"Right now there's this thing where ethics aren't what they used to be. This idea that people are trying to replace the ideas of good and bad, with better or worse." -Dave Chappelle
What you're writing should naturally lead to the conclusion that working for Google, Meta, Verizon, AT&T etc are all in the category of companies one shouldn't strive to use their hard earned talents for. For some reason I cannot fathom, you seem to land on the idea that Palantir is okay, because all these others somehow have snuck under the radar of many people?
I’m saying Palantir and defense tech is better because they are upfront about their association. In contrast you have what the author calls as morally neutral companies that are in fact gray areas.
I'm an immigrant in Norway. The darkness is enough of an issue that told us know about this in the state-funded language classes and made sure we knew help was available. I'm in Trondheim, so December is full of 4.5 hours of poor sunlight each day.
If there were something else that really gets folks, it is that Norway's people are rather reserved, to a point, and it really makes some folks lonely. This combined with the dark winters really causes some folks to struggle.
Everyone gets used to the weather and quickly learns how to dress properly enough.
For me, personally: I'm fairly introverted myself and generally had only a few friends near me before I moved, so it suits me well. Also: I've been here a decade or so and I moved for marriage - I've always had at least one friend here. I've worked a little bit. And then I got into board games (both immigrants and local folks), so I meet some folks that way. The person that organizes the games, though? They struggled a bit for a while.
I know about this from living in Lima (Peru), the weather due to our geological position is always temperate, goes from min temps of 11 degrees to like 32 in summer (top), usually around ~18/19 degrees up to like 23 throughout most of the year.
You'd think climate is great, but it's ALWAYS "foggy", you can't see a clear blue sky like in the inner regions of the country such as Cusco, it depresses you, I can't imagine it being even darker.
It's why I simply can't believe nordic "stories" about being the happiest place, I simply can't believe with all the money in the world you'd be happier than at a tropical beach with half of that money.
There's ways to black out windows and darken rooms to counter all of that daylight, but when it's dark it's really hard to counter that when going outside.
Without actually personally experiencing it, I think I would have the opposite struggle. If it were dark for that long without clouds so I could have all of that extra time to view the sky I think it would be a much different situation though.
It's actually surprising how north the famous EU countries are. Already south France and Italy are about the same latitude as New England; Norway must be like Alaska as far as daylight goes. If it weren't for the warm Atlantic current the place would be a glacier.
In the northern hemisphere the prevailing winds come from the west, which is why west coasts are more moderate than east coasts. Winds coming from the ocean are more moderate than winds coming from the interior of a continent.
This is why New York is on the same latitude as Lisbon yet is much colder. Same for Tokyo and San Francisco.
Western Europe is about as far north as people can live in large numbers.
The example that blew my mind once and I've been repeating it since: New York is as north as Madrid. Like, almost exactly, 0.3 degrees difference (or 20 miles, or 33 kilometres).
Living in Northern Sweden with "midnight sun", what gets me the most the few times I've been approaching the equator is warm nights that are pitch dark. So strange! And then I remember that this is the experience of the majority of the world. :D
I was really really close to trying to spin up something at work using the Max Engine. However, I see that it collects telemetry [1], and we can't really allow that. Do you know if there are plans to be able to turn this entirely off at some point?
It's nice to know if I should keep it on my radar, or if I can't consider it without changing jobs :)
There’s nothing bad about telemetry per se. In fact it should be considered bad to not be paying attention to how anything you build works in the real world.
(Then comes Meta c.s. and everyone rightly distrusts anything reported back from their computer)
This just to say, that yes, the majority of companies cannot be trusted, but there’s still good guys out there collecting useful metrics completely devoid of secondary malicious purposes.
Intentions be damned. Some industries take IP/security very seriously (eg regulated medical). Tools which phone home “for my user experience” are a complete deal breaker.
> I feel like teenagers are not exactly a demographic that never sees targeted ads
That is definitely true, but my opinion would be that they need "less ads", and not "more". That's a phase of life when most people are very suseptible to societal messaging, and form their self-image (partly?) based on it.
Not all ads are created 100% equal of course, so one can only hope these ads are nice to the users.
There seems to be a focus on something about the brain "calcifying" or people getting stuck in their own pattern over time here.
That may be a component, but I think anothet thing that correlates heavily with the graphs presented in the article is simply: When you have enough spare time to prioritize music. (although you could explicitly prioritize it like some commenters mention)
I still find lots of new music, but it always comes in periods of my life when I have some leeway, and those are fewer and farther between now.
I didn't know it runs an LLM when you append a "?", but for any Kagi-users out there, you can use the bang: !fgpt $QUERY if you automatically want to jump to an LLM.
The !fgpt-bang seems to be the model: "Claude 3 Haiku" going by the developer notes. Which often outperforms at least ChatGPT 3.5, easily recouping some of the money I put into Kagi every month.
I'm not sure if these books really are what you're looking for, because each of them is a mix of engineering history, and the description of how a group of people end up doing amazing things.
In each of the books, there were nuggets of wisdom that I've tried to bring along with me in my job (as best I can).
Like:
- Doing things as simply as possible to start off
- Keeping iteration time to a minimum, for maximum exploration of ideas
- Being willing to think outside the box
My takeaways above, hardly do these books justice, but they are as follows:
- Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed [0]
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. [1]
- The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal [2]
In a similar vein to the "War Stories"-clips, (even though I never played Ultima,) their Ultima post-mortem from GDC is a great watch too.
https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0
Myself and others would consider your experience unique/not the norm. If you don’t mind me asking, what was the mechanism used to obtain those jobs? Was it primarily via networking or word of mouth, did you have some type of in? Or were your jobs with smaller employers or startups perhaps? Because in “The Enterprise” you’ll be disqualified straight away if you don’t have a certain amount of experience in a certain framework.
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve tried to explain that every new technology I’ve learned I’ve picked up on the job and specific framework experience is largely irrelevant, I’d be a rich man.
For example, I’ve been a software engineer for 27 years using tech stacks primarily within the Java ecosystem but encompassing many different frameworks, languages, databases etc. However, getting a job in a similar or even identical business domains but on the .NET tech stack would be next to impossible.
I might be atypical, for sure. I've moved through Java, Go, Python, c++ and recently to Scala now, with no contacts at any of the companies I've applied to, but hopefully good references in each case. I've only been a dev for 7-ish years and had 3 separate jobs in that time. Youth might have given me some leniency in the first moves, but maybe less so in the latest one.
Im from a small country, so it might just be that the developers have a stronger hand at the negotiation table than elsewhere, since there're fewer competent devs as a result.
In any case, as a programmer I feel like I would always hire someone that demonstrates good programming skills in the "wrong language" over someone who's mediocre in the "right language", so it's sad to hear that's not the case many places. And that might be a lesson I should keep in the back of my mind as well.
What you're writing should naturally lead to the conclusion that working for Google, Meta, Verizon, AT&T etc are all in the category of companies one shouldn't strive to use their hard earned talents for. For some reason I cannot fathom, you seem to land on the idea that Palantir is okay, because all these others somehow have snuck under the radar of many people?