Discussion systems all the way down :-). This is a fair assessment of the github issues system. I suspect that because git(1) can be a change control system for anything there is never any hope of making an effective issue tracker for a particular thing it is being used to manage change on. The choice the project made to allow the developers to determine when something was an issue is essentially adding a semantic layer on top of issues that customizes it for this particular corpus of change management.
Yup. Pretty much everything seems better when you're being nostalgic. And that is singularly due to the human tendency to forget the bad parts and remember only the good ones (it's a solid self care strategy).
I had fond memories of programming my CP/M machine back in the day, built a re-creation and was painfully aware of how limiting a 25 line by 80 character display could be. Nostalgia, remembering the good times, reality some things really sucked too.
Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
Back in the early days of the web and SGML, the focus was reversed, which is to say "web" sites would just publish content and the "user" could apply what ever style they liked to get a presentation that worked for them. This infuriated web site authors who had their own idea about how their web site should look and act on your display. You were the consumer and they presented and if you didn't like it go somewhere else. You can still see vestiges of that with things like "use this font to show things" Etc.
So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
Y'know, the thing which you did is probably the best way to make use out of nostalgia.
Like of course you had your CP/M machine and it had its restrictions but you are seeing them now with the added information of the current stage
There were also things that you liked too and still like and they may be better than somethings in current time
So you can then take things that you like and add it to modern or remove previous restrictions by taking access to modern upgrades.
> So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)
I think the problem's more so spiritual. The social contract is sort of falling off in most countries. So there is a nostalgia for the previous social contracts and the things which were with them like the old internet because to be honest the current monopolistic internet does influence with things like lobbying and chrony capitalism to actively break that social contract via corrupt schemes.
People want to do something about it, but speaking as a young guy, we didn't witness the old era so we ourselves are frustrated too but most don't create manifesto's due to it and try to find hobbies or similar things as we try to find the meaning of our life and role in the world
But for the people who have witnessed the old internet, they have that nostalgia to end up to and that's partially why they end up creating a manifesto of sorts themselves.
The reality of the situation to me feels like things are slipping up in multiple areas and others.
Do you really feel that the govt. has best interests for you, the average citizen?
Chances are no, So this is probably why liberterian philosophy is really spreading and the idea of freedom itself.
Heck I joined linux and the journey behind it all because I played a game and it had root level kernel access and I realized that there really was no way to effectively prove that it wasn't gone (it was chinese company [riot] so I wasn't sure if I wanted it)
I ended up looking at linux and then just watched enough videos until I convinced myself to use it one day and just switched. But Most people are really land-locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, even tiny nuances can be enough for some.
using Linux was the reason why I switched from trying to go from finance to computer science. I already knew CS but I loved finance too but In the end I ended up picking CS because I felt like there were chances of making real impact myself which were more unique to me than say chartered accountant.
So my point is, I am not sure if I would even be here if I had even the slightest of nuances. Heck, I am not even much of a gamer but my first distro was nobara linux which focused on gaming because I was worried about gaming or worried about wine or smth. So I had switched to nobara.
Looking now, I say to others oh just use this or that and other things and see it as the most obvious decisions sometimes but by writing this comment, I just wanted to say that change can be scary sometimes.
> Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.
I would say let the man have his freedom. I would consider having more choices to be less of a burden than few choices in most occasions. Of course one's mind feels that there is a sweet spot but in longevity I feel like its the evolution of ideas and more ideas means more the competition and we will see more innovation as such.
When Blekko was acquired by IBM in 2015 we had an "Integration Executive" assigned to us who was responsible for all the 'detail work' of the integration (if you can imagine a project manager for an integration that would describe their job). He had joined IBM in the '80s. I found his perspective on the Gerstner years pretty fascinating.
I had interned at IBM in the late 70's (as a high school kid of all things) and decided it was more of a real estate company than a computer company :-). Up until Gerstner, IBM had a policy of acquiring and holding real estate as a hedge. Often reported on the books under "cash equivalents" because real estate had the property that it could usually be liquidated when required into cash. When we were acquired in 2015 that had changed, nearly all of the places I had worked in the 70's were no longer owned (or operated) by IBM.
Our exec said that those property holdings were the only thing that kept IBM alive between 1990 and 2000. They had to ruthlessly re-tool the entire business and that required a lot of up front cash without a product revenue stream to fund it. That was Gerstner's legacy for him, he used that asset to re-invent the company around consulting services, business automation, enterprise data processing, and business insights driven by processing billions of metrics.
And it turned out that a lot of companies needed to understand their business better, and automate it, to adapt to this new fangled thing called the Internet.
We both agreed that they would be unlikely to do that again as they had used up their 'secret weapon' already.
Residential real estate construction has lagged population growth for decades as the average age of the first-time homebuyer has gone up and real wages have stagnated. The largest generational cohort in the United States (the post-WWII one with the nickname that everybody is tired of hearing) is getting out of homeownership as they retire southward or head to assisted living. Many of their family homes are in areas in which young people can't or don't want to live. There's going to be a great value reckoning as this asset transfer takes place - I have trouble believing that "line go up" will apply as it has post-COVID with so many sellers and so few ill-equipped buyers.
On the other side of the coin commercial real estate is often treated as financial leverage and a store of value instead of a going concern. From what I understand commercial landlords very frequently use their existing properties to collateralize new loans in a daisy chain-type fashion. Recall all of the grumbling about the end of downtowns and what would happen to CRE paper if people didn't return to the office a few years back? We came pretty close to the precipice and avoided it by artificially propping up the utility of these buildings. What happens during COVID II: The Quickening?
Combine all of this with a broader economy that's been vigorously puffed down to the filter with two drags of AI smoke left in it and things don't look particularly rosy for RE as an appreciating asset class. Scarcity doesn't automatically imply value perceived or otherwise.
Not financial advice, not an economist, just my $.02.
I worked for a large Silicon Valley company that took the exact opposite approach. They didnt think they had expertise to strategically manage real estate. So the company leased their facilities (and moved twice while I was there). They were also in a business where the original products were still generating lots of cash that was invested in adjacent product lines (and mostly successfully).
I talked to a CEO of one of these companies who claimed his accountants were pushing him to do the leasing only since a company was only supposed to be in one sector. A tech company that has a lot of real estate on the books wasn't going to have the same ups relative to book value, etc. Of course not having the same downs seems worth it if you aren't a day trader.
That's classic (bad) business school advice. Core competency. When I went every company was supposed to try and be like GE. Amazon in particular ignored many of the things I was taught. Take a college professors business advice with a grain of salt.
Google's stance on this was fairly draconian when I was working there, basically Google's position was that they could be in ANY business at ANY time so that ANY thing you worked on was theirs. On the day I joined, one of the other new hires had a marked up copy of the agreement with some VERY simple wording changes that said basically "wasn't in this business at the time the employee started working on the project" (aka a no retro-active clause) because this individual pointed out quite reasonably that if they were working on something in good faith on their own that wasn't part of Google's business and it turned out to be a really good idea, then Google, based on how the agreement was written, could go back and say "but we're in that business now too and you were working for us so we own your idea."
To which the HR person at the orientation had said, "Don't worry Google wouldn't do that." And this individual said, "I'm sure they wouldn't, that's why it seems like a no-brainer to put it into the agreement, it just says they won't do something that you and I both agree they would never do. I can't sign the document as written without this." The HR person took the updated version off to someone (presumably legal). And then after lunch this person was not in the group (I had seen them eating lunch) So when we had finished up, before my mentor had arrived I went out and found them waiting on the circle for a ride and asked them what happened. They said, "Google said no and also said they were rescinding the offer of employment."
And that told me everything I needed to know about how Google really thought about things vs what they said they thought about things.
Works in Austria. The legally binding collective agreement contract for IT workers here has a specific clause regulating the terms of when an employer may or may not claim rights on IP created by the employee. (§18 Diensterfindungen)
In California (where Google is headquartered) the law regulates the boundaries of IP ownership. If you work on something unrelated to your work on your own equipment on your own time, your employer can't claim it no matter what the employment agreement says.
I live in California, and they can. The key there is that is isn't "Unrelated to your work" it is "Unrelated to the work of the company." Also phrased as "The company's business." Google literally claims they could be in any business[1] at any time so anything you work on belongs to them. Further, as my lawyer pointed out to me at the time, California is an 'at will' state so they can fire you for any non-protected reason, one of which is 'working on things and forcing them to sue to get rights to that work product.' It isn't a very balanced situation from a power dynamic. My advice to anyone at Google (as it was when I was there) do not work on anything that you might later want to develop further while working at Google. If you really want to work on this thing, quit, and then start working on it. Otherwise you are at risk of the "success disaster" where your side hustle is suddenly worth something and at the same time you're being told to hand it over to your employer or be fired and sued at the same time.
[1] They rationalized this when I was there with their "20% time rule" which was time to work on what ever you wanted, but working on whatever you wanted still belonged to Google because they had a unlimited right of first refusal to productize whatever it was you worked on.
I think you're overstating. If it's on your time and your equipment and unrelated to your work, but it is related to your employer's business, it's not obvious.
If you work for a big tech, there's a huge range of stuff that's related to your employer's business, which means you have to tread carefully.
Hmm, collective action, you might be on to something there :-). Personally I think if we could eliminate the who 'no warranty of any kind' disclaimer ability for software and organize around collectively fixing this sort of abuse in the market that things would be different in a very positive sort of way.
How about if all employees of all companies did it together, organized in a way called law, so that you don't need to engage in this rigmarole and the company just never owns anything you do unless they specifically paid you to do it as part of your job?
This is part of the reason why I never worked for big tech. I always have a side project going. I cannot function without a side project.
I don't believe that any corporation would ever reward me for any reason; so without a side project, I wouldn't have hope... How would I get out of bed in the morning to go to work, without hope?
For me; day job is survival, that's it. I do it well because I'm well practiced and I need good output to provide me narrative cover but I don't trust any of it. I'm not invested in my day job at all. I assume it's all a PsyOp and I could lose the job any day for any weird reason. I act and pretend constantly and I care about nothing and no one and I trust no one...
I literally believe that if I worked for some big tech company which was actually rewarding employees for real, that they would stop rewarding employees as soon as I became one. I've encountered a situation like this in the past. Horrible situation. The secret to happiness is just don't expect anything and do unto others what they do to you.
This is definitely a sound strategy, you have to be careful about little tech too. Personally I managed to work at several "big tech" companies that were okay with me doing side work for profit (both consulting and design/development work). I carried that forward as a manager and was always supportive of people who did side projects because my experience was that those people were less likely to burn out than ones who were spending all their time at work.
Yes, it is. I feel like this level of distrust is probably something that wealthy people often experience; but at least they can take a look at their bank account or portfolio app from the comfort of a house they own to help soothe the pain.
I don't think therapy would help me to be honest. My problem is not psychological; it's that I need more money to buy my time and freedom. One time I was earning a modest passive income for about 3 years while working on open source projects; I was quite happy then and the fact that I didn't trust anyone was not a problem as I wasn't forced to interact with anyone.
I guess one positive aspect about this feeling of 'not caring' and putting on a mask is that it comes across as confidence and it gives me more control. I can say unexpected things and control other people's emotions to some extent.
When you're always willing to throw away the entire relationship in every interaction, people tend to respect you more for some reason. It's like; if you don't value the relationship, it signals high status or something. I suppose this is the trick that psychopaths use?
I've related elsewhere[0] my story about how Google laid me and half my team off 2 weeks before we were set to receive a six-figure retention bonus following an acquisition.
In the original Q&A with corp dev just after the acquisition was announced, someone pointed out that the contract we were offered allowed for that sort of thing. Google's representative said something similar to the parent comment: "Don't worry, that's not something we actually do."
It was especially galling because, after a round of layoffs a year or two prior to the acquisition, that startup had issued retention bonuses to those of us who were left. Unlike Google's subsequent post-acquisition bonus, contracts for those bonuses explicitly stated they were payable even if we were subsequently laid off or fired, as long as we weren't fired for one of a few specific reasons like embezzlement or harassment or other serious workplace misconduct.
It was such a marked contrast and, like the parent comment, it told me all I needed to know about how Google really feels about its employees, and how very literally true the old saying of "you can't trust what you don't have in writing" is.
I can't agree with this interpretation. A human, somewhere in the bigco, decided laid you off. That specific person decided to take advantage of you, and is responsible for that action. Bigco may have an incentive structure that pushes for this behaviour, but a human looked at incentives and morals and decided. Don't let them off the hook by pointing at the bigco.
"And that told me everything I needed to know about how Google really thought about things vs what they said they thought about things."
What you describe doesn't really provide much signal about this, because a big corp will always have a huge interest in having uniform working contracts. Exceptions are possible but only worth the headache with them for fairly high level employees. So even for a clause that they really wouldn't care much about, you'd expect a similar reaction.
I encountered a similar situation in my career.
The work looked good, the team looked good, money was good.
Then when the work contract came up, there were some unusual clauses about my salary that I was not comfortable with. They first said that it was OK to ignore the clause as they would pay my salary as explained orally. I insisted that they write the work contract as they plan to pay me.
After about 1 week of back and forth, they admitted that the clause was indeed unusual, was there for historical reasons and that they plan to change it in the future. However, they said no clause in the contract could be changed as of now, as it was the same contract for every employee, and no past had employee ever complained about it.
Unfortunately, I ended up declining the offer, as I considered the risk was not worth it.
I'd like to get a full QPSK based OFDM modulator/demodulator implemented in an FPGA. Means improving my Verilog skills, my FPGA tool familiarity, and really understand how to implement OFDM modulators.
Create a blog and post at least 8 times to it over the next 12 months, which would be improving my skills with writing and illustration.
Design at least two boards and get them through the prototype stage into bringup and running.
I believe that the outcome of the Ukraine-Russian will shape the world for decades just as WWII did. It is my hope that the Ukrainians succeed in throwing the Russians out of their country. In a post war Ukraine, I'd like to help it rebuild in any way I can, and to do that I have to speak Ukrainian at least conversationally.
And this is always my question: "... because the genie, used well, accelerates learning." Does it though?
How are we defining "learning" here? The example I like to use is that a student who "learns" what a square root is, can calculate the square root of a number on a simple 4 function calculator (x, ÷, +, -) if iteratively. Whereas the student who "learns" that the √ key gives them the square root, is "stuck" when presented with a 4 function calculator. So did they 'learn' faster when the "genie" surfaced a key that gave them the answer? Or did they just become more dependent on the "genie" to do the work required of them?
I graduated HS in mid 2000s and didn't start using a calculator for math classes until basically a junior in college. I would do every calculation by hand, on paper. I benefited from a great math teacher early on that taught me how to properly lay out my calculations and solutions on paper. I've had tests I've turned in where I spent more paper on a single question than others did on the entire test.
It really helped my understanding of numbers and how they interacted, and helped teachers/professors narrow down on my misunderstandings.
Not only that: I suspect you already have an inkling of the range of the expected outcomes for the answer in your head just looking through the problem and any answers that fail that test will cause you to pause to re-check your work.
This aspect is entirely missing when you use an oracle.
You still need to be curious. I learn a ton by asking questions of the LLMs when I see new things. “Explain this to me - I get X but why did you do Y?”
It’s diamond age and a half - you just need to continue to be curious and perhaps slow your shipping speed sometimes to make sure you budget time for learning as well.
