Epic's behavior has been consistently ethical as long as I can remember (and I've been following them since the 90s). The reason Sweeney is an interesting person is that he has been developing the industry (not just his company) for the past 30 years, and has interesting things to say based on that experience because he has a strategic vision and also continues to be deeply technically involved (he was the original architect of the Unreal Engine and continues to personally design tools and entire languages/frameworks for game engines). He was a technical founder role model long before pretty much every operator on scene today even started their career.
I don't think your analysis is valid in California. Public high schools in California receive most of their funding on a per-pupil, attendance-weighted basis from the state on a redistributive basis (all property taxes from across the state are pooled and redistributed).
Parcel Taxes allow wealthy areas like Palo Alto to have much higher qualities of education. School District quality is probably one of the number one factors for families looking for a home.
Most school districts in California don't have any parcel taxes. There are definitely some like Palo Alto and other Bay Area and LA school districts that do, but they serve as a relatively small boost (0 to 20% of the district's budget). But yes, to the extent they constitute a significant portion of the revenue, the dynamics described by the parent post play a role.
Parcel taxes are known to be a poor funding mechanism for this reason, but they were the only viable way for districts to raise extra money while working around the toxic side effects of Proposition 13 (https://ed100.org/lessons/parceltax), which illustrates its long shadow in California state law. Prop 13 is of course responsible for multiple other self-reinforcing anti-growth incentive loops.
My favorite loophole on Prop13 is where a Real Estate Trust can purchase a commercial property, and then sell portions of that Real Estate Trust to LLCs. Those LLCs maintain their ownership percentage, but investors can buy/sell shares in that corp without triggering any of the Prop 13 change-of-ownership triggers, and therefore keeping a cap on their tax increases.
Absolutely true. Also I find it strange that the companies in question could easily resolve their workforce issues by forming a fund to build better/faster public transit to link up their offices with less NIMBY-dominated cities, but choose not to do so.
I don't think the lack of usable rights-of-way explains public transit issues in the Silicon Valley.
Tech companies had very modest participation in the Caltrain PCEP project, and still barely participate in the Dumbarton rail corridor planning, have made no direct moves to expedite or simplify the BART Silicon Valley expansion, have not attempted to improve the performance of VTA light rail, have not publicly tried to pressure the SF city government to expedite or simplify Caltrain DTC, and have made no proposals to make use of vacant or underutilized rail or ex-rail rights-of-way across the Silicon Valley where no NIMBY opposition exists. (Yes, Atherton is famous for its NIMBYs blocking the original HSR construction plan. It's not currently relevant and can be bypassed.)
I guess I misunderstood the comment I was replying to. The parent comment mentions the 737 MAX so I assumed that’s what the commenter was referencing.
I have read up on the 777 and yes, I agree it’s incredibly safe statistically (as is the 787). I didn’t realize the commenter was talking about the Malaysia flight either. Apologies to them
The delay observed happens after the train has stopped. The delay is due to laggy software and can be eliminated without extending anything from the train while it's moving.
The video is showing part of that delay, but the blog entry is explicitly suggesting that the step start extending while the train is still in moving (at < 5 mph):
> This can be fixed in software. As seen in the timeline graphic, allowing the step to deploy and retract while the train is in motion would remove this wasted dwell time.
Agreed that Sphinx is extraordinary and wildly underrated. Sphinx is the only architecturally sound, extensible, widely used documentation framework that I know of. Its plugin ecosystem is amazing and gives me incredible leverage to improve documentation for teams and projects.
I'm not a fan of reStructuredText, but nowadays it's possible to do most things that previously tightly coupled Sphinx to RST in Markdown, courtesy of MyST-Parser: https://github.com/executablebooks/MyST-Parser
Except that the plugins are not compatible with each other or the latest version. That means I'm seeing some bugs that are fixed in the latest but I can't get the fix because my doxygen plugin doesn't work with the latest, and even if it did is the mermaid plugin updated yet? (please don't ask which versions of each I'm using - I believe there are at least 2 different ones that can do both of the above and they all have different abilities...)
I've never used Dark Sky, but the most innovative weather app/site I've used is definitely Weather Underground. Their radar and 10-day view are second to none.
It does sound like Dark Sky had one useful feature that has no match - analyzing weather radar and sending personalized rain alert push notifications based on your location. That's pretty awesome.
> a proper explanation (which I didn't find skimming the article) needs to cover why tech is more influenced by that than say travel & leisure sectors.
Sure - the explanation goes like this: in the tech industry, a larger number/proportion of these jobs are in pre-revenue/growth stage companies (as acerbically categorized by OP). The difference between a growth stage company and an established company is that the growth stage one needs more capital to fund its growth. The cost of capital has risen rather dramatically, therefore the total workforce these companies are able to fund has shrunk.
P.S. Love the "slugs through the hourglass" meta tag find!
