1. Life isn't fair. The earlier you accept that, the better off you'll be. This unfairness is why you're here posting on hackernews and someone through no fault of theirs is starving trying to cross the Sahara into greener pastures. It cuts both ways.
2. Hard work rarely ever implies financial success.
3. "...second tier job from the perspective of software professionals". Tiers are a made up concept. An Nvidia programmer working on critical HPC work is in a difference league than someone who is very good at making infinite scroll smooth.
Software is a broad field with different specializations. I don't know what you do but you made a bet and it's probably turned out quite well for you. Other people's bets did worse, others did better.
Comparison is the thief of joy. Remember to be grateful for where you are and how far you've come.
Thank you for your comment. These are all great points. I absolutely appreciate #1. #2 is a bit harder to accept as it implies I don't have agency. I always had the dogma that my hard work would make a difference from the perspective of financial success. And it has made a difference no doubt. The thing that has preoccupied my thinking is the magnitude. We're talking 100 to 1 when it comes to the impact of luck vs. hard work. This is a bit unsettling for me. Cest la vie I guess.
> #2 is a bit harder to accept as it implies I don't have agency.
Of course you do have agency to a certain extent, the important thing to recognize is that "hard work" leads to mostly linear gains, while to be "successful" (in the "getting $62M in stock options" sense) obviously requires some exponential windfall.
The idea that hard work is the only factor for financial success is a blatant lie, perpetuated by those wishing to justify the almost-Ponzi nature of modern economies. Ever wondered why GDP growth is in terms of percentage, while compensation for labor is linear to the effort/work put in?
It isn't fair because entropy is uncaring. You can't control all the variables and so even if you had perfectly balanced society in spreadsheets, you couldn't implement it. This is the fallacy of city planners too, you can't control the human factor, the weather, the global community etc.
Even if we just talk money in one community, you could give everyone the exact same amount of money and through no fault of their own, some people would lose it and some would benefit wildly, because of the human factor. Person A starts a coffee shop that goes bust, person B starts a coffee shop that does well, just due to timing or luck or even the weather the month they opened.
How do you suggest we make life fair? Some things you can make changes to equalize, but how are you going to equalize height or intelligence or something like that?
You're not being told to pick someone, you're being told that your org cannot really have 80% of people meeting/exceeding expectations and that because reasons (budget), you should review the cusp cases and adjust them down.
Ridiculed by whom? We've seen many competitors try to make a streaming service and beyond Apple, they all provide a laggy experience even in the menus.
If you're going to emulate someone, it's not a bad idea to emulate who has the best results
Even Apple TV is pretty sluggish on my LG TV. And it sometimes makes my TV crash so I have to reboot it. It's maybe not as bad as the steaming pile of garbage that is Sky-Showtime, but it's got a ways to go before it's comparable to Netflix on my TV. Amazon Prime is pretty terrible on my TV too.
That’s your TV having a shitty processor and WebOS not being the best. Even expensive smart TVs don’t ship with good silicon.
Get something like an Apple TV or Fire TV Cube and you’ll have a better experience. The Apple TV 4K in particular ships with a very powerful processor, it’s far snappier than any other streaming box I’ve tried.
It's been a few years since I let go of my TV, a not new-at-the time, but high-end LG, and I loved WebOS on it. I considered it the best, even better than Apple TV, especially for netflix. The new owner runs it without complaints.
Yeah, no shit. Still, Netflix, Plex and Youtube work just fine, so Apple TV should be able to work at least as well. I'm not buying an extra device just to compensate for shitty software, that's silly. I prefer to unsubscribe.
> This is Apple's entire MO. You are expected to replace all your devices every year or two.
As someone who previously was an "anti-fan" of Apple's (we're talking 2000s, early 2010s) for their ridiculous prices (and that still stands for things like the Vision Pro), I've now seen the light (or gone to the dark side if you prefer) and now believe Apple provides better value for money than most of their competition due to the longevity of their devices. I know this is anecdotal and a sample size of one but I'd be curious to see data backing up your claim above.
Apple was a rip off luxury brand back in the day if you had a Samsung Fascinate or something. MacBooks were horrible and macOS was annoying to deal with. Now they're the default price/performance choice if you want a decent reliable machine, and iPhones are obviously very good value if you just want a phone that works for as long as possible.
Incorrect. Frequently, UI lag on components that hit server side back services is made significantly worse by naïve microservices, especially in the face of organic growth.
Specifically, every API call that traverses a machine, boundary, necessarily impart, additional latency, and uncontrolled microservices can have a multiplicative effect
I agree that a bad implementation may lead to poor performance. However, this is irrespective of the architecture. The effects of an architecture are more noticeable in the context of maintainability, scalability, and extensibility.
it's not actually irrespective of architecture. Some architectures are significantly more prone to certain kinds of problems than others. For example, monoliths can become so large as to make development, especially many-team development, inconvenient or impossible. In the specific case of microservices, the key benefit (multiple teams can develop and deliver in parallel without stepping on each other, separating concerns into their own ownership areas) has the tradeoff of distributed systems overhead, which can range from high latency (when a number of microservices are in a serialized hot path and the complexity is not being effectively managed) to lowered availability or consistency (when data is radiating through a network of microservices asynchronously and different services 'see' different data and make conflicting correct decisions). Monoliths see this set of performance problems much, much later in their lifecycle, because they have much better data locality and local function call characteristics.
Ad serving and metrics are asynchronous so won't block any UI. And authentication/identity has the same behaviour with monolith/microservices. It's ultimately just a look up this user in some database.
It's the serving of the content that requires coordination across multiple services and most of that should be cached at the serving layer.
Incorrect, in most apps nontrivial content is highly personalized and dynamically served, auth in microservices is frequently two or more hop rather than one hop, and ad serving and metrics frequently involve synchronous steps.
Disney owned streaming services and HBO Max are far from laggy thanks to BamTech.
But as far as the menus being laggy. When you are trying to keep the bill of materials for streaming to less than $20 in the case of Roku, what do you expect?
The AppleTV box is $140 and the difference in quality shows
Our modern American framework of rules around various types of incorporated entities are the wrong tool for the job of enabling a credible organization to achieve OpenAI's purported mission.
What's needed is closer to a government agency like NASA, with multiple independent inspectors like IAEA empowered by law to establish guardrails, report to congress, and pump the brakes if needed. Think Gibson's "Turing Agency."
They could mandate open sourcing the technology that is developed, maintain feedback channels with private and public enterprises, and provide the basis for sensible use of narrow AI while we collectively fund sensible safety, cognition, consciousness, and AGI research.
If we woke up tomorrow to aliens visiting us from a distant galaxy, and one alien was 100 times more intelligent and capable than the average human, we would be confronted with something terrifying.
Stuart Russell likens AI to such an alien giving us a heads up that it's on the way, and we may be looking at several years to several decades before the alien/AI arrives. We have a chance to get our shit together sufficient to meet the challenges we may face - whether or not you believe AI could pose an existential threat, or that it could destabilize civilization in horrible ways, it's probably unarguably rational to establish institutions and frank discussions now, well before any potential crisis.
Heck, it's not like we hold our governments to account for spending at the scale of NASA - even a few tens of billions is a drop in the bucket, and it could also be a federal jobs program, incentivizing careers and research in a crucial technology sector.
Allowing self-regulated private sector corporations operating in the tech market to be the fundamental drivers of AI is probably a recipe for dystopian abuses. This will, regardless of intetions, lead to further corrosion of individual rights to free expression, privacy, intellectual property, and so on. Even if a majority of the negative impact isn't regulatory or "official" in nature, allowing these companies to impose cultural shifts on us is a terrible thing.
Companies and corporations should be subject to humans, not infringe on human agency. Right now we have companies that are effectively outside the control of any individual human, even the most principled and respectable CEOs, because the legal rules we operate them by are not aligned with the well-being of society at large, but the group of people who have invested time and/or money in the legal construct. It's worked pretty well, but at the speed and scale of the modern Tech industry, it's very clear that our governmental and social institutions are not equipped to mitigate the harms.
NASA and the space race are probably the most recent and successful analogy to the quest for AGI, so maybe that's a solution worth trying again.
No they don't. They _say_ they do (really mainly Amazon) and the rumor develops legs and gets repeated.
To actually do this, you need an objective measure that is repeatable over many different kinds of products, domains and people and they is a very hard problem no one has cracked. Career ladders and some calibrations help to do this but it'd never perfect and people slip through the cracks.
If you're at a big company, you've seen people get a rating that seemed misaligned to their work because an arbitrary curve is enforced or a project has high visibility by sheet luck because an exec was adamant that the project be on the roadmap.
Not really until tesla - Mercedes has been excitedly shipping creaky piano black plastic for years and I'm sure there are many other brands cutting corners to reduce price. (Porsche doesn't seem to care which is good)
My BMW X5 just was driven back to me yesterday after nearly 3 weeks away for 1) a puncture and 2) a recall of some sort. 3 weeks because they decided run flats would save them money, and also got rid of the garages courtesy car fleet, also tyre sizes which are near unobtainium and never in stock anywhere.
This is my second X5 G05, and this one is definitely of lower quality than the first. Removed bits here/there, replaced aluminium parts inside with coated plastic, replaced leather with synthetic-like thing and plenty of other cost cutting markers.
Don't tell me 'oh don't buy another one' as demonstrated by this article (and others), they all do it to pretty much the same degree, all you can hope is not to run out of warranty before something mind bogglingly expensive breaks.
Sad to see. I had an X5 from 2002 with manual 5-speed transmission (had to search hard), and it was excellent. Still somewhat regret trading it in after 287,500 miles, with very few issues. The only issue was that the brake calipers would start to drag slightly and warp the rotors, but I discovered that it was because I was using them too lightly; occasionally doing some serious braking (not quite as hard as bedding new race pads) was enough to get >100k miles out of a set of rotors & calipers. Similar with an E36 that I used for track days & time trials.
I found it really sad to see that Mini (owned by BMW) and BMW are pushing hard on run-flats. Hard NOPE from me, as I drive a good amount in fairly rural areas, and driving 50mi from a random point (the flat-driving range spec of a run-flat tire) still leaves me at a random point with no service. And the quality is just gone way down, as you've noted. Too bad.
BMW X models are special. Manufactured in the USA. I’m driving an X3 now. Front carpets disintegrated after 500km. BMW cars built in Europe (non-SUVs) are of a much better quality.
Aslo, this list is based on owners reporting everything from nuissances to serious stuff. That alone is highly subjective, and we didn't even get into the root causes for each reported issue...
It looks like the feature is only available if you “add on” the audible version when you’re making your ebook purchase? And, for limited titles.
If I just bought a book in audible, there should be a “buy ebook” button in that app! And if I have the book in kindle, it should give me the option to add on the audio book after purchase. Seems like a missed opportunity— there must be a reason for it being so clunky.
Edit: I have not been able to find a single whispersync title. Looks like it’s not enabled at all in Canada? And the US books that have the feature don’t even follow the setup (eg icon) as described on the website (https://www.audible.com/ep/wfs)
You don’t need to buy ebook and audiobook at the same time.
The icon appears when looking at the audiobook’s product page (both on Amazon and Audible). Unfortunately the ebook page doesn’t appear to have something similar.
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