aloe_falsa

Oh god, yes. The powers that be in my workplace are obsessed with cyclomatic complexity, so now we’re reviewing a flood of LLM diffs that take perfectly good code and extract each loop into its own function with a dozen arguments. The code is now more maintainable on paper and far, far less maintainable (by a human) in practice.

> The original claim, as I understand it, is basically this: you can’t be an honest actor in a dishonest system.

Right, but, taken to its logical conclusion, you cannot earn any amount of money honestly at all, because you'll always create negative externalities to some extent, or supporting people who do/companies who exploit their workers, even as a rank-and-file employee.

I don't know which FAANGs you have experience with, but the companies and teams I worked for were very numbers- and impact-oriented. No amount of posturing and politics would help you at performance review if you couldn't show that you accomplished some goals and moved some KPIs that ultimately made the company money.

YMMV though - if you know people who managed to stay at a FAANG for a significant time without producing anything of value, more power to them.

As someone who knows English and is learning German, the words "Handy" for smartphone, or "Beamer" for overhead projector, or "Oldtimer" for classic car all sound very out of place. Even hearing "das Baby" for a nursing-age baby (instead of the German "Säugling") sounds a bit weird.

I guess it's different when you grew up with those words and internalized them.

That's exactly what ruined it for me. The few apparent survivors of the human race are huddled in a tin can, running out of resources - fade to black - and suddenly, by divine providence and author fiat, everything is fine. It kills the suspension of disbelief.

GPL defines the “source code” of a work as the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. If Meta released a petabyte of raw training data, would that really be easier to extend and adapt (as opposed to fine-tuning the weights)?

Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel “Ship Breaker” deserves a mention here. It’s set in Paolo’s dystopian solarpunk universe, where old tankers are cut up to extract the last tons of fossil fuels from their hold, and it really emphasises how dangerous and unrewarding of a job it is.

> Property that is used by the public should be owned by the public.

Not sure why that follows, or how it would avoid the tragedy of the commons, or why we should act as if that’s already the case.

That all aside, how would you feel about people reclaiming public space, parks and public transportation, by blasting loud music in there?

> absolute bare minimum

Doing the bare minimum for a "Meets Expectations" rating after performance review and calibrations still means working a lot and delivering on the projects you've committed to, drafting design documents, doing interviews, actively improving existing codebases, and mentoring junior ICs. If you do all that, then the company's happy.

(Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.)

Not an umlaut, a diaeresis - it shows that the letter has its own sound (unlike the word "coop", for example).

You'd generally use it for proper nouns (like Brontë or Boötes) and rare loanwords - it doesn't seem very useful for common dictionary words, since anyone who can understand the word itself probably knows how to pronounce it.

Not sure about police officers, but the other professions you named have to complete graduate or post-graduate studies in their field, pass a formal examination, maybe publish a few peer-reviewed papers while architects build a portfolio - this is usually proof enough of their strengths.

Actually, this works in IT as well: if Donald Knuth, Yann LeCun or Zvi Gallil ever decide (however unlikely) to apply to a web shop, they'll probably get waved through on the strength of their credentials. For the self-taught J. Random Hacker, who can't show any of his old code because it's under NDA, there's the interview pipeline.

Technically true, just as if you replace Meta with Amazon, Google Cloud, Etsy, eBay, the local city council, etc. If you don't have a diversified, multi-market, preferably international presence, you're not viable in the long term.

Of course, in the really long term, we're all dead. Meanwhile, the local mom & pop candy shops keep advertising and selling online and making ends meet.

Funnily enough, "MMAcevedo" doesn't break my suspension of disbelief, while "Clippy" does, hard - even though it tries to stay grounded in reality and drown you in quotes and references.

The Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos had a $40M salary in 2022, which is definitely too much money. However, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the company's $31 billion revenue.

So I'm pretty sure the streaming services are charging whatever they can get away with, aka the market equilibrium price, regardless of their executives' salaries.