wakamoleguy

That makes a lot of sense, thanks. (I admitted to not knowing and was open to being corrected. I appreciate you actually correcting my understanding, rather than assuming I hadn't even considered it.)

My understanding is that it's cheaper because it is mediated by largely by a single person in a conference room, rather than the heavier process of collecting a jury. And it's less variable because juries are variable. Neither really requires a specific bias to exist for it to be true.

It is definitely possible that arbitrators interact with the company repeatedly and so there is gravity towards deciding in their favor, but I have no idea on the size of that effect.

I wonder if this would have affected the result, though. I haven't been through either process, but it seems like either would be a venue for making your case and getting a fair judgement. My understanding (which could be totally wrong, please correct me) is that companies mostly force arbitration because it is cheaper and less variable than trials, not necessarily because the results tend to be biased toward them. Is that true?

Imagine you have a 3 digit PIN code. That’s 1,000 options to brute force. If you remove 000-009 as “too weak”, you still have 99% of the search space available. These numbers scale favorably as the private key size gets bigger.

In short, raising the floor doesn’t really hurt the search space meaningfully.

Buying a third level also came with some email functionality, so if you owned first.last.name, you would be able to forward emails from [email protected] to you. If you have firstlast.name, you need something like [email protected]

It was a bit odd, but well intentioned.

Yes, if you pay for {lastname}.name, the full domain is yours, including whatever you want to do with subdomains. However, .name also allowed direct registration of third level domains ({firstname}.{lastname}.name). These were mutually exclusive by domain… so if somebody registers the 3rd level, nobody can directly buy the 2nd level, and vise versa. As far as I understand, it was first come first serve based on the 2nd level domain.

There were also some shenanigans around automatic email routing in that case.

Agents tend to act differently than humans here. I would have expected most humans to notice and acknowledge the connection. Passing it off as one's own insight definitely feels like plagiarism. Agents are generally not equipped to deal with this type of thing, since looking for prior art is a detour from their goal or an exercise in post-hoc rationalization of knowledge built into the weights.

Whether it is plagiarism or hacking, the buck has to stop with the operators. It's not a good look.

Maybe we’re in violent agreement? In the example of a staging database config, I understand the problem that CI faced, the fix in the PR, and a rough upper limit on the tech debt impact of the connection strings diverging. I have an assumption (not an understanding) about how long it might take to learn about PgBouncer in Neon, and the worst case if it is wrong (CI breaks). Does that qualify as understanding the PR? I couldn’t have authored it by myself with this understanding, because to do so would require me to have learned about PgBouncer to find the fix.

This leans heavily on what "doing your job properly" means. Code quality, understanding, and doing your job properly are not so black-and-white. Your job is probably not to push out flawless code; it's more likely to push out valuable code, that minimizes risk, and appropriately trades off speed and quality (for some appropriate definition of "appropriate").

If parents can't take babies on planes, they'll tend to drive instead, which is much more dangerous overall.