Recent submissions

Comment · 7 months ago
The difference is that Roblox has a thousand "attention stealers" which have enough gameplay and multiplayer fun to keep an eight year old entertained for a long time. Fortnite is just the same recycled concept over and over, with an interface that is difficult for a child on a console. There are a number of Roblox games that are genuinely well-designed and fun, don't let the graphics fool you.

(Also, eight year olds don't have $3 in Robux unless someone buys it for them, so blame the parents as well)

Comment · 1 year ago
" This group tended to agree with dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues came up with an unforgettable term to describe this group’s psychology: “The need for chaos.”"

My take is that a lack of opportunity / class stratification / societal mobility plays into this. It's essentially the same reason people play the lottery. When you're stuck in a seemingly intractable situation, you need the world to suddenly change around you. Maybe you win Powerball, or maybe you decide to just burn everything down out of desperation. Social media just amplifies those thoughts.

Comment · 1 year ago
The article references a study which claims that university students have difficulty reading Dickens or Jane Austen. Here's an excerpt of the Dickens from the study:

"LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest."

I'm a college-educated, reasonably well-read person and this is a rough paragraph to get through. Old idioms, excessively lengthy sentences, anachronisms (what is a "horse blinker"? "Michaelmas"?), etc. Why choose this type of subject matter to draw conclusions from?

Comment · 1 year ago
Not advertising it is key. I'm also coming up on 50, and people constantly are surprised when they inevitably find out how old I am. Ageism can unconsciously creep in when you have more than 15 years of experience visible on your resume, even for higher management-level positions.

Also - if you're a mid-level IC in your 40's you should start asking yourself what's stopping you from being higher up on the IC or management tracks. "Career senior engineer" is not a great place to be, long-term.

Comment · 2 years ago
Rails may indeed be good enough, but comparing a full-stack platform (Rails) to a frontend UX framework (React) is fundamentally unfair.
Comment · 2 years ago
This. They're great for small/mid-sized developers, but they price themselves out once you're doing billions of messages a month. At that point companies start looking at aggregators one level down (i.e. closer to the carriers or raw SMTP).
Comment · 3 years ago
Firing IC's at large corporations usually involves some sort of a individual coaching/PIP plan. This takes time for managers and HR to write and implement, takes N weeks of observation, and creates nervousness in coworkers who think they might be next.

Much easier to do a Thanos-style snap and get rid of X% all at once, with no pre-warning or reasons required besides "challenging economic conditions".

Comment · 3 years ago
Sure, but Google at least presents itself as being a search engine, composed of potentially unreliable information scraped from the web. GPT looks/feels like an infallible oracle.
Comment · 3 years ago
It's great, until people realize GPT-3 will generate answers that are demonstrably wrong. (And to make matters worse, can't show/link the source of the incorrect information!)
Comment · 4 years ago
That would make more sense if 1) he had a coherent plan 2) he could motivate the good 20% to stick around 3) he had some way to differentiate high vs low performers.

Instead, he now gets an effectively random layoff, with potentially whole/important teams vanishing, and biased so that the best people (who can easily find jobs) are most incentivized to leave.

Comment · 4 years ago
Lawyers and bankers a) don't fly on their own dime, b) have huge potential financial upside in getting those deals done.
Comment · 4 years ago
A blockchain that can barely manage seven transactions per second is the "best monetary system we could have invented"?
Comment · 4 years ago
These tools aren't interchangeable. Photoshop is for editing images. Illustrator is for editing vector graphics.

Figma is a multiplayer layout tool, which can be used for web, print, or anything else. The main use cases for enterprise are a) it's web-accessible, and b) the realtime collaboration/revision/commenting tools.

The smart thing would be to just sunset Adobe XD and replace it with Adobe Figma.

Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
Not to mention the technical issues involved in having a truly cross-platform asset. What's the poly and texture count? How is scale represented? Collision volumes? How does it render properly? What file formats do we standardize on?

The whole thing is ridiculous. The cynical view would be that this is trying to quickly get retail gamers/"investors" to subsidize VC returns, before the crypto market fully tanks.

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