Willish42

15 ms·

61.
by Willish42 2y ago
> I recently read Graeber’s book “the Dawn of Everything” and it bent the truth so much every which way to get to his POV that I won’t read another book by him. Do you mind elaborating on why this is the case? I've read and liked so
62.
by Willish42 2y ago
Fine, I'll bite. Here's the retraction statement, which I read in full. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014148117 Some key quotes (emphasis added via italics ) > Despite this correction, our w
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by Willish42 2y ago
Yeah... I'm not even Australian and this being some sort of indie OS build made by or for indigenous Australians was my first guess at what this was. I had a similar concern but you stated it way better than I could've. Thanks for
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by Willish42 2y ago
OK fine, this might be one of the best use cases for LLMs that I've seen. The output is pretty witty and impressive for the low cost of some basic scraping infra and a really short but effective prompt ( https://github.com&#x
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by Willish42 2y ago
> which, unlike "systemic racism", is actually real If you truly think the concept of systemic racism does not exist, your warped perspective is probably beyond saving. The term itself dates back to the 60s and has a long histo
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by Willish42 2y ago
> I don't buy the narrative that Google is cracking down on employee activism. Seriously? As somebody who's followed this stuff closely there's loads of historical precedent here for assuming exactly that. Including with
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by Willish42 2y ago
Anecdotally, I've heard this is the case at more than one major tech firm, and will likely have caught on since many of the same companies already laid off many recruiters during "difficult decisions for the very harsh economic en
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by Willish42 2y ago
Thanks for the link. I also took the term as clearly being used to describe the dynamic between managers and the engineers / coding "class" within a company. At Google, those lines are admittedly probably a lot blurrier, but
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by Willish42 2y ago
I couldn't agree more. I have rewatched the prequels and still enjoy them. Meant more that at the time I was young and wasn't aware of the backlash. Now I'm older and still don't care :) The Prequels Strike Back [wiki li
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by Willish42 2y ago
> And in my next newsletter, I'm going to walk you through how a very specific kind of managerial mindset has poisoned Silicon Valley, making career failures unfathomably rich while your favorite tech products decay. I look forward
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by Willish42 2y ago
oh man, TI-BASIC was awesome!! My first programming language, and funny enough due to how the programs worked, a relatively useful trove of "open-source" code to learn from. I remember essentially cramming several different modifi
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by Willish42 3y ago
I found the wallpaper used in the article picture, in case anybody else was curious (turns out it's a League of Legends fanart which I'm not too familiar with but was hoping this was a cool JRPG I hadn't tried yet or somethin
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by Willish42 3y ago
I completely agree but I will say that as somebody who intellectually understands that principle, overwork and burnout are still insanely common and arguably even rewarded in some work cultures / tech in general, and I screw this up
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by Willish42 3y ago
Some big tech organizations basically do this without the pay. Essentially in some FAANG corps, you have to prove having worked at L+1 while still at L to get promoted to L+1. In my biased / personal experience, the veracity of such a
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by Willish42 3y ago
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-there-so-many-bad-b... link for the lazy
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by Willish42 3y ago
Reading about this game in the late 90s when the N64 was out, it had this insane allure and lore to it that other Nintendo games lacked outside of Zelda and maybe Pokemon. This game got me into emulation and retro gaming at a very young age
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by Willish42 3y ago
This article was very uninformative for the subject / claim it's making. I found https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/05/glasses-e... to be a much better read, recently written, on e
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by Willish42 3y ago
Might be just me, but I'm getting transient page load failures for the page, might be getting a "hug of death". https://web.archive.org/web/20231102190919/https://open.mozi...
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by Willish42 3y ago
This and the suggested article after it [1] were easily the most depressing things I've read since Uninhabitable Earth many years ago Every time I read the "real" scientific outlook on climate change it's so disturbing I
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by Willish42 3y ago
aha, so THIS must be the real reason people like Redfin can make money off of giving you a "digital realtor" rather than FSBO uploads alongside the MLS listings. Makes sense, monopoly / oligopoly working as intended. I knew t
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by Willish42 3y ago
I'm probably way too late for this comment to not get buried, but in my experience 99% of homeschooled or "unschooled" kids growing up in the US around me had parents who were obsessed with avoiding secular education on thing
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by Willish42 3y ago
Dumb, uninformed question here, but are there not some sort of For Sale By Owner systems that cut into the huge percents in closing costs? Or is the issue that you have to pay the buyers' realtor fees too and that's unavoidable? I
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by Willish42 3y ago
Totally. Sometimes [Hanlon's Razor]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor ) applies too -- often times the easiest thing to do is pile on without refactoring anything. And what makes sense in the scope of
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by Willish42 3y ago
> I think if you claim that this makes Apple evil then you would also need to argue that most of capitalism is evil. I mean, surely a mixed bag, and I still participate in it regardless, but pretty much, yeah. https://www.reut
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by Willish42 3y ago
I'm reminded of that one quote from a letter of some author [paraphrasing, and I've seen it (mis-)attributed to Mark Twain and too many people to look the real quote up] "Apologies for the length, I did not have time to write
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by Willish42 3y ago
Yeah, Apple customers tend to also just "trust Apple" and get whatever the recommended product is for their price point. Half the reason I find this troubling is ewaste, the other half is I'm sick of having to try to explain
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by Willish42 3y ago
I'll admit "evil" is a stretch but I was thinking in terms of the amount of e-waste this causes due to insufficient RAM hurting the longevity of a $~2k+ computer e.g. https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights&#
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by Willish42 3y ago
Speculating, but I'd wager it's to clear out existing inventory by phasing out the old chips on other SKUs over time. E.g., you start with the expensive Macbook Pro models when you have fewer M3 chips in production, since those wi
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by Willish42 3y ago
And yet _still_ 8GB of RAM as the baseline. It's probably as profitable as it is evil / misleading.
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by Willish42 3y ago
Consumption taxes do still tend to have disproportionate effects on those at the bottom ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_tax#Savings_effect ), but there's more logic to step 2 if gas prices are increased

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