the_greyd

That's Cory's whole schtick - he critiques big corps. I follow him a bit and most times his analysis is good and other times he dismisses things that don't fit in his ideological viewpoint.

As someone from India, "tor-toys" is what you would hear from most Indians. For most words of the kind, in india they would be pronounced in exactly the way that would make you remember the spelling of the word (since you are graded on that). I would bet that's the case with most non native speakers.

Overall I like yuval noah harrari's point about our systems, that liberal democracies and free market are based on the assumption that we have rational individuals making decisions in their self-interest. Which is not true at all, in today's day and age where misinformation and propaganda run rampant. You cannot rely on individual judgement to get us out of a pandemic. Same can be stated about climate change. I would say it's more alarming with climate change, since the consequences of our actions are stretched out in the far future (atleast when compared to covid). How the heck are we going to get people/companies/govt to get in line with what's needed for the survival of our species?

You make a good point. In a state of pandemic, the population IS in some sense similar to livestock, bodies to be managed, since the virus has weaponized our bodies. Wouldn't you say?

College sounds fun! Do it!

Now that you can sit in inside spaces without a mask, I feel libraries and cafes are a real alternative for me! And this is me typing from a desk at a public library 10 minutes from my apartment. Can't express the amount of relief and joy I feel right now

Kudos to the team, they've done an amazing job with the elementary ecosystem, considering they are just a handful of people!

I don't think those are the defining factors of why they got famous or successful out of all the highly intelligent and hard working people out there. The fact that they got famous brings light to their ideas, which makes you think there's something special about them.

You'd be surprised to find many many many highly intelligent people out there with clever way of doing things, and I'd argue no less intelligent than elon musk or jobs or any other famous person. Our culture right now worships successfuly entrepreneurs as Gods with amazing brains who cracked the problem, but really it's more of luck and being at the right place at the right time.

If I understand, we are talking about a very narrow definition of success and failure here, professional success which is recognition, fame and riches? That seems to be a rare product of being lucky; where what you like doing and what you have an aptitude for, is exactly what's needed by the society in the field you're working in. Then you need to know the right people and be in the right place to get the recognition for it. All these things need to align, so it doesn't surprise me that these are rare events. And if you do happen to be one of the successful people it often deludes you to think it had something to do with YOU, rather than it mostly being a product of all the circumstantial things beyond you.

I'm surprised, personally I would put software engineer akin to a new-age factory worker, but worse for multiple reasons. This is taking into account how many new software engineers are joining and where the field is going in general, sure some are doing novel work but most are definitely not.

RedHat is not a "product" company but a "service" company, so comparing it to other big tech companies is an apples to oranges comparison. The nature of big tech is scalability (product), whereas Redhat is more of a sustainable business focused on providing support around OSS software, it isn't aiming to do anything new and revolutionary. Not every company has to be gunning towards world domination..

Cool project! Love the autocomplete feature. Just my 2 cents about the custom commands, hiding the complexity of git commands is not something I'd like personally (not accounting for alias, aliases are cool). In most cases you'd much rather know which exact git command did/does what to debug/fix, so it's better to invest that time learning early on..

Drawing a parallel to Nassim Taleb's "don't hide the risk" (or atleast what I understood from his talks), working for a big corp hides risk (and reward). If you or the team do a shitty job, the feedback and the results are often not immediate, and absorbed by the bigness of the corp. I have seen fair share of disinterest and mediocrity in my place of work and I think it's a leadership problem partly, where they've pretty much failed to motivate or incentivize people to improve/move around the company and you have people working for years in the same role and project doing the same work, creating very little new value.

Also great point that it might be a characteristic of somebody choosing to work for a big corp vs something else. In today's climate that seems a very safe decision for a new grad. Ultimately it's a job that you do to earn money, it's naive to think everybody wants the same thing from their job.