skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're citing examples from a fairly homogenous set of inputs, one that was largely fed by Twitter refugees. The nature of the Fediverse is that it's as disparate as the web itself; you're starting with a fundamentally incorrect premise by referring to "Mastodon" at all. If you're trying to say "Mastodon" is ideologically any one way or the other, you're hosed from the start. It sounds like our political values probably diverge pretty seriously so I won't mourn you not joining the Fediverse, but treating it like a monolith is a common misconception. If you truly care about people challenging their own beliefs, start there.
Taiwan and Singapore did not do extended lockdowns. They had lockdowns, but we could still order food delivered, still go out to buy food or go to the doctor, and we had constant updates on the number of infections, as the rate went down, restrictions were relaxed.
The points you highlight are very valid, but you cannot just say it had nothing to do with remote work.

>Long after Wall Street ordered its bankers back to the office, the California-based lender’s chief executive, Greg Becker, at times worked from Hawaii, president Mike Descheneaux decamped to Florida, chief risk officer Laura Izurieta was based in a suburb of Washington and general counsel Mike Zuckert worked mostly from New York, according to several people close to the bank.

I have noticed quite often that a lot of things to fall through the cracks irrespective of how many meetings you have on zoom. A lot of catch up happens offline in informal conversations. This might be mitigated on an IC level mostly given that a good team might have a well groomed backlog being fed to them. But at a leadership/design level things are still more informal and might take a few years to get to an efficient level. So dismissing that remote work could have led to a gap is probably being very narrow.
The way I read this was the leadership did not handle remote work well and feedback did not flow bidirectionally well across multiple levels. When in person sometimes luck/chance just happens and might be enough to mitigate huge issues.

edit: from the downvotes looks like remote work is an untouchable topic and has nothing wrong with it. /s
what you are saying is, it's an economic decision, which is what I am saying. But you're not recognizing it as an economic decision, you're just saying "food. do it"
Another option is to leave it be and run a speed test to see if it performs as expected. This may result in less runaround if you have a real drive but need to RMA.
That should be true though, if it doesn’t have indexable content whose URL could theoretically be permanent, it shouldn’t be crammed into a web page. Write an application instead.
Something like a secretary to handle standard responses for incoming mail might be useful for many who get lots of unsolicited mails that are not outright spam.

Could be a "Lenny" equivalent for spam, but also a templatized response + smart filing thing. I'd love to have something like that in Gmail. It's too hard to do a good job with manual rules.

Maybe BARD will be integrated in Gmail.
What you both probably want to read about are the following two:

The predominant wisdom is the linear no threshold model - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model

and the counter argument, the radiation hormesis hypothesis - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
Interesting, I blame it on the migratory patterns of the barnacle goose. An opinion of equal value as stated in the article.
A literal example of this is that US Space Shuttles are never launched nor land (except if there was an emergency) on the last and first weeks of a year, and until 2007/2008 (where the software was meticulously tested and fixed in summer of 2007) missions are scheduled to avoid December 31 and January 1 in space. This is a precaution against year-end rollover (YERO) bugs (https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=2699091&page=1).
I'd argue that that doesn't have to be the case. The companies that are failing their junior employees and new hires are doing so not because they are remote/WFH, but because those companies did not invest the energy and resources necessary to be good at remote/WFH. There are plenty of companies that focus on remote work and have no issues with onboarding or failing performance.
test write functionalities in development.

This is a new line.
How would you verify if you don't know the subject matter in the first place?
Warning: wall of text follows!

Tldr; it's a lot of coursework but I've never regretted it.

I'm a TPM now, have worked on aerospace projects with small teams where it helps to be fluent in both sides of the electronics and mechanical design. I've managed multi disciplinary design optimization efforts where there is heavy intersection between code and real-world mechanical factors (writing code for my mechanical designs and writing the backbone for other contributors or translating their system to code). Being able to understand electric motor systems design end to end through the entire chain from control comms to firmware to MOSFETs, electromagnetics, and mechanics has been rewarding for me as well.

In terms of opening opportunities, small hardware startups are where I've been able to have impact, and where there is demand for someone who wants to contribute in both areas. Where I am now as TPM is a fairly limited track and PM is a bad word in some companies. At faang, it seems that software track pays better than tpm or mechanical so that is one item to note.

At larger companies it is a difficult sell for someone who wants to do both at the same time as an IC. Smaller niche companies are more likely to want someone who has the breadth and can help fill in gaps or own a whole project.

The reason I am not a pure SWE is that my passion lies in being able to hold the result in my hands at the end of the day (or week, month, year:)

I'd recommend you try out the machine shop or what is available to you if you go to an engineering college, maybe some robotics projects, mechanical engineering foundation courses, material science courses. See how you like it. I'm sure you will be successful whatever you do. If you do both it's a lot of work but I never regretted it for a second.
>This is on purpose, because otherwise it would lead to proliferation of redundant, potentially crappy and insecure formats on the Web.

In a well-designed datatype system, an image datatype would, for decoding take a compressed image and return a decompressed image. Possibly with streaming support.

It would not be able to do anything else, not having capabilities to anything else than necessary.
If these language models are sufficiently sophisticated, does this start to count as social engineering?
How about the SVB CEO lobbying to reduce risk regulations:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/11/silicon-val...

Or SVB executives mass dumping their shares 2 weeks before collapse:

https://www.newsweek.com/silicon-valley-bank-ceo-sold-millio...

Or SVB executives getting millions in bonuses hours before takeover:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/11/silicon-valley-bank-employee...

as always, the shit rolls downhill.

tired of this clown world.
This article got me wondering: what is the difference between an immigrant and an expat? It seems like immigrant is the term used for someone migrating westward, and expat is the term used for someone migrating from a Western country eastward. For the sake of this definition we're considering North America the western limit of the world and Asia the Eastern limit.

Opinions?
> If anyone has advice on building TZ-distributed teams I would love to hear advice!

You won't love to hear it, because the general way to handle large TZ offsets it to make work async, and it sounds like "mob programing" as you do it is quite sync.

What I've seen work is strong document culture - write docs, leave comments, etc. Have clear expectations on deliverables from the start ("this doc will design service X, impl can start when 3/3 senior engineers approve design by leaving an "I approve" comment). Everyone does their thing, and you don't need to be talking to someone to do it.
Well, if we're going to do that.

Apple has shown that they'd willingly help themselves to your data, while protecting you from others accessing it. Who knows what Apple will do with it? For all we know, iCloud Drive is now E2EE because they've figured out a way to ingest metadata and other information about your file as they store them. I mean, we don't know for sure if it's encrypted before being stored or not. All we know is it is now encrypted if you turn it on and Apple has no access to it. But to say nothing of it before or after. (/tinfoil on)

I'm not a Microsoft apologist, but I don't think they'd need to lie: "No data is stored for any period of time."

Anytime they've done shitty things, they have more or less been caught.

> if they also share the text with third parties

Legally, they have to share whether this data is being shared with third parties. It's about all we can do these days - for all you know, HN is collecting data on your activity and selling it to third parties for extra $. (Unlikely, but if we're gonna put our tinfoil hats on... no one is beyond suspicion! /s)

In any event, I know what it's doing and I'm not under any illusions that this is a privacy issue. I only use it to write things that will end up in public spaces anyways (such as HN, or Reddit). Any of my more private type of writing is done with offline tools.
But… they don’t, really. “SPAs” are just a corruption of the web brought about by people who obsess over replacing end user operating systems with HTML+CSS+JavaScript. Most actual users would be just as happy to install a real native application.
> How can we really call this a private browser

Because (much like the case with Chrome) most people use a privacy-respecting nonprofit fork rather than the main product.
This is a good point, and I upvoted it.

AI tools do redistribute the ability to produce art, which might otherwise tend to be limited to a lucky few who get the right education and training.

The problem, however, is that without a professional class, fields tend to drop in stature, and whole fields of human endeavour begin to seem less consequential. This is important to the self-respect argument I outlined above.

I recall an Onion article entitled something like "Area man asks friend if he knows how to get any doctoring work," about a man who (apparently) sees conducting surgery and doing odd-job home repairs as roughly equivalent.

Something like a "doctoring work" market is on its way for the artworld, and in the process, it will dramatically change the social significance of artists, the social stature of artists, and, more generally, the possiblity of making a defensible 'moat' around one's living as an artist.

The big beneficiaries of this process, aside from Susan, who will suddenly be able to write that novel, will be the guys selling Susan her novel, one token at a time.

Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I genuinely think this will make Susan's novel less meaningful, both to her and to her readership, as well as making novels in general less meaningful.

All the while lining the pockets of, inter alia, my former employer.[1] I think this is.... not a good change?

[1] Disclosure: I benefitted financially from the advent of contemporary ML. It made my career, frankly. It stands poised to unmake the careers of many of my art friends.
I would go further even and say that for any team that doesn't all do just one thing, developing the spec is half the work.

Once all the interconnections are figured out and the mechanical engineers know what needs to hold what shape at what temperature and pressure, and the metallurgists know what chemicals will be touching the metal, and the power connectors to sensors are all numbered so you know how many you need and where they'll go, and the communications lines with what format and inputs/outputs they'll talk to at what voltage... to me a spec is the document that tells everyone where their little part needs to fit.

You have to do that downstream and collect it back upstream for larger projects, since the person doing it never has enough expertise. And then the spec negotiation between teams that don't really necessarily know what constraints each other has which need to be resolved so that people know what to design.

It's frustrating but actually writing down a detailed spec really does enable a lot of other stuff to happen. I'm sometimes blocked as an individual because of a team that's in my path but which isn't really in my field. Say, they do optics and I design the optical sensor so I need to know the optical power to expect but they have to do simulations and get information from the chemists and semiconductor test engineers first. I need a spec for what they want -- I need to know how low the light level is, how much noise there is, and lots of other little details too.

I don't know if that qualifies as "terribly meticulous" but in my experience skipping the spec step often means wasting an incredible amount of time solving the wrong problem.
25 years of being told I should switch, and I still i never GET the time to learned curl's syntax! don't worry, i'm sure i'll wget to it soon
“We are not trying to avoid every broken leg possible.”

Spoken like someone in s country with an affordable healthcare system.
I purchased four different mattresses until I settled on one. Most major brands have very easy return policies so shop around and try out a few before settling.
How hard could it be to just post a list of what's available via the service? Even the lists being shared are pretty vague in terms of app descriptions. Some look downright sketchy.

I mean, what exactly is the value prop here?
You got me!

I live in a yurt in mongolia.
So, there is money to be made from LLMs, there will be advertising injected into the models responses etc.

It's really the early days, but there's no way energy consumption won't grow exponentially now there is potential for earning money.
TIL a large prehistoric elephant is somehow closely associated with bondage porn. Will the wonders never cease.
> If you struggle with Linux, go watch YouTube videos where Linus Torvalds talks for a couple hours. I swear the next time you open a command line or work within a slipshod hideous UI that I guess just works, or something, you'll somehow feel this uncanny relief because you know Linus.

Doesn't make any sense , Linus Torvalds doesn't work on making command line or UI, I can understand if this was about writing kernel drivers or writing programs calling kernel API ,
The command line and other UI are much abstracted away from the kernel no?
5 people in one meeting, done 2-3 times per day, for 4 days per week => 40-60 people
One counter argument to this take is:

If cube farms or offices with doors are so much better, where are the companies without open-offices and outsized performance financials.

I suspect most employees just aren't that productive for it to matter much.

There is probably some small percentage who are more productive, and even fewer who are much more productive, but their needs are overwhelming by larger business decisions, and fads in management and design.
Because having said defense mechanisms without waving your guns around like they do in the South is pretty useless.
I told my father tonight I felt like there was no reason to live, in the present situation, even though I had enough to support my loved ones for the rest of their lives. He actually said, surprisingly to me, that my worth was not just money or being able to financially take care of people, but actually something to do with the love he and my family had for me (which is ridiculous and something I never felt true, and definitely never heard from him). So forgive me that I'm in a complicated place, but I have never believed we should be judged by our capitalist success, rather by our freedom and creativity. I'm probably projecting too much on this conversation. But I can't relinquish the belief that without an unguided, open path towards either making art or money-as-substitute, there would literally no reason to wake up in the morning. And when I look around I see many people who feel the same. Except for some zombies who worship the death of all that is human. In all of this. As it's always been... since the Russian revolution, since the birth of Futurism and fascism. The endless parade of lazy youth, not the awesome youth who paint and smoke in cafes, but their evil counterpart who reject argument. Here we are: The dumb 1933 futurists are backing GPT as if it's the new jet fighter. Fascist without knowing it. Murdering themselves without realizing it. Thinking they're progress.
>western toolchains

Talk about a distorted view of the world. These toolchains are packed full of eastern contributions.
We signed a contact, but they was unable to pay me either way. Yes, we had a working MVP.

Thanks for the answer :)
The most important point is missing. The reason for Meta layoffs is that metaverse is not getting enough traction. They wasted billions and they blame engineers for WFH? It's nonsense.

Moreover, with multiple rounds of layoffs nobody's gonna join Meta. Why joining? Getting 500k "salary" with a risk of being laid off in the next 6 months and spending the next 6 months looking for a job? It's not 500k, folks. It's a fake 500k carrot for naive bunnies.

I had offer from Meta, and I am so happy that I didn't go there. The company is just unstable, going downwards spiral. They have to pay me a really good sign up bonus with a good vesting schedule so I consider them, maybe, one day.
"including turning down a job at Microsoft in the nineties
I can still see my dad shaking his head about turning down Microsoft…"

That was quite a while ago... Probably should forgive and forget that one. Forgiving the disappointment makes mental space for new opportunities.

I agree non-conformists start the really visible flashy companies. A new aircraft maintenance company can make bank, but it doesn't really grab headlines.
a healthy youtuber exposed himself to a black widow bite for science because he was doing it with all sorts of other venomous insects

he stopped the channel and stream for a week because he was seriously ill and went to the emergency room one of the days

"nothing to fear" is not really correct
> Is this typical for CS undergraduate degrees because you get to pick your own classes?

Yes. For example, here's MIT's computer science and engineering degree requirements. After math and basic programming and engineering fundamentals, it's all electives.

http://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/computer-science-engine...
Thanks, @mjtechguy. The program reads any files within the selected directory and copies the data to either a single output file or prints it in the terminal. It does not differentiate between file types.
Just give it another 10 to 20 years and the next generation of the workforce will introduce cubicles as a monumental innovation in office design technology.
If you do the quoting inside a ChatGPT prompt then it will itself be hijacked with prompt injection
For some reason, this evokes very hilarious imagery.
The problem w mob programming is that measured purely on a man-hour cost it sounds extremely stupid and expensive for a company. It has always sounded to me like a hare brained idea that a dev shop came up with to sell more man hours per feature delivered.
which was a safe space instance

What does that mean?
Made has great classes for kids every Saturday; highly recommend.
It may not be common in your part of the world, it is extremely common in the former USSR (maybe because it was called "the prison of nations" or something to that effect). I am honestly surprised that anyone would have trouble understanding the difference between ethnicity and nationality as it seems very obvious to me and everyone I've ever met.

> Consider the way Russians-in-exile perceive themselves in the current geopolitical context.

Those who I've spoken to identify themselves as Russian citizens temporarily in exile, whilst I am ethnically Russian who has no connection to the country at all. I don't think these are the same.
> mob programming

That sounds... horrendous. I really enjoy "pairing" when chasing down bugs, but doing that when trying to write new features would be nigh-on impossible.
LOL. One person in your team was a manager on an IC salary, and your manager was a director on a manager salary.
TL;DR: every dictatorship inevitably follows the same path of self-destruction. How many generations should pass for people worldwide to realise there is no viable path to long-term prosperity than a democratic social order?
Or just chronic inflammation. I’m not an expert so take all of this with a grain of salt, but the danger of high powered long wavelength radiation sources is not that they damage DNA directly via ionization, but they deliver heat energy deeper inside the body than e.g. a laser (which will just give you skin burns), the same way that a microwave oven heats food on the inside not just on the skin.

Clearly if you are standing next to a high enough power transmitter, you will be cooked and die. At lower power you may survive but with severe burns. The effect of sub-acute doses is not clear, but it’s certainly not solid reasoning that just because your cell phone is not causing cancer that there isn’t a higher chronic dose that will. There is a space of power between “cell phone” and “admitted to hospital with burns”.
This is good fanfiction, but doesn't really reflect reality. Employees have mostly gone along with RTO/hybrid strategies and there hasn't been a mass exodus where it's happened, especially in this job market. Most people are probably assuming RTO is a matter of when, not if, for most companies anyhow. And remember that 40,000+ tech workers have been laid off in the past 6 months, and the specter of ChatGPT is lurking over the future of knowledge work for many.

There are certainly "single issue workers" who will quit over non-remote, and more power to them, but it seems silly to think that Google, Meta, or Amazon would have trouble hiring workers with a 3-day-a-week office policy, especially at their top-of-market salaries.
Been there, done that: https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-metas-push-to-solve-the-...
Futurama had every single problem of the 20th century, just translated forward a millennium.
Here's an attempt at quantifying

Junior staff need constant help, but senior staff need space that's hard to achieve at an office. Studies show people take 30m-1.5hr to dial in for deep work.

So, imagine a "light" office day:

- 8a drive, coffee, etc

- 9a sit down

- 10a standup mtg

- 11:50a team lunch roundup

- 2p random meeting

- 5p drive home

At best, that leaves 3 hours of deep work: 11a-12, 3p-5p. Heaven forbid someone swings by your desk during that period!

WFH gets the 2 commute hours back, gives scheduling control to bookend breakfast & lunch with whatever distracting meetings, an async standup removes the sync one's disruptions, and a lot of the desk traffic is gone.

So, WFH done right, ~doubles the amount of deep work by the more effective staff
Those who can afford to immigrant to western countries are not poor people at home country. If they failed in new country, they have option to go back to own country where they will have good quality of life as compare to new country.