Joined 14 years ago
There has been some movement lately, though. I'm not sure who exactly to thank, but "the community" created a new unofficial resource for getting going with FoundationDB: https://foundationdb.vercel.app/7.3/
AFAICT this now gives them default permission to train an LLM on your code (as Posthog telemetry data is inextricably tied to your code) use it, and even sell it if they wanted to (as it's not your data anymore, it's their model). Yikes.
Pedantic answer: Unless the light source has different colors on different sides
Complex answer: Kind of. Even a linear color fade (from reality) can turn non-linear (and therefore induce color effects) when pushed through a color grading pipeline. So if you count e.g. film emulation as a "physical effect", then yes.
As I read it, the article is simply trying to help people understand what kind of work is valuable to a company and therefore what they should focus on to make themselves valuable. I presume that making yourself valuable pays dividends, including promotions! Somehow the idea of going to work and not trying your best because “you’re not getting paid … for that” just feels so cynical and divorced from how I’ve seen successful people grow and make big bucks in tech.
(And this is all a bit separate, of course, than the debate about whether staying at a company or job hopping is better for career trajectory.)
- $50 - Something rug-shaped exists
- $100 - Durability
- $200 - Materials
- $500 - Comfort and design
- $1000 - Basic craftsmanship
- $2000 - Refinement of craft
- $5000 - Artistry & identity
- $10000 - Tradition
- $20000 - Mastery
- $50000 - Rarity/historical importance
- $100000+ - ?
Because most people don't cross-shop $20k rugs and $200 rugs, most people are focused on one or two aspects around their personal budget. The essayist mentioned being amazing by the craftsmanship and artistry (see scale above). A broke college student might just want something that holds up in their dorm room and see what materials it's made out of and comfort as meaningless and abstract. And a billionaire shopping for a rug for their office might take everything other than rarity/historical importance as a given and just be thinking about that.
I think there is a large cognitive bias to consider everything you can easily afford "tangible and important improvements" and everything you can't as "abstract"!
So, it stayed with the world because it went semi viral in some tiny circles. But it didn’t stay with me because I personally learned little from it.
The thing that stays with me is all the things I learned spending years trying to implement an API you can describe in ~30 seconds really well. It’s a rare opportunity to be able to go so deep on a problem in a career.
I don't know the details know, but it was definitely configurable when I wrote it :) I remember arguing for setting it to a default of 30/60 seconds we decided against as that would have impacted throughput at our default RAM budget. I thought might have been a good tradeoff to get people going, thinking they could tune it down (or up the RAM) if they needed to scale up perf later.
