and the answers they give, at least enough to be communicative. They couldn't do what they do otherwise. A lot of people want to make human cognition more complicated (or objective) than it actually is. We take input, predict the future based on our experience, act, and then observe our actions and think about them. AI does the same apart from (maybe) observing its own actions. But then, you could argue that the next turn is them observing their actions.

The concerning disanalogy is that we assume that they are like us because they speak like us and can understand us, and that is a really bad leap in logic. Whatever intelligence they possess, it is fundamentally different from ours and impossible for us to comprehend.

Managers don't do this stuff for funsies they do it because they don't trust that their team won't go off track because of something they don't know.

Re: a woooden body, there are a couple reasons it's preferable despite the maintenance - the biggest is that they can be adjusted to fit a specific blade and chip breaker. Since the blade and chip breaker are made by hand, you can't mass produce a body and still have the tool perform. The other big concerns are weight and economy. Metal bodies are way heavier. And if they break or are damaged, can't be easily fixed. A wood body can be made in a few minutes with materials that are usually found on hand.

Modern metal-bodied planes do work similarly, in that both let you set a blade slightly beyond a flat sole, allowing you to remove high surfaces on wood. That's about where the similarities end.

Japanese blades are laminated steel, and quality blades are hand-made by smiths. Smiths use proprietary techniques to make blades that can maintain edges for longer than machine-forged steels. Chipbreakers are made of laminated steel as well and can keep the primary blade under tons of tension, allowing it to remain stable even when cutting against the grain. Wooden bodies allow skilled users to adjust the blade depth within microns without sacrificing stability. Wooden bodies are easily adjusted to fit the needs of the user.

To use an analogy: using a western hand plane is a lot like trying to race a Camry rather than a Porsche. It's not that the Camry is wrong - it's just built differently. The Porsche is really easy to drive into a ditch if you're not careful. It'll break down a lot, but it'll also perform much better for a skilled driver. The Camry, conversely, will be easier for anyone to drive and probably go a lot longer without maintenance. It works fine as a daily driver, and you can tune it so that it'll perform like a Porsche would, but a very well-tuned Camry is probably not going to outperform a well-tuned Porsche and a person used to driving a Porsche is probably going to complain about the Camry's handling.

Americans got robbed of something between 20-40% of the purchasing power of their dollar depending on what they're buying. People aren't stupid, they know they're getting hoodwinked when someone focuses on the fact that the rate of robbery is slowing down rather then the fact that they didn't stop the robbery in the first place.

If Americans own stock at all (38% don't), the majority of it is in retirement accounts.

Last year, the median income was still below 2019: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

It's true that managers have a lot of latitude to read self summaries and either amplify or disregard them. The #1 thing you can do to avoid problems with your own reviews is to actually understand what your manager's and the company's priorities are and align your work to them. I have given poor reviews to people who invested lots of time and energy in projects and probably even did good work on them, because they were _completely_ off strategy and completed before anyone who knew better could tell them they were a waste of time and energy.

This isn't malevolent. It's because every manager is tasked with supporting the company's overall goals, frequently with very limited resources. Work that veers off into left field, even when perceived as valuable from the employee's or peer's perspective, is basically lost opportunity to do something more valuable. And that gets very expensive when trying to grow quickly.

If you want to get ahead, you and your manager need to work together to make sure the work delivers results, is aligned with strategy, is timely, and is visible to other managers and execs. Hit all four, and the need for recognition is obvious. I've seen execs argue against managers that individuals deserve promotion. Miss one, and you're probably relying on your manager's good will and clout to make the case.

If the work is not aligned with strategy or didn't deliver results but took a lot of time, your manager will look like a fool arguing that you deserve recognition for it.

Also, re: exceeding expectations, this comes up in every org and with every team. Everyone is always graded on a curve, both within your individual team and across each exec's organization. This is because the budget for compensation is fixed ahead of time based on assumptions about the percentage of employees that will exceed expectations. As long as each exec gets roughly the expected number of employees exceeding and meeting expectations, their recommendations for promotions, bonuses, and comp adjustments will likely be approved.

If the ratio for a given exec is out of whack, the only options are: 1) Get it back in line, 2) Take budget from someone else, or 3) Increase the compensation budget.

(3) frequently can't be done without board approval, so is not really an option. (2) is going to start a knife fight between execs over whose employees deserve it more, which nobody wants. This leaves (1). This is why alignment and upward and outward visibility is so important - it banks you social capital with the people who have to allocate limited resources.

Tether publishes their reserves [1], only 4% are Bitcoin. 84% is "cash & cash equivalents & other short-term deposits", 3% is precious metals, 5.55% is "secured loans". They report $5B in net equity, ~4.2%. So basically, if their collection of assets declines in value by 4.2%, they become unable to redeem every coin. There are a _lot_ of ways for that to happen with 87% of their assets in T-bills and money market funds. If the shortest T-bill is 4 weeks to maturity, they have plenty of time to incur interest rate risk (e.g.: Silicon Valley Bank).

[1]: https://tether.to/en/transparency/?tab=reports

Wealthy individuals moved into "gentrifying" neighborhoods _after_ massive movements of capital, not before. In 2007, no professional was leaving the upper east side to move to Williamsburg or Prospect / Crown Heights. After Bloomberg rezoned the waterfront and rammed Atlantic Yards through, boatloads of money moved in. Vacant lots and abandoned buildings were torn down, new ones were built, "luxury" housing stock was created and _then_ rich people moved in.

It's not all that different than VC money in startups - investors are sheep. Once it becomes clear a big fish has made an investment in an area, money floods in and drives up prices. To justify the increase in land values, investors have to raise rents. To raise rents, they need to improve the housing stock. This creates the inventory that the wealthy purchase.

There is a fundamental mismatch between the economics of startups and the economics of trades. Startups and technology work best when you can achieve scale quickly and without friction by using the same solution repeatably. Software is ideal for this, it scales (nearly) infinitely and can continuously deliver the same result. Work in the physical world frequently requires site-specific solutions. It's more akin to consulting than engineering.

It's not surprising that startups in the space came in overly optimistic and imploded quickly. I think most tech people have a bias against the trades and think it's easily understood grunt work. The reality is that it requires deep subject matter expertise, familiarity with local markets, sites, and housing stock, and a healthy amount of on-the-fly creativity.

The company has no mechanism for determining that a person has entered into a contract unless someone tells them. Prohibitions on transfers prevent the cap sheet from growing, and the company from getting marked to market when they don't want to. Also makes it easier to create golden handcuffs.

There is always a nonzero chance that the deal falls through because the you are the first to get sued and lose their shares. If it were me, I'd want the contract to eliminate my liability in that scenario. If it were to happen, the buyer would very likely litigate on their own behalf rather than lose the shares that they paid for. These contracts are much more of a negotiation than a straightforward asset purchase on a stock exchange.

Tl;dr the options agreement is a private contract and so is the forward sale. If you're going to enter a forward contract and take hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, you need a competent lawyer to scrutinize the contract and limit your downside liability. Then it's up to you and the buyer if the risk/reward is worth it.

If you're interacting with users, it's important to publish crisp and defensible promises to end users and deliver on them (when these promises are backed by a contract, they're an SLA). Boundary setting is as much about what you will do, and delivering consistently, as it is about being comfortable saying no when the error is the user's. Stating clearly what you expect people to do (sign up for this email list, upgrade on this cadence) goes a very long way.

Policies and promises stated and delivered are usually enough to get people past the anger phase of grief to bargaining, which makes the interaction a lot easier to manage.

That said, people generally resist any kind of change. That's _why_ it took nearly 50 years of lobbying and an unelected tyrant like Robert Moses to, for instance, really shift New York City's infrastructure in favor of cars. The question is how to make it clear to individuals why a life stuck in traffic isn't in their best interest anymore and hold the government accountable for making improvements.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

[2] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/when-cities-treated-cars-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Apple's and Facebook's approaches are totally different. Facebook vacuumed up reams of data from themselves and third parties and spat it back out into the industry indiscriminately. It _did_ likely allow some niche businesses to reach target audiences. It _also_ created and enabled a rube goldberg machine of third parties to access behavioral data in a way that likely made it personally identifiable. The same was true of most third party platforms. Cookies were fundamentally broken and users have no idea what data they were creating and no meaningful control of how it was being consumed (or by whom). All sorts of harm was done in ways that was difficult to quantify.

Apple giving individuals meaningful control over their data within Apple's ecosystem and protecting anonymity at the boundary of their platform is a net good. Apple's segmentation and targeting of users is fundamentally different than cookie based targeting utilizing 3P data. The fact that this hurt parties who unknowingly relied on 3P data in good faith is a sad externality, but nobody should lose sleep over it. I wouldn't feel bad about mom and pop groceries losing revenue from cigarette sales either.

Of course, there are more opportunities to goof off at home... but _maybe_, if the work is still getting done in the hours people are working, the remaining work is performative and unnecessary and you can decide to either take on more meaningful work or examine your internalized guilt about Never Working Hard Enough.

Of course, it may be easier to concentrate when you're afraid of someone "catching" you not working... but _maybe_ if you're unable to work without fear, you ought to examine why that's the case and seek better sources of motivation.

Of course, the fact that at least some work is performative and unnecessary makes managers and executives believe this untapped "productivity" is being stolen... but _maybe_ it ought to be pointed out that overworking people leads to lower productivity overall and there's a lot of empirical evidence to suggest that even 40 hours of work a week is too much.

Of course, cities are emptying out and this may be bad for local economies based on a captive class of office workers... but _maybe_ a local economy requiring millions of people to spend hours of their lives each day migrating away from their homes isn't exactly sustainable.

And on and on...

I work for companies based in New York City. We had to move 2.5 hours away from NYC to find a home that fit our budget. If the powers that be want to continue to allow the costs of education and housing to double every 9 and 15 years respectively, they'd better allow us to move where we can actually afford to live ~or~ pay us what we need to house, feed, clothe, and educate our children.

I was pointing out that we already have a legal and moral framework for discharging debts that can't be repaid.

Student loans can't be discharged through bankruptcy unless the borrower is permanently disabled. It's entirely possible to end up in default on a loan for a degree you never obtained, paying a loan your entire life, without ever decreasing the principal. Unsurprisingly, this rubs people the wrong way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap#/media/File:OEC...

Seems like countries with paid leave have comparable or higher rates of labor participation and (on average) lower gender pay gap.