abvdasker

13 ms·

91.
by abvdasker 5y ago
In retrospect it looks like wishful thinking, but for a while I held out hope that the transition to white collar remote work during COVID would be permanent so all that empty office space could be converted into residential. Might have gon
92.
by abvdasker 5y ago
Yeah except you get paid half as much and have to wear a button down to work.
93.
by abvdasker 5y ago
Yeah not much background in this article. Affirm is a "buy now, pay later" service (BNPL). It's basically just personal loans with the addition of a fee charged to merchants (on the premise that providing financing will attra
94.
by abvdasker 5y ago
In the case of the Uber autonomous car which killed a pedestrian in 2018, Uber reached a settlement with the victim's family and faced no criminal charges (I think the answer to your question is clearly yes). The "driver" beh
95.
by abvdasker 5y ago
I hope you're right, but this feels like an instance of the hot hand fallacy. In a historical sense, nuclear weapons haven't existed for very long. 76.56 years without a nuclear attack is less than the life expectancy of one US ad
96.
by abvdasker 5y ago
Even if what you're saying is true, I don't see the problem with everyone working less in the remote world. If everyone secretly wants to work less maybe we should all just work less. If we collectively need an excuse like remote
97.
by abvdasker 5y ago
This is the fundamental nature of bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies.
98.
by abvdasker 5y ago
Reminds me of Ross Ulbricht getting busted for running Silk Road. If you're running the largest black market for drugs in human history, why in the world would you stay in San Francisco???
99.
by abvdasker 5y ago
That’s a wildly impractical position to take and isn’t really true in my experience. I spent several years at a seed stage startup where it was me on backend and one other engineer on mobile. We would specify a JSON API and then could work
100.
by abvdasker 5y ago
I've also noticed this trend, but I never see it discussed or talked about within tech or without. It feels like the second renaissance in computing brought on by the smartphone is petering out. Maybe it's because I'm cynical
101.
by abvdasker 5y ago
What if they just passively or inadvertently encouraged it? It’s entirely possible that the algorithms Facebook has used to prioritize content highlight inflammatory or violent content. Maybe in the process of maximizing attention they simu
102.
by abvdasker 5y ago
I tend to think acknowledging the existence of hateful beliefs is a good and rational thing, but maybe that's just me.
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by abvdasker 5y ago
Second Life allowed for a lot of the NSFW content and interactions that people tend to enjoy both in entertainment and in real life (this is also true of VRChat to some extent). Metaverse will be a sanitized, sterile project for children. F
104.
by abvdasker 5y ago
> Denial of the science of intelligence differences, the relevance of intelligence in life outcomes and how heritable it is. > Belief without evidence that black/white racial differences in outcome are completely due to modern sy
105.
by abvdasker 5y ago
The very same article I linked to suggests yours is a minority view among those who have attended college: > When it comes to their own experiences with higher education, an earlier Center survey found that the vast majority of college g
106.
by abvdasker 5y ago
I'll risk making this a partisan issue and say the anti-intellectual and anti-science bent seems increasingly prevalent among Republicans like Mike Parson and their constituencies. One of the most shocking statistics I've seen rec
107.
by abvdasker 5y ago
I wonder if the government ever looks at the laughable compensation of its employees as a security risk. Every time I see salary numbers — even for very specialized and prestigious jobs — I’m shocked at how little they make.
108.
by abvdasker 5y ago
This is a solved problem. Just do what most American cities do with other natural monopolies like utilities: use careful price controls to cap margins and slow rate increases. You don't need to invent some esoteric market-based solutio
109.
by abvdasker 5y ago
In America we can get unanimous support to provide healthcare for CIA agents suffering from a disease that doesn’t exist, but giving free healthcare to regular people is politically unthinkable. https://www.collins.senate.gov&#x
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by abvdasker 5y ago
> When they have dreams for the world, they dream of new versions with higher mandates and bigger budgets. (Think socialism.) This sentence was a red flag in terms of the author’s credibility. The wealthy educated class the author genera
111.
by abvdasker 5y ago
I'm glad you put "dissident" in quotes. USAID is notoriously rife with CIA plants and many CIA operatives use the organization as cover, which implies that a nation targeting its members would have a lot more justification th
112.
by abvdasker 5y ago
This is a story which was likely written at the behest of the publisher as a pre-release book review. Harden's participation -- and her own book by the sound of it -- is explicitly political. To read between the lines a bit more one ca
113.
by abvdasker 5y ago
A fundamentally semantic argument like this seems mostly irrelevant to me. It's like calling Google or Facebook advertising services, which might technically be true but isn't usefully descriptive. Using the author's logic yo
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by abvdasker 5y ago
I didn’t know that. It sort of has the effect of sounding like the voice of amorphous global capital is speaking directly to you and also that global capital writes at about the level of a high school senior.
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by abvdasker 5y ago
> When invited speeches from people such as Christine Lagarde, then head of the International Monetary Fund, were cancelled after student activists accused her of complicity in “imperialist and patriarchal systems”, the response was a co
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by abvdasker 5y ago
This looks similar to a very entertaining game I played a while ago called Orwell. It’s mostly text based and simulates the experience of being an intelligence/signals analyst in a dystopian surveillance state.
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by abvdasker 5y ago
There are probably some generalizable differences between software engineers who work for intelligence agencies vs private sector engineers. The most significant factor being that government engineers need to be able to get a security clear
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by abvdasker 5y ago
Hard to find much sympathy for the wealthy landowners who use violence to clear poor people out of their vacation homes. This is an obvious systemic breakdown where the solution will be either tougher laws against squatting or better public
119.
by abvdasker 5y ago
Shouldn’t Stripe be big enough at this point to have some leverage as a customer?
120.
by abvdasker 5y ago
Hard to outcompete such dramatic cost savings. An engineer India is going to cost a tiny fraction of one in the Bay Area. Not sure that's a winnable competition unless you accept a massive pay cut.

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