> the uniqueness of your starter is defined by the local climate, local flour, and the way you feed it to keep it alive. The weather in Greece is much warmer...
As someone who knows English and is learning German, the words "Handy" for smartphone, or "Beamer" for overhead projector, or "Oldtimer" for classic car all sound very out of place. Even hearing "das Baby" for a nursing-age baby (instead of the German "Säugling") sounds a bit weird.
I guess it's different when you grew up with those words and internalized them.
That's exactly what ruined it for me. The few apparent survivors of the human race are huddled in a tin can, running out of resources - fade to black - and suddenly, by divine providence and author fiat, everything is fine. It kills the suspension of disbelief.
... and comes accross as a deus ex machina transition.
More authors should be brave and have their stories end bleakly.
Great examples that come to mind would be 'Death's End', 'Echopraxia' (to a lesser extent also the prior 'Blindsight'), 'Consider Phlebas', just to name a few.
GPL defines the “source code” of a work as the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. If Meta released a petabyte of raw training data, would that really be easier to extend and adapt (as opposed to fine-tuning the weights)?
Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel “Ship Breaker” deserves a mention here. It’s set in Paolo’s dystopian solarpunk universe, where old tankers are cut up to extract the last tons of fossil fuels from their hold, and it really emphasises how dangerous and unrewarding of a job it is.
A harrowing near-future dystopian tale, definitely worth a read. His "Windup Girl" is better; "Ship Breaker" is like a YA version of Windup Girl, IMHO. His "Water Knife" is also quite interesting, imagining a future where climate change has dried up water supply to the southwestern US, and the states have militarized against each other.
Doing the bare minimum for a "Meets Expectations" rating after performance review and calibrations still means working a lot and delivering on the projects you've committed to, drafting design documents, doing interviews, actively improving existing codebases, and mentoring junior ICs. If you do all that, then the company's happy.
(Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.)
> (Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.)
A good engineer can do all that's needed of them in 20-30 hours a week. It's not quite coasting, but it's not difficult either.
> (Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.)
Too bad all of those totally don't matter. What you're saying here comes down to doing what management wants. And management, above all else, DOES NOT WANT THE STATUS-QUO UPSET. The chairs in management are to be divided according to endless politicking and 5000 meetings for every line in the org chart, the only thing that matters. If any effort is actually successful beyond what was agreed beforehand ... that would undo the "work" of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of management meetings.
In other work drafting design documents, doing interviews, improving existing codebases, mentoring junior ICs (to do the same) ... it's not a design document to create a new successful product on the internet. It's a design document discussing whether component #1823871 of Google maps should be monitored by a Python, C++, Java or Go program, and whether it this monitoring server gets configured using json, yml, chubby, files with strings, protobuf, python (configuration in code, python to configure flags, python to configure startup files, python to change build files, or python read by the program upon startup), Go, Java or Go. Don't forget: 8 page minimum, and you can't have less than 40 reviewers.
This document is then followed by a manager from outside your org deciding that the whole monitoring is being shipped to India, and 3 months later you check on borg ... and surprise! There ISN'T anything monitoring it, as far as you can tell. Your manager assures you your work was not for nothing, but your design document curiously has never been accessed, and everybody you ask (btw: you're quickly told you're not supposed to do that) says management forbade them from looking at your design document.
Later you learn that there isn't a single team in India that actually has access to your document (if you're working long enough at Google and actually know how to check that, which used to be 99%, but now ... perhaps 20%).
A year later, the product takes down all of Google maps, your team's lack of monitoring gets blamed for the outage ... but 10 minutes after you go to your manager with this the postmortem, suddenly, gives you "access denied". Then, you get scheduled for a support checkin where the person doing the support checkin has no idea what it's about.
Of course, what it's really about is that your forced one of the managers in your org to explain to higher ups how your concern is being addressed while still meeting budget constraints ... Which could have upset the status quo (recognizable by "Moderate impact" on your GRAD review) or actually upset the status quo ("Not Enough Impact" on your review). Congratulations!
Articulate, accurate, and simultaneously funny and sad.
These bureaucratic processes have been around for a while, but within the past ~2 years it all became shamelessly overt, and is now explicitly about "business as usual".
Not an umlaut, a diaeresis - it shows that the letter has its own sound (unlike the word "coop", for example).
You'd generally use it for proper nouns (like Brontë or Boötes) and rare loanwords - it doesn't seem very useful for common dictionary words, since anyone who can understand the word itself probably knows how to pronounce it.
Not sure about police officers, but the other professions you named have to complete graduate or post-graduate studies in their field, pass a formal examination, maybe publish a few peer-reviewed papers while architects build a portfolio - this is usually proof enough of their strengths.
Actually, this works in IT as well: if Donald Knuth, Yann LeCun or Zvi Gallil ever decide (however unlikely) to apply to a web shop, they'll probably get waved through on the strength of their credentials. For the self-taught J. Random Hacker, who can't show any of his old code because it's under NDA, there's the interview pipeline.
Technically true, just as if you replace Meta with Amazon, Google Cloud, Etsy, eBay, the local city council, etc. If you don't have a diversified, multi-market, preferably international presence, you're not viable in the long term.
Of course, in the really long term, we're all dead. Meanwhile, the local mom & pop candy shops keep advertising and selling online and making ends meet.
There's actually a word for this: terroir - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir