Yes in a country of 1 billion people there are dodgy apartments, but then again in my country of 26 million people an estimated 60% of new apartments have flaws, big ones in the middle of Sydney have been deemed unlivable only a few years after being built.
China overbuilds entire cities and everyone mocks them for it, but a few years later those cities fill up and people conveniently forget about that.
Even the commentator who coined the term Ghost Cities admits they have become functional economic powerhouses.
> Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities"
I like the fact minimalist approaches, like svelte, htmx and alpine.js are getting more and more traction.
I felt like fighting this fight alone for years in the golden years of node, webpack and react where everybody was creating crazy stacks and adding GraphQL and so on, to basically get what Django + jquery did 10 years ago in a tenth of the time and code.
So far I also survived:
- xml is the future
- let's use nosql for all the things
- you must use the same language at the back and front
- yes, you site must have an AMP version (ah, you forgot this one, didn't you? It was sooo imporant, and then pouf, it was gone like tear in the rain)
- yes, your home page must be an SPA
- you can't code anything without async
- you can't live without a message queue
- everything must become a micro service
- of course you need a container for that
- of course you need a orchestrator to organize those containers
- of course you need the cloud, it would be crazy to deal with those containers and orchestrators yourself
- dude, why do you have a server? Use a serveless backend!
- dude, why do you have a backend? Just call saas from the edge!
Every year, some generation of engineers have to learn the concepts of "there is no silver bullet", "use the right tech for the right problem", "your are not google", "rewriting a codebase every 2 years is not a good business decision", "things cost money".
I have ADHD and though I love having a tidy home I struggle to make it happen. Still, I find chores to be a low stakes daily dojo to practice prioritization, executive function lol, "good enough" nonjudgemental thinking and all those values.
Two books helped me greatly and they both call out the exact distinction between perfection and efficiency you do. Consciously giving up on "efficiency" has helped me finish a lot of projects I otherwise would have put off for far too long!
The books are "How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind" by Dana White for ADHD folks, "How to Keep House While Drowning" by KC Davis for when life is f'ed. Heartily recommend both.
The atmosphere masses roughly 5.5x10^18 kg. Removing 140ppm to return to pre-industrial levels is 7.7x10^14kg of CO2 to split: 110 tonnes per human. 44g/mol and a Gibbs free energy of -394kJ/mol, and we need 6.5x10^21 joules, or 1.8 billion GWh. More or less dead-on the energy in a trillion barrels of oil, or 10,000 1GW nuclear reactors working flat out for 20 years[1].
Something on the order of 2003 estimates of global petroleum reserves and also of gas reserves.[2]
Sounds hopeless, but it's also a fraction of a percent of one year of total global insolation: about 12 hours' worth.[3]
1 trillion trees will also absorb roughly that much in about 30 years[4].
So not completely beyond the scope of physically possible human endeavour, but also probably substantially larger than any previous single endeavour.
There's also nothing actually to stop the species doing something other than "it's expensive and hard and I get a better return from making an app for dog manicures". But money is a made up number and were actually not very short on human effort[5] or most materials or even usable energy[6].
[1]: in 2021, humanity operated 366 GW of installed nuclear capacity with 411 reactors. The line is currently going down (2020 had 369 GW and 415 reactors). The concrete and other materials presumably used in the reactors would mean there's a zero in the right half-plane: it'll get worse before it gets better, but nuclear is far from alone in this and by some estimates 50 times better than wind on a per-TWh basis.
[2]: considering where the problematic carbon comes from, that's probably not a coincidental similarity in scale!
[3]: and that shows in solar installed capacity: about 1TWh. Build about 10 times more than that, dedicate it all that new capacity to CO2 splitting, run it for 20 years, and party like it's 1499. It would need only 50 million acres: 10% of Saudi Arabia or Mexico would do, 1/3 of Texas or basically all of Great Britain (and a bit on the side to compensate for the latitude). Roughly 30m^2 per human: about $3000 worth of installed GW-scale solar power using an estimate of $2 billion/GW, plus the chemistry machinery and op-ex for 20 years. You might even negotiate a price break at the first trillion?
[4]: but the wood has to stay in the tree or otherwise not be burned or rotted. Obviously avoiding burning down what trees we already have is probably a good start.
[5]: other then then what will you do with all the "operationalised" humans needed to do it? Training that much of humanity would subvert a lot of existing political structures. If anything, this is why I think it won't happen under our current systems.
[6]: and you'll get much if the material back afterwards, and what you definitely wouldn't be short of would be energy capacity!
Something I've been saying is that the "asshole CEO" is necessary to get large orgs to actually do things. The author tells a relevant example, where a CEO is too timid to force change without the approval of his underlings (wtf?), who in turn are afraid to make changes with the CEO's approval. This results in a deadlock where nothing changes.
The kind of systems thinking outlined in the article is a very rare thing in the world, and outright frowned upon as "not proper" by those entrenched in the more conservative approaches to leadership.
Case in point: Elon Musk.
Compare SpaceX to NASA. The development cost of Starship, including about a dozen test articles, is the cost of a single SLS launch. People love to go on about how SpaceX is "making mistakes" and that their "rocket blew up", while neglecting to mention that the first SLS test launch also failed to achieve the desired orbit.
Elon Musk is one of the few corporate CEOs that get that mistakes are necessary stepping stones on the way to success. He encourages experimentation and rapid iteration, and will fire idiots that push back against improvement. Remember the engineer that argued with him about Twitter's slow performance, where it takes tens of seconds for it to show less than 1 KB of text? That guy had no incentive to make changes and was happy to let things be.
Meanwhile, I've been to over 150 organisations as a consultant, and not one of them has this mindset at any level of management. Everything has to be perfect up front. Everything needs to be planned 6 months in advance. Nobody is ever allowed to flip a harmless switch "just to test" an idea, no-no-no! That's not proper. The switch flipping has to be documented. It has to have a test plan, a rollback plan, a UAT plan, and seventeen people need to have a hundred meetings over months instead of simply trying the thing to see if it works.
This is the inherent nature of self-organised bureaucracies. Everyone optimises for their own personal local optimum, which is never the organisation's optimum.
Only the CEO can force behaviour changes to redirect efforts towards the global optimum, but that requires forcing people out of their local optimum, which is unpleasant for those people.
That's why you need "asshole CEOs" like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk. These people can never rise to top organically, via ass kissing and "making nice". They have to be there from the beginning, holding the reins of power in a way that cannot be taken from them by people that are made uncomfortable.
I always like to keep a context for this sort of stuff. Here's my growing list:
giant impact that formed the moon (4.5bya)
great oxidation event (2.4-2.0bya)
multicellular life (1.5bya-600mya)
trilobytes appear (521mya)
landplants (470mya)
first land animal (428mya)
pangea forms (335mya)
pangea breaks apart (200mya)
angiosperms (275mya)
trilobytes disappear (252mya)
ginkgo (200mya)
flowering plants become abundant (100mya)
antartica was a rainforest (90mya)
dinosaurs died (65mya)
primates (55mya)
azolla event (49-48mya)
pantherlike cats (10.8mya)
first humans (5mya)
megalodons go extinct (2.6mya)
modern humans (300k years ago)
yellowstone's last eruption (70k years ago)
humans reach turtle island (30-20k years ago)
african humid period, green sahara (14.5-5k years ago)
beringia land bridge gets inundated (11k years ago)
saber tooth tigers go extinct (10k years ago)
horses go extinct in north america (9k years ago)
shift to wetter climate makes Amazonia transition from grasslands to jungle (2k years ago)
At age 35 I was diagnosed with ADHD. Woah! I try to minimize medication.
A few tricks..
1. An ADHD diagnosis looks at 5 areas, Activation, Effort, Memory, Attention and Affect. I struggle with Activation and Effort.
If I am inactive, I now know enough to say, "Activate!" And this gives me a trigger to change my behavior.
2. ADHD folk oft describe a phenomena where they excel under pressure or when doing tasks for others. There was a recent thread on /r/adhd where people offered to clean other's houses because they recognize they don't do things well for themselves!
As a mental trick, I externalize myself. I create myself as a person I want to do things for. Part of this is recognizing that when we do things for others, like cook a great meal or do a spring clean, we don't expect them to appreciate every detail of our work. We just want to impart a feeling of deliciousness or well-being. Similarly, do not ask your future self to marinate in every detail of your work- the goal is the overall feeling.
3. Thanks to life experiences, medication, and a lifelong infatuation with builder games like Factorio, I know what I am like and what I can do when a project engages me and I give it my full effort. Identify, Organize, Create/Act, Debug, Repeat. I now understand that moments of inspiration, medication, and grit & discipline are different paths to attain this state. Thus I have some control over summoning that state directly.
4. I now understand there is an emotional signal sent by the cerebellum that facilitates executive function- the impulse to get stuff done. Physical exercise, eating well, sleeping well, core things that reduce depressive feelings are correlated with improving executive function. Embrace it, treat your body well.
4. ADHD research & brain scans have identified two key mental states. The first is DMN, a passive-receptive state where memories and stimuli flow more freely. The second is TPN, when we become focused on tasks and the brain inhibits these stimuli. In people with ADHD, the DMN rarely quiets down. So now I can recognize that engaging with memories, good and bad, and various stimuli, are a part of how I function. I can somewhat identify that function, accept that its happening and maybe interfering, and politely ask it to relax.
Just watch the first lecture and you won't be able to not watch the rest. It starts with making your own autograd engine in 100 lines of python, similar to PyTorch and then builds up to a GPT network. He's one of the best in the field, founder of OpenAI, then Director of AI at Tesla. Nothing like the scam tutorials that just copy-paste random code from the internet.
I encountered the author’s short story that’s linked in the article, Lena [1], a while ago, possibly here on HN. It’s really great, but be warned.
It’s one of the most deeply disturbing sci-fi horror stories I’ve ever seen. To be clear, most of the horror is implied rather than described, which I think only makes it worse. Part of me wishes I had never read it.
Highly recommended, but if you’re at all in doubt if you have the stomach for it, maybe stay clear.
Mental health is mechanical. Most anxiety and suffering within mental health are second order effects from unconscious fears that we have about behaviours we feel are risky to take. For example, if you grow up in a household where your personal distress causes distress in others, you will hide your own personal distress and attempt to appear good all of the time. You will have high levels of anxiety in situations in which you might have to admit distress/dissatisfaction/not be a happy person that makes everyone else happy.
To improve mental health, more behaviours on the spectrum of all possible behaviours need to become calmly accessible. This allows the brain to be calmer in a wider range of situations; previously a situation that might cause distress might have been avoided/cause a spike in anxiety, now the situation can be faced calmly and the newly integrated behaviour allows the individual to say "sorry, I'm finding this too stressful, I need to stop".
Everyone typically has their own unique combination of behaviours which are not easily accessible. In my personal therapy I found that my dreams were a useful way of diagnosing what behaviours I was not comfortable with. I got very interested in this and ultimately completed a Masters in Psychology to write a paper on the topic based on the underlying neurology that occurs during REM sleep.
I happen to develop an open source, no-root, network monitor, and firewall for Android.
We let users block connections to IPs that have no corresponding DNS request. Of course, genuine reasons to connect directly to IPs exist, but not so much for installed apps.
I'm surprised immutable systems aren't more popular.
Back in the Knoppix days it was first a novelty, and then a blessing
that you had to boot from a CD-ROM, because it led to one amazing
outcome:
Less tinkering.
Or rather - it split use from tinkering.
Systems today are designed around the principles of deferral and
volatility. You can add or change anything at any time. The user has
absolute freedom to tinker, but also the vendor of always-connected
products has endless possibilities to update. The result is a mess of
dissatisfaction and half-bakery. Nothing is ever finished or fully
right. It also, maybe paradoxically, leads to systems that feel less
under your control.
Systems like TinyCore and Live CD distros take a different approach
that the OS is finished. You have two choices, take it or leave it.
Unless you are prepared to cross a non-trivial barrier to remix and
update the non-volatile image, you are forced to just use what you
have. That leads to more productivity because you adapt to the tool
rather than constantly adapting the tool to you.
I like TinyCore because it's looking to a middle ground of baking
immutable systems at key stage points and keeping changes separate
from the immutable core. I can change the core if I want to, but
rarely.
I see that as a separate prospect than "appliance platforms" like
Android and a PhoneOS onto which you can only load "apps".
What ideas and favourite solutions do other's have for using
immutability, or not liking it?
I class Bevy as a “non trivial” project. It's also an example of how to immediately set new Rust devs up with better system performance to reduce the problem you mention where compilation becomes a bottleneck as a project grows.
The early setup docs offer ways to improve compile speeds. Some help all Rust projects (change your linker) and others are specific to Bevy (enable dynamic linking if you're not on Windows).
Yes, it's a little jarring for an intro to game development with Rust to start with, “first, change a bunch of things so your compile speeds don't suck by default”. But I appreciated it because it helps you evaluate Bevy properly (it's as fast as it'll get from that point) and it also made my non-game Rust project workflows faster.
Bevy also sets expectations well about the initial slow-ish build (“This will take some time as you are essentially building an engine from scratch. You will only need to do a full rebuild once. Every build after this one will be fast!”).
The big recent exemplar of street layout for a new place is Houten in the netherlands [0] which is basically focussed on a train station and walkable town square at the centre with a ring road at the edge. Roads are a 'soft grid' for pedestrians and cyclists but stopped up for cars making the car network more of a tree with dead ends rather than a grid. And making road speeds slow at the centre and fast at the edges.
Dave was a brilliant designer, both analogue and digital, but not so great a businessperson; his company, Sequential, who made some of the most beloved electronic instruments - not least the Prophet series - went bankrupt and Yamaha bought the name. Dave went to work for Yamaha and Korg, and then Seer Systems, where he designed the first ever “soft synth” (professional-standard PC synthesiser plugin), Reality. He had all of the acclaim, and I’m sure he did OK, but he did not have the financial success the quality of his work deserved.
Nevertheless, he then founded Dave Smith Instruments, maybe the start of the analogue synth revival (which is going gangbusters now; Eurorack is the coolest hardware hacking scene on the planet). DSi did pretty well, which was great, but here’s what really reveals how beloved Dave was; his old friend Ikutaro had a word with his friend, the president of Yamaha, and more or less asked; “we all love Dave. You’re not using the Sequential name. How about it?” and Yamaha went… “you, know, yeah” and gave him the Sequential name - which still had significant brand equity - for free.
> Instrumental in restoring the Sequential name was Roland’s Founder, Ikutaro Kakehashi, a longtime colleague and friend of Smith’s. “I feel that it’s important to get rid of unnecessary conflict among electronic musical instrument companies,” said Kakehashi. “That is exactly the spirit of MIDI. For this reason, I personally recommended that the President of Yamaha, Mr. Nakata, return the rights to the Sequential name to Dave Smith. And I’m glad to see such a wonderful result—a new product with the Sequential name.”
And in 2021, he sold now-Sequential again under much happier circumstances; $24m to the well-regarded British gear manufacturer Focusrite.
The music gear industry has more than its share of villains - google Uli Behringer sometime - but Dave and Ikutaro were real ones, and the best parts of the industry (including the big Japanese manufacturers, Korg, Roland/Boss, and Yamaha) move in their spirit. And a large part of that is because of the existence of MIDI.
I've worked in "climate intelligence" for many years. The list overlooks one of the largest and most immediate opportunities around that market: the data infrastructure and analysis tools we have today are profoundly unfit for purpose. Just about everyone is essentially using cartography tools to do large-scale spatiotemporal analysis of sensor and telemetry data. The gaps for both features and practical scalability are massive.
It has made most of the climate intelligence analysis we'd like to do, and for which data is available, intractable. And what we can do is so computationally inefficient that we figuratively burn down a small forest every time we run an analysis on a non-trivial model, which isn't very green either.
(This is definitely something I'd work on if I had the bandwidth, it is a pretty pure deep tech software problem.)
Without meds, the constant feeling was that life was moving a little faster than me. I had to put a lot of effort just to stay apace, and taking a day off means having a day and a half of stuff to do tomorrow.
I don't need meds to live. I need meds not to feel hollow in my soul. If I think about doing something that is meaningful, I need my meds to up and do it. Otherwise it's living the life of someone with really great plans that are unable to leave their head. It is hellish.
I've managed to get specific exclusions for IP I've worked on as a side project, and more recently got my employer to include the majority of the github "balanced employee ip agreement" [1] in our employment contracts, which states quite clearly "If you create IP outside the scope of your employment or contract or before or after your employment or contract ("Your IP"), the Company doesn't own it" [2]
(UK based company)
I read a book once (which I can't remember the name) that shows you how self-esteem (and lack of) can block us for doing things that matter to us. Like having a toxic partner/family makes you have a low self-steem. So in other words, living and hanging out with people that supports and love you and what you do, have a huge impact.
Edit: six pillars of self esteem is the name of the book
I was recently playing[0] with the ZSTD seekable format[1]: a *valid* ZSTD stream format (utilizing ZSTD skippable frames, that are ignored by de-compressor) w/ an additional index at the end of the file that allows for random access to the underlying compressed data based on uncompressed offsets. This combined w/ a Content-Defined-Chunking[2] and a cryptographic hash[3] in the index allows for a very efficient content-addressable storage. For example I've successfully applied it to a bazel-cache, which gave me between 10x and 100x wins on repository size w/ negligible CPU usage increase.
Not sure why this says FAANG because it's talking about Google.
Calibration, promo committees, feedback and the like are intended to create equivalent expectations on impact across different orgs. The dirty little secret however is that at best it has limited success.
The best advice I can give anyone in such an organization is to be liked by your manager and their manager. If that's true, good things will tend to happen. If it's not, good things will be a lot less frequent.
Put another way: you can take the exact same set of objective facts and use them to say a person did a good job or a bad job. There's a popular meme about feedback at Google that goes something like:
> This project would've failed without this person. It failed anyway but it definitely would've failed without them.
The difference ultimately boils down to whether or not they like you.
Here are a few Google-specific tidbits worth knowing:
1. Ratings are fit to a curve across a sufficiently large pool, typically at the director level and usually over 100-150+ people. This means there will be a percentage range of people who get Meets All, Exceeds Expectations, Greatly Exceeds, etc. This is intended to stop ratings inflation;
2. A consequenc eof (1) is that ultimately you are competing with people in your org for those better ratings. This can create some perverse incentives and a toxic environment;
3. It is almost always better to let something blow up and come and fix it rather than preventing that from ever happening. The first will get you a lot of recognition. The latter will get you almost none;
4. Promos at Google are stack-ranked. Each committee gets 10-15 packets that will be for a particular level. The committee will rank those packets. After that the promotion target will come into play. This is set by management and was allegedly cut as a cost-saving measure when Ruth Porat came on board. If it's 20% then the top 20% from that ranking process be promoted.
You will find people who serve on those committees who say this isn't how it works and they'll argue they're evaluating if someone is operating at the next level or not. This is partially true. Thes packets will be divided between promote, don't promote and on-the-bubble. The on-the-bubble group will be sufficiently large to allow for the promotion target to be met;
5. For SWEs. L5 is the "terminal" level, meaning there is an expectation of growth to that level. L3->L4 and L4->L5 once went through promo committee but now don't. Management within orgs decide this. These too have target percentages and there have been cases where the promot rate has been too "high" and orgs have been told to cut back on promotions to meet the targets;
6. There is a massive backup at L5->L6. Because of the low target percentages the impact required keeps going up and really you need your management to really push for this to happen. There are limited slots so you may be waiting eyars and again this is why them liking you matters so much. Google is full of L6s who got promoted 5-10+ years ago that would never make the grade by today's standard. For really old cases you can find archives of why there were promoted and you'll find cases like "promoted unit testing".
I say all this because the author of this thread seems to fundamentally misunderstand how this process works.
Note that Gitea will start adding federation support to their code forge, and at least 3 other projects are dedicated to code forge federation at: https://forum.forgefriends.org
Also a self-hosted alternative to KeyBase is at: https://keyoxide.org (minus the chat parts).
Yes in a country of 1 billion people there are dodgy apartments, but then again in my country of 26 million people an estimated 60% of new apartments have flaws, big ones in the middle of Sydney have been deemed unlivable only a few years after being built.
China overbuilds entire cities and everyone mocks them for it, but a few years later those cities fill up and people conveniently forget about that.
Even the commentator who coined the term Ghost Cities admits they have become functional economic powerhouses.
> Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...