zemptime

Can't believe this only got a couple of upvotes!

There is one. Don't destroy the means of error correction. Without that, no further means of moral development can occur. So, that becomes the highest moral imperative.

(It's possible this could be wrong, but I've yet to hear an example of it.)

This idea is from, and is explored more, in a book called The Beginning of Infinity.

The reason I dislike the twitter argument is, even if ruby was the root cause, the choice of ruby still launched the business and got them to that first success disaster.

The deeper reason I think it's a bad argument is because twitter ran into a problem native and new to them - massive fan out (celebrity tweet -> millions of followers). that's not the kind of thing any language typically does while responding to a web request.

Lastly - heavy survivorship bias here. We will never hear about all the startups which were "scalable from day 1" on java or whatever and fizzled out.

Looking at https://www.wired.com/author/sheon-han/, this author's whole strategy seems to be bear poking. The writer is skilled but at least in this ruby one they are definitely hate-farming. I'm a little sad to see content of this quality in Wired.

Anyway, I'm off. Returning to be part of the usually silent majority who is happily using ruby to ship useful software!

I did try ruby-prolog. The deeper issue is that its just not prolog. Writing in actual prolog affords a lot of clarity and concision which would be quite noisy in ruby-prolog. To me, the difference was stark enough it wasn't worth any convenience already being in ruby was worth.

I've wished for the same kind of 'embed prolog in my ruby' for enumerating all possible cases, all invalid cases, etc in test suites. Interesting to know it's not just me!

I've recently started modeling some of my domains/potential code designs in Prolog. I'm not that advanced. I don't really know Prolog that well. But even just using a couple basic prolog patterns to implement a working spec in the 'prolog way' is *unbelievably* useful for shipping really clean code designs to replace hoary old chestnut code. (prolog -> ruby)

One theory I've heard for this, and sorry I don't remember the source, is that Napoleon suspected if he truly did take down the Russian royalty then he expected the rest of European royalty to unite and attack attack him.

Regardless of what you might think of Snowden, he has a good quip on this: "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."

This made me curious. Having never read the gitlab code before, and on mobile, took all of about 30 seconds to find https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/master/config/ro...

Those are some pretty clean routes!

Suspect 6 minutes being increment has more to do with being 1/10 of an hour (easy to calculate rate) & and as fine-grained as you can get without being so obnoxious you can't track.

If the cost of providing this research is high, who would fund this peer-reviewed research which wouldn't make them any money?

For example, who would fund more studies on ginger? https://nutritionfacts.org/video/ginger-for-migraines/

I love Kung Fu Panda! It secretly became my favorite movie. Secretly, because it wasn't until years after I'd seen it that I realized how much I liked it compared to... every other movie.

MMT has seemed to me to be an academic fig leaf over the indirect taxation which occurs when more money is printed. MMT is fundamentally wrong, and everyone smart knows it is, but you as an individual can't make any sort of "respected" career as an economist unless you say the right things or are stupid enough to believe them.

Shoot. I was interested in this track. I'm also not loud on twitter or even aware there was an outcry. Bummer.

Whenever I get in this kind of funk, I notice that the more energy I put into it... the more it grows. What always gets me out of it is to stop focusing on my feelings and start focusing on what others need from me.

This is made much easier when you have a supportive team at a company which truly has a learning culture (heuristic: look for founder-led companies which haven't taken outside investment and have sustained growth). The fact your manager left and you have a total absence of feedback sucks. It's very easy to doubt in that situation.

It's entirely possible for an individual contributor to communicate everything right, implement well, conduct everything professionally and STILL have everything blow up. Normally the advice here is "truly great IC's account for environments/problem selection" as well. While true, this also feels a little...cruel? Uh, dismissive? I don't know how to characterize it.

Assessing the state of a business and whether you can fit into it well is a skill which must be learned. You're not gonna be good at it at first. And it sounds like, for you, this may be the key skill to work on. Can you distinguish between what's truly your fault, and what's a product of the environment you're in? You say label it a dream job but... is it? You're certainly going to know more about a place once you're working there than before you've joined.

The hardest part of distinguishing is typically actually admitting to yourself that some aspects are out of your control. At least this was for me... at one point I built something truly great for a business who didn't deserve it. That's when I learned (the hard way) my execution is necessary for, but independent of, the success of the business.

Ignore the fear. Don't feed the FUD. But do be honest with yourself about where you are, and what you're doing. Is it really all you? (really?) Learning in this way is typically expending energy to rid yourself of illusions and scripts which no longer serve you.

For where you're at right now, I also suggest you imagine for a second what someone up the org chart would want to see out of the best version of you. This means you're going to need to approach someone in the company with your vulnerability. But also come with something to offer (a plan, an idea, a direction). Consider this a litmus for them as well as for you. If you put in a good faith effort and they cruelly discard it, time to move one. If they don't, they really listen, and they put in effort too.. maybe there are problems you weren't aware of. Problems you can help with.

Good luck. Don't be too hard on yourself. But don't be too nice on yourself either! ;)

I'm personally attracted to this investment not because of squeeze potential but because I believe they're going to corner the online used games market & open up new business models for smaller game devs. First mover in a major way.

https://gmedd.com/

If you truly believe what you're spouting here, then - have you shorted it?

I can't directly speak for the autonomous groups of people in loose orbit around https://old.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/ who can be labelled the apes (I know for sure there are other groups but this is an easily accessible one), but what I've observed:

Goals:

  Elimination of FTD's, period. Market participants who FTD regularly are ejected.
  Information symmetry between blob & retail - true regular reporting on short positions, Swaps, other derivatives. Teeth for this.
  Increase in reporting penalties to be less than a cost of doing business.
  T+3 Settlement to T+0.
  Widespread usage of implementations like IEX to eliminate profitability of low-latency arbitrage.

How:

  Routing orders through IEX
  Exiting brokers who are simply bad for retail (Robinhood)
  Withdrawing equities from the DTCC accounts and broker dealer system as a vote of no-confidence (GME recently stated 5m+ individual had directly registered their shares w/ transfer agent as of Oct 31... and put it on their 10-Q, making them only company I'm aware of to have done that in past year).
  Suing brokers/applying regulation pressure to those who don't allow basic rights (direct share registration from europe)
  Actual monitoring of which brokers are dipping their hands in their customer's cookie jars (see: Fidelity a couple months ago suddenly posting 10m+ shares available to borrow in a very illiquid stock. Where could those have come from? Customer's cash accounts? Oh, it's not *lending*, it's *posting as collateral*? etc)
  Signal boosting for existing, honorable efforts: Dennis Kelleher @ https://bettermarkets.org/ / Susanne Trimbath
  Awareness & localized support of legislation
  Filing FINRA complaints, getting in touch with compliance officers, actually watching & asking.

The beauty and confusion here is, you just have a lot of people learning and teaching each other. Over time, they learn more and do more things.

I'd say probably most valuable at this point in time is the mixture of identified and pseudonymous journalism increasing financial literacy/awareness of just how... pardon my french, fucking bad, the existing incentive structures are w/r/t regulators. Good example: https://upsidechronicles.com/2021/09/05/how-wall-street-shor...

Suspect most valuable long-term will be the mass direct registration of shares in individuals book names rather than beneficiary ownership through a broker. If/when the apes have directly registered all available shares, 1) any significant amount of continued trading volume in lit markets is fraudulent and you have a slam-dunk legal case. 2) GME could legally exit participating in the DTCC and move onto a crypto-run automated market maker which meets all of the above goals. Any synthetic GME positions floating around would have to be immediately and forcibly closed, and there's a lot of material research on how the real number of shares floating around might be on the order of magnitude of 1 billion. Big problems for the blob.

There's a complex of people in Washington dedicated to defending the mechanisms which allow for the siphoning like FTD's (failure-to-deliver's), asset lending with no return dates, what is effectively asset lending by other legal names, and other things like exemptions for market makers being allowed to provide naked positions in the name of "liquidity."

This complex of people has a name (!) - "The Blob." It's the amorphous bureaucratic mass of people who will send vague and threatening letters to people actually attempting reform ("Dear Mr. Young Senator, we recommend you don't pursue your inquiry into naked shorting further, or it will be bad for your career.")

Then you have, diametrically opposed to the Blob, the $GME apes. Forget for a second about the mother of all short squeezes, "dying brick and mortar," "nfts," etc. The property worth paying attention to here is how antifragile and self-correcting the ape community is. Here you have tons of random, highly distributed and highly passionate people apprehending the real nature of our financial, media, and political institutions. You have a system where when the Blob pulls a fast one, a set of people who got in for a squeeze/quick profit are converted from a set of ambivalent retail traders into an intolerant minority whose focus has shifted from profit to "If we haven't achieved systemic change, we have failed."

The fight for reform is well underway. There's so much more to be said here but I'll end with this: even if you don't care or believe in $GME, believe in the apes. They're the individuals putting their skin in a the game and exposing themselves to harm for what they believe is right. Pay attention.

This could be interesting. Value is assigned by people, so the fact the credentials for a given work reside somewhere else with 'less legitimacy' would mean yes - you could copy it. However this other chain would be entirely illiquid.

But...the interesting part. What happens when cross-chain asset movement is much simplified? I don't see there being any issue with legitimacy (original owners could still verify ownership, you couldn't). But if you flooded original chain with fakes, uh...

Talked myself out of it. nevermind

Actually a metaphor just came to mind.

Imagine you've been playing on a 60hz refresh rate monitor forever. Then, you play your favorite fps on a 120hz refresh rate monitor.

That's what the difference feels like.

I hopped in my Tesla for the first time and after a single stop sign where I stopped kind of weird (not honestly that bad), that was it. The Tesla person on the initial lesson assumed I'd driven one before. You get the hang of it really quick. Same story for many other people who've driven my car. If you're not using regenerative breaking it's pretty much like a normal car sans the small acceleration gas cars provide with no braking.

Particularly like the section on "why not invert?"

> In light mode, darker colors often communicate distance.

Knew this but hadn't consciously realized it.

This should be much further up than where I found it!

I see a lot of comments here postulating how autopilot is a terribly designed feature from people who appear not to be speaking from first hand experience and now I feel compelled to comment, exactly following that HN pattern someone posted about how HN discussions go. That said thanks for keeping this discussion focused & framed as a system design one, doesn't feel like a Tesla hate train so I feel comfortable hoppin' in and sharing. This is a little refreshing to see.

Anyway, perhaps I'm in a minority here, but I feel as though my driving has gotten _significantly safer_ since getting a Tesla, particularly on longer road trips.

Instead of burning energy making sure my car stays in the lane I can spend nearly all my time observing drivers around me and paying closer attention farther down the road. My preventative and defensive driving has gone up a level.

> I just don't understand how you can have a "self driving car but you must but be ready to put your hands back on the steering wheel and your foot on the pedal(s)".

I've not hit animals and dodged random things rolling/blowing into the road at a moment's notice. This isn't letting autopilot drive, it's like a hybrid act where it does the rote driving and I constantly take over to quickly pass a semi on a windy day, not pass it on a curve, or get over some lanes to avoid tire remnants in the road up ahead. I'm able to watch the traffic in front and behind and find pockets on the highway with nobody around me and no clumping bound to occur (<3 those).

To your suspicion, it is a different mode of driving. Recently I did a roadtrip (about half the height of the USA) in a non-Tesla, and I found myself way more exhausted and less alert towards the end of it. Could be I'm out of habit but egh.

Anyway, so far I've been super lucky. I don't think it's possible to avoid all car crashes no matter how well you drive. But I _for sure_ have avoided avoidable ones and taken myself out of situations where they later occurred thanks to the extra mental cycles afforded to me by auto-pilot. My safety record in the Tesla is currently perfect and I'll try and keep it that way.

I don't think autopilot is perfect either but I do think it's a good tool and I'm a better driver for it. Autopilot has definitely helped me spend better focus on driving.

This gets a hard disagree from me. I _really tried_ to give the whole node + react approach a go because, to me, GraphQL & all the things you can generate with it is _magical_ (especially fine-grained authz with app-specific graphql directives - beautiful!). Singularly, the availability of xstate to replicate business processes identically between api & ui. So useful! So undervalued!

Then I ran into finding myself spending time on background jobs, authentication management (not the basic functionality but tinkering & modification past password reset / session management, blacklist/expiry if jwt's, etc), file upload integrations, db management (when not utilizing prisma or hasura), etc. High variety of effort spent on tasks where I found myself asking the question, "why am I having to work on this...?"

I still ship more in Rails. It's still a better tool for most things. There are cases where I'll reach to node when needs are simple and short-lived. Other tools have the potential to exceed Rails (and I hope they do), but they're not there yet.

One of my least favorite things about Rails, & one of the best ideas to emerge in the past decade or so, is react. The componentization of views driven by state is such a useful approach. Rails has historically had a has & belong to many relationship between controller contexts and views, which is essentially global and easy to get super confusing. React (and now browser-react aka web components) provide a better way of tackling this problem.

And... they hook up directly to my cache? They provide a great way of broadcasting dom updates directly? They interoperate with web components no problem where I need high fidelity interaction/performance? etc etc. Rails... has done it again.

No getting away from how useful it is.

I don't see it linked off this article so I'll throw another relevant one here - "The Most Intolerant Wins"

See: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Additionally full of all kinds of flavorful anecdotes like:

> I once pulled a prank on a friend. Years ago when Big Tobacco were hiding and repressing the evidence of harm from secondary smoking, New York had smoking and nonsmoking sections in restaurants (even airplanes had, absurdly, a smoking section). I once went to lunch with a friend visiting from Europe: the restaurant only had availability in the smoking sections. I convinced the friend that we needed to buy cigarettes as we had to smoke in the smoking section. He complied.

edit: there are a bevy of sibling comments to this one, asking an important question: "When should I be intolerant of intolerance?" The answer explored in the article above is, "...the formation of moral values in society doesn't come from consensus. The most intolerant person (or minority) imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance."

On a larger timescale, the most intolerant viewpoint will shift the views of others toward it. Recognizing this, a society can't tolerate a viewpoint which would be damaging to the core values that society purports to hold, or over the inevitable long-term it will destroy itself. This is why a society which values free speech must quash those elements inside it which will only accept censorship.

Also, "virtue" as quoted has a more specific meaning which is consistency with internal values. That's to say nothing of what those internal values are. They can be great or horrendous for society. Virtue is the willingness to sacrifice for them. Being intolerant is the mechanism by which civil rights advances, just as it can be used for evil.