It’s going to be a glorious disaster. Didn’t they slash the initial IPO estimate about six months after announcing it and shortly before the whole API thing? I haven’t cared enough to follow it closely, especially since abandoning the platform, but it really seems like the stakeholders wanting to cash in on a sinking ship before it finally goes down.
I know that’s a popular saying, and there is some truth to it, but it’s not the whole story. Encryption protocols used by the intelligence services, for example, are highly secure and not open source, while open source encryption protocols have themselves become vulnerable to attack.
Enigma is a primary example of this. While at the time it was considered unbreakable (by both German and Allied intelligence), the knowledge of the physical and logical operation of the Enigma device was key in breaking the code. Codebreaking usually relies on a combination of intelligence gathering and mathematical analysis, and open sourcing it solves a big part of that picture.
I’m saying this as an old school cypherpunk - I’ve since gotten out of it in favor of math I find more interesting - and a user and advocate for technologies like PGP. I used PGP for a long time on many of my emails, and I even had the PGP in Four (later, Three) Lines of Perl as my email sig to show how stupid it was to declare encryption a weapon for export purposes. What I’m saying is that I’m an ally.
I’ve also gone long past the point in my career where I feel comfortable with categoricals like that, and I had a few minutes to type up a reply that will be read by fewer than ten people.
In the US, there is no law or regulation. It’s decided company by company. We usually distinguish between vacation days and sick days, and the number of hours for each accumulate throughout the year based on the number of hours worked, with more senior employees having a higher ratio (meaning they accumulate hours faster). The total number of hours are generally capped (eg, they can’t go above 240), but they do carry over year to year. Some companies (and I believe this is required in some states, like California) must pay out the remaining vacation hours when the employee leaves the company, so that if you leave with 120 hours of vacation on the books, you get three weeks vacation pay in addition to any additional severance package. That does not hold for accumulated sick leave. These are both considered “paid time off” (PTO) because employees are paid their salary/hourly pay. When I left my last position, I did so with 240 hours of vacation that they had to pay out, which was in addition to my hiring bonus and moving allowance at my new employer. It came in handy.
Other companies do what’s called “unlimited paid time off.” This means there’s no pre-existing cap and that vacation and sick time get bundled together. It’s all at the manager’s discretion. Depending on the company, though, it can be a disadvantage. Corporate culture can be such that people are discouraged from taking time off, and there’s no vacation pay out if you leave, because you don’t have set hours on the books. Americans in general take long weekend or week-long vacations, sometimes up to two weeks. Depending on the role (and the nature of the vacation), they’ll still work some hours, because that’s often the cultural expectation.
The worst jobs - and this means the majority of service jobs - allow for either zero PTO hours, or will routinely deny employee requests to use them. The above applies to corporate jobs (eg engineers and designers), union jobs, and government work. The person making your pizza or telling you where the shoe department is probably doesn’t get those “benefits,” and if they do, they have to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops (including facing the wrath of their manager) to exercise them.
I’d like the US to have legislation to force minimum levels of PTO, and I’d like to have the culture change so one can say “I’m going to be in Greece for four weeks but will call you when I get back” rather than saying “I have stage three liver cancer and will be getting my organs replaced but I can make the meeting at ten.”
Manager at a FAANG here. Three days of sick leave (per year I’m guessing) is fucking insanely low. Just a flu will take someone out for a week easily. If you force them to come in or else take unpaid time off/risk being fired you’re going to a) get someone who is marginally productive at best and b) likely to get more coworkers sick, causing a bigger slowdown and costing the company more money. You also come off like the person who writes the memo that 40% of sick time is taken on a Monday or a Friday.
You’re Colin Robinson, the energy vampire of your office.
This the order in which you should try to access papers:
That’s the thing. I wouldn’t be disappointed to hear Tucker Carlson saying something like that. I mean, it’d probably count as the nicest thing he’s said all season. Same with whatever that Fox version of the view is.
But Whoopi used to have heart.
What we need is a vaccine for affluenza.
TiVo was an early digital video recorder that dominated the market for a while. Broadcasters brought lawsuits against the company saying the recording of videos was violating copyright laws, and advertisers hated it because you could skip commercials. TiVo argued in court that they weren’t pirating, but just time shifting the content. Similar arguments were used for people who ripped rented dvds and so on.
TiVo has entered the chat.
It is absolutely infuriating when you see this and put it next to cases filed against people like Trump and Gaetz.
I know. I’m old enough that I worked through the Y2K problem. Not me literally - I was working on a different class of systems - but I literally sat next to COBOL devs who were paid to work on green screens on an IBM midframe for more than half their time to get rid of the two digit date representations on systems operating cellular communications as well as the ones that ran sales and services for a large telecom company. It was my first real job in the industry, and I remember the Gateway type computers sold at Sears with the “Y2K Compatible!” stickers on the front.
My phrasing was both tongue in cheek and a callback to another problem that similarly had some people dreading the end of the world with nuclear reactors running amok and planes crashing from the sky.
In any case, he had a bigger impact on the world than most humans ever will, and going out peacefully at 85 really doesn’t sound all that bad.
It would have just been really funny if his gravestone could have listed his dates as Born June 6 1936 - Died December 13 1901.
TFW when all of your bugs are like cockroaches that run away from the light but hide in the dark where you can’t see them.
This is an actual OMG moment.
The next Y2K style problem will happen on this date, January 19, at pi o’clock in 2038. I was really hoping he’d get to see that.
He was ironically taken too soon.
I am selecting the files I wish to transfer and the ones I do not. It is my bandwidth. I also use reader mode as an accessibility feature.
The oldest crpg I ever played was called advent, because the Vax computers could only use 6 characters for file names and so the people who ported it couldn’t use the actual name “adventure.” It was basically the same as the game infocom shipped as Zork.
Apparently the original implementation was on the PDP-10 in 1976. There might have been a couple other games that predated it by a year or two, but adventure was the big one in my opinion because it led (eventually) to the creation of the infocom text based game engine and a whole line of games ranging from hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy to leather goddesses of Phobos.
The main part you need to pick up is being able to establish the mental hooks around the ideas that are central to programming. Do you know how you can watch a choreography session and see the dancers just pick up the moves as they’re described/demonstrated? That’s because they’ve learned the language of dance. It’s an entire (physical) vocabulary. It’s the semantics of dance.
What you need to do is do that with programming. There’s a number of getting started with books and videos, but you’re going to want them to learn the fundamentals of not just a language but of programming.
If you’re talking about using other people’s functions (like in an api), then the function name should give you a clue about what it does. The cool thing about functions is that you don’t have to know how they’re doing their thing, just what they’re doing. If you have the source code, you will find you remember more if you use comments to make notes for yourself (it engages more of your brain than just reading).
If your problem is writing your own code using functions, start out more slowly. Write a program that’s just a giant block of linear code. Once that’s working, then take a look as to how to break it down into functions. If you have a block of code that sorts a list, for example, and you had to copy and paste it into three different areas, that would mean it should be a function.
Use comments very often as you’re going. Before you write a block, write a comment about what it’s supposed to do. You’ll start to see some generalities, which will be you learning programming, not just a language.
One of my first computer jobs was working in a student computer lab at my undergraduate university. This was back in the mid 90s-ish.
We had three types of computers - windows machines running 3.1 or whatever was current then, Macs who would all do a Wild Eep together when they rebooted en masse, and Sun X Windows dumb terminals that were basically just (obviously) unix machines for all intents and purposes. This was back when there were basically like 5 websites total, and people still hadn’t heard of Mosaic.
So everyone wanted the windows and Mac boxes, and only took the xterms when there was nothing else open. I was the primary support person for them since none of the other people wanted to learn Unix and I was the only CS major.
The X boxes suffered from two main learning hurdles. One was that backspaces were incorrectly mapped into some escape key sequence, and the other is that it would drop you from (I think) pine into emacs as a mail editor as soon as you hit it. 90% of my time was telling people how to exit emacs. It was that, putting more paper into the printers, and teaching myself more programming than I was learning in classes.
What I’m saying is that their pre-IPO valuation dropped by 2/3 before the additional user drop post-Spez closing everything down because he literally said he’s trying to do what Elon is doing to Twitter.
To be even more clear, what Elon is doing to Twitter has cratered them from the $44B that he paid for it (which was at the time probably overvaluing them by about 10-15%) to what was in April (as I recall) a $15B company as per the write down from their major bank investor. It is now widely considered a $4B company post the X transition and I think they’re still somehow bleeding valuation. Even that might be generous, since it has come out that Dorsey only kept his $1B stake in the company under the agreement that they’d buy his shares from him at the original $54.20 offer, so you can count that as yet more debt - this time for a quarter of the worth of the company. The Saudis also agreed not to sell and hold another $1.5B iirc, so if they have a similar deal Twitter is a $4B company with an additional outstanding and not on the books debt of $2.5-3B.
Spez did what he did because they crashed from a massively overvalued IPO estimate - what the bank that will be writing their IPO expects the company is worth - to about a third of what they thought. That’s why Reddit freaked out - Spez was watching his (hypothetical) money being set on fire. He really thought he was going to be the next Silicon Valley multimillionaire based on that site. His attempt at Eloning has not, based on anything I’ve read, increased the value of the site.
I think most of the cratering is because, as we all know, the money went away. That’s the same cause of the 500k layoffs in the tech field or whatever we’re up to. Literally everyone but Apple has cut tens of thousands of people because the covid boom and the free money went away. He’s still chasing the dragon and lashing out in a panic.
Spez thought he was going to be the next Elon. He’s going to be the next Tom MySpace if he’s lucky at all, and even that is more than he deserves.
On social media sites, the users are the ones who create the value. The company provides the structure to expose that through developing the software and the algorithms, and obviously paying to host everything. But unlike, say, a newspaper, everything that makes the site worth visiting at all is the community.
The moderation is the product. That’s it, 100%. When they get confused about that - that is, when they lose sight of the fact that 100% of their real value is being created for free, and their job is to just get it to people - their community starts to fall apart. A fall in KPIs, pre-IPO, is deadly. I would be shocked if they go through with it at this point, because they’re going to get killed. spez needs to show ballooning numbers to justify anyone institutional investors staying involved.
They should sell themselves to anyone willing to write a check at this point.
Just as a note, losing 2% (and there’s a lot of different and more meaningful KPIs) is a really big deal if you’re supposed to be growing double digits. The ridiculous valuations built into tech companies is based on massive growth, not current numbers. If you’re expected to grow at 30% and instead you lose 2%, that’s a massive loss. Reddit, last I checked (before the rexit) had come down something like 66% in the estimated IPO valuation. That’s why they freaked out and basically banned third party apps in favor of controlling advertising and subscriptions. They said they want to emulate what Twitter is doing.
If they do go through with their going public, the short side is going to kill them. I think the appeal of Reddit is different than Facebook and that they’re going to do a slow run of Digg and MySpace.
I’m blocked from the article, but as someone who used to work in the industry I’m going to hazard what I think is a safe guess, and which is an under discussed aspect of intelligence.
If you put 5 cctv cameras in the worst parts of the city, you can pay someone $20/hour and have them monitored 24/7. The person’s one job is to call in a crime when it occurs and vector in police. As long as they’re not terminally addicted to instagram, you have that area covered.
Bump that up to 10,000 cameras and you run into a problem. You’re not going to hire 2000 people to watch them. You’re going to try to come up with something clever, maybe, that allows you to track back to a crime that was otherwise reported, but real time responses are out the window.
Even those that supported the development of the levels of surveillance that Snowden exposed have to acknowledge that looking at everything means you’re looking at nothing. The signal to noise ratio goes to absolute shit. It’s actually worse than useless because you’re thinking you’re monitoring, but you’re really not because you’re drowning in noise. It’s like they teach every yuppie in B school - if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. There’s a known phenomenon in defense and intelligence to center in on the gee whiz aspects of technology and lose sight of the actual mission.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist and as much as I dislike the current government of Israel, I don’t think this was some kind of nefarious plot. I think it was a massive fuck up thats going to have a body count in the tens of thousands and that will change the history of the region for a decade.
I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.
First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.
That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.
Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.
Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.