cletus

20 ms·

121.
by cletus 2y ago
Don't get me started on the home button. I miss it dearly. The UI/UX of a home button is unmatched by any of the replacement gestures. Some of them are just plain bizaree too eg swipe up, right, up to get your apps. The biggest pr
122.
by cletus 2y ago
I'm struggling to see why I'd buy this over a Macbook Air. I have an iPad Air. I use it a lot but generally just to watch Netflix or Youtube. I don't enjoy typing on it at all. I have the Air specifically because it's To
123.
by cletus 2y ago
IME Apple has always been the most honest when it makes performance claims. LIke when they said an Macbook Air would last 10+ hours and third-party reviewers would get 8-9+ hours. All the while, Dell or HP would claim 19 hours and you'
124.
by cletus 2y ago
Google just doesn't have the attention span required for this sort of thing. I was around at Google when Larry Page was pushing the "more wood, fewer arrows" mantra but it never translated to organizational or cultural change
125.
by cletus 2y ago
> Maps is part of the search org Is that true now? It certainly wasn't when I worked there. > Chrome is part of the android org. This only happened in the last month. > I'm basically not counting YouTube ... Youtube reven
126.
by cletus 2y ago
And we arrive at collectivism vs individualism and the tendency of people to privatize gains but socialize losses. Yes, search and ads are the golden goose but so many things contribute to that success. Chrome, for example, is absolutely cr
127.
by cletus 2y ago
Having worked at Google, this is entirely self-inflicted. This once internal now leaked video [1] summed it up pretty well. There is so much process you have to go through to do anything. A lot of it makes sense but it comes at the expense
128.
by cletus 2y ago
The quote I come back to repeatedly is "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" as it perfectly describes the Moderator Problem. There are people who ask questions. You need questions but quest
129.
by cletus 2y ago
Up until 2010 or so I used to be pretty active on SO. It was Jon Skeet, Marc Gravelli then me on the top users. I stopped for a variety of reasons, some of which are completely unrelated to SO but here were several big issues I could see th
130.
by cletus 3y ago
The US spends $30-60 billion a year on agriculture and subisides [1]. This is controversial for all the obvious reasons. Without subsidies we'd waste less food but overproduction of food is an intentional objective of these programs. W
131.
by cletus 3y ago
My big takeaway is that modern build systems are fundamentally broken. Autotools, even Makefiles, are (or can be) incredibly obtuse, even unreadable. If I read this attack correctly, it relied on a payload in a test file (to obfuscate it).
132.
by cletus 3y ago
If the wireless last mile option costs $500/household then you'll get destroyed by a competitor who can come in and offer the same or better service at substantially lower cost. So yes, it does matter. I'm not sure what you m
133.
by cletus 3y ago
The last mile is expensive. Even hooking up the customer to the line running outside their house is expensive. I've seen different customers estimate this at anywhere between $2000 and $5000 per premises. This assumes ~40% customer tak
134.
by cletus 3y ago
Story time: I worked on Google Fiber. I believed in the project and it did a lot of good work but here, ultimately, was the problem: leadership couldn't decide if the future of Internet delivery was wired or wireless. If it was wireles
135.
by cletus 3y ago
Story time: I worked at Facebook and had to work with someone who came from Netflix. He was one of those people who, when he went to a new company, simply tried to reinvent everything he came from with no care or consideration given to what
136.
by cletus 3y ago
It was definitely cultural. The engineering hierarchy was: 1. C++ engineers thought the only real language was C++ 2. Java engineers thought the only real languages were C++ or Java 3. Python engineers either thought the only real languages
137.
by cletus 3y ago
> JSON.parse('[null,null,null]') > (3) [null, null, null] > JSON.parse('[,,,]') Uncaught SyntaxError... Maybe eventually someone realized this was horribly inefficient and added an extra st
138.
by cletus 3y ago
I used Closure at Google after coming from a Java background. I always described it as "Closure puts the Java into JavaScript". The team I was working on found several bugs where live code was removed from the dead code removal to
139.
by cletus 3y ago
> Piper is not a reimplementation of Perforce, by the way. Yes, it is. You are probably confusing Piper, the internal name for the VCS, with Google Piper [1], which is a completely separate and unrelated project. That project seems a clo
140.
by cletus 3y ago
As for Glean, you concede "some semantic understanding". All I know is as of 2 years ago I couldn't do "Find Usages" of a particular C++ method where I could Google cs 6+ years ago. I did spend way more time doing w
141.
by cletus 3y ago
I hope Buck2 is better. Like I said, I have no experience with it. My issue is more organizational. Meta, as a company, in my experience, does not put in sufficient investment to build a mature, robust open source project with few exception
142.
by cletus 3y ago
I've worked for both Facebook and Google so can make informed comments on this with two exceptions: Buck2 came after I left and I'm honestly not sure what sapling is. Is it some Mercurial-like re-implementation a bit like how Goog
143.
by cletus 4y ago
A lot of people don't understand what's going on here. Maybe you haven't worked for a large company but it operates quite differently to a small company. Two things can be true at once: a company can both need to hire and peo
144.
by cletus 4y ago
I left in 2017 and it was still the expectation then but there was a lot of variance in orgs and with particular managers and ICs. For example: I had known at that point people who had been L4 for years. I think 8 years was the longest I en
145.
by cletus 4y ago
The leadership churn you mention is very real. The joke at Google even when I worked there (2017) was every few months you'd get an email saying your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager. Yo
146.
by cletus 4y ago
This isn't new or surprising. Nor is it new. For those unfamiliar, Google engineering levels generally go from L3 (new grad) to L9 IDistinguished SWE). There is an expectation of growth to L5 (Senior SWE). I'm not sure what the f
147.
by cletus 4y ago
Put another way: if AMD (and especially Intel) don't do something about this they're going to get completely eaten alive by ARM. The amount of processing power available in a modern smartphone is truly mind-boggling. I'd love
148.
by cletus 4y ago
I ultimately see space as humanity's ultimate home. Not in the Star Trek or Star Wars sense (because I don't belive FTL communication or travel is possible) but instead as a Dyson Swarm. A Dyson Swarm is a collection of orbitals.
149.
by cletus 4y ago
All these big companies give grade employees on a curve. So, in Meta parlance, only 5-10% of employees can be "Strongly Exceeds Expectations". This is measured across the director level, so units of 100-200 employees. Here's
150.
by cletus 4y ago
We have this notion of historic times that people largely stayed in place. We find evidence repeatedly that this just isn't the case. A good example is the spread of wheat cultivation across Europe. We can get fairly accurate reads on

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