MrSqueezles (u/MrSqueezles)

MrSqueezles commented on Banned in California bannedincalifornia.org/... · Posted by u/pie_flavor

These explanations have no citations, and even the explanations frequently conflict with the category labels. It seems much more like an elaborate propaganda infographic than a useful source of information.

MrSqueezles · 18 days ago

"Hey AI, tell me what manufactured phone components require permitting in California." ... Copy paste copy paste copy paste

I can think of multiple manufacturers that do all engineering and have recently built manufacturing facilities in California and would manufacture there at scale too except other states gave them massive tax incentives. Tesla and Rivian both do initial manufacturing in California. Startups like Freeform, doing metal 3D printing at scale, are in California. This article is wrong.

MrSqueezles commented on Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/eysquared

rjzzleep · 3 years ago

Do they? I'm sure they run something, but I'm not sure they're the ones telling Pichai constantly which services to cut. To launch Stadia, to kill Stadia, to get Pichais buddy to take over Google Pay, to fire Pichais buddy who runs Google Pay.

Maybe they are micromanaging nightmare bosses, I wouldn't know. But from all I have seen, from the very start of Pichais tenure, he definitely deserves a huge chunk of the blame.

I don't think that Google's market cap increased by ~$890B because of Pichai, it increased despite him.

MrSqueezles · 3 years ago

Yes. This is correlation, not causation. He has been focused on diversification away from ads and hasn't been performing especially well.

His pay is likely set years in advance, based on performance metrics. Sundar is riding the ads wave to huge payouts in spite of his massive failures, Google Plus, Stadia, devices, especially ChromeOS tablets, mismanaging Cloud, and on, and on...

MrSqueezles commented on Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics news.shopify.com/importan... · Posted by u/virtuosarmo

flappyeagle · 3 years ago

This is not how recessions work.

MrSqueezles · 3 years ago

Emotional investors moving hundreds of billions of dollars create self-fulfilling prophecies. It absolutely is how recessions work.

"I'm so pissy because the US Fed isn't giving away free money anymore. I'm moving to cash and will shower money on any company that does layoffs."

Yeah, it works.

MrSqueezles commented on Meta employees grill Mark Zuckerberg at all-hands meeting following layoffs washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/bryan0

extr · 3 years ago

I'm of a few minds about this. I don't think these questions are unfair, because it's destabilizing mentally to deal with constant rumors, unclear direction, and actual layoffs. I worked at Meta during the Nov layoffs (though not personally impacted), and I remember the day to day anxiety in the lead up and aftermath. Nobody wants that. It's part of the reason I quit.

I don't think Mark's answers are necessarily unfair either, he's running a business after all. He does have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, even if that means making difficult staffing decisions (still true even if they were his fault to begin with by over-hiring). Ultimately you agree to participate in this framework by accepting a job at a public company.

But there is a point after which it becomes distasteful. It gives me the same sort of feeling as those stories about companies pulling offers right before the start date, after an employee has quit their previous job. Legal? Yes. Justifiable? No doubt. Morally? It's grey. And it leaves a sour taste. On an individual level, it's the kind of thing that is punished in the long run, through reputational damage. In an ideal world I would like to see companies face something similar.

MrSqueezles · 3 years ago

His responses show he doesn't have any understanding of what he's doing to people and their families. If humans were robots who didn't need shelter, food, and care, okay I guess. I may get laid off. If so, I'll go to sleep until I'm needed again. That's not how people work. Nobody wants a job with a constant threat of being laid off during the absolute worst economic times, when finding a job is hard and if you're honest with potential employers about being laid off, you'll have an automatic negative stigma attached to you.

If staff reductions are necessary, there are ways to do them within a reasonable amount of time without seriously hurting people and traumatizing everyone who's left at the company. Layoffs are bad for morale, bad for business.

Or you could look at employees like sheep or cattle to be herded and culled when it suits and when asked for justification, make completely tone deaf answers that show no compassion for the human costs of your actions, the actual points of the questions. See if your best people are still loyal and decide to stick around.

MrSqueezles commented on Launch HN: Codeparrot (YC W23) – Automated API testing using production traffic · Posted by u/royal0203

rkhacker · 3 years ago

Few missing details that are crucial to usage within an organization:

1. what is the type of service instrumentation needed to capture the data? Wonder why this is needed when typically the data is already captured in an APM log? The instrumentation might add performance and security concerns.

2. what is the sampling logic to capture the traffic? It might compromise the fidelity of the test data and give a false sense of test accuracy.

3. what is the duration of data capture? Is it a week's or month's or quarterly data? Meeting 90% coverage on a week's production sample data will provide a false metric.

4. can it faithfully handle data privacy and customer anonymization? This is critical for API's dealing with PCI and other sensitive data.

MrSqueezles · 3 years ago

Yeah, 4 is key. Many privacy regulations stipulate that account data must be deleted within a certain period of time, usually days or less, after a requested account deletion. In this system, all recorded requests would have to be discoverable by the requestor's ID and production systems would have to remember to perform deletions when necessary. Also, this database and all related testing systems would have to be held to production level standards for data access because anyone who can see test data to root cause errors can see people's and business' real, private information. Especially for data controlled and regulated industries like government and health care, this would be a nightmare.

It's a neat idea. These kinds of systems often require lots of care and grooming. Since it's used to retroactively test features after they're in production, there's a repeating process of discovering we're saving data we shouldn't, scrubbing, filtering, anonymization, etc. In most cases, I've watched them eventually get replaced by fuzzers. Still, having a central service used by lots of companies may allow this solution to scale up, develop necessary features to solve these problems and function well. I hope it works out!

MrSqueezles commented on Record-Breaking Egg Profits Prompt Accusation of Price Gouging modernfarmer.com/2023/01/... · Posted by u/myshpa

Alupis · 3 years ago

Literally everything manufactured got more expensive in 2022. Everything.

Why would eggs be any different? It's not like they pop out of the chicken and land on your plate - there's a ton that goes into getting them into the store just so you can buy them.

Assuming egg production didn't experience significant cost increases seems precarious without evidence.

It's in the food industry - which suffered some of the most draconian restrictions on personnel and safety measures available at the time. For all we know, half of that cost increase could have gone to just sheets of plastic to hang all over the place and single-use disposable masks, gloves, boot coverings, hair nets and more that all had to be changed several times per day.

It's not Price Gouging simply because we don't like it folks...

> Collusion of the biggest producers would also explain why the more expensive eggs at the store did not rise as much as the cheaper brands

No, not at all. It simply indicates the more expensive brands had enormous margins before covid and were able to keep pricing more stable against rising costs.

Your cheap brands had nowhere to go, except raise prices when costs increase. This is so obvious and basic, it's weird it needs to be said.

Additionally, government policies don't happen in a vacuum folks. Policies made it difficult to produce and manufacture, and shocker - prices went way up. This is not rocket science...

MrSqueezles · 3 years ago

What are you talking about? Egg producers reported that avian flu affected supply, so they made employees wear, "hair nets ... changed several times per day"?

Watch the movie The Informant. It's a true story and we only know it happened because one guy was trying not to go to jail. What's happening now is nothing new.

MrSqueezles commented on On ChatGPT acoup.blog/2023/02/17/col... · Posted by u/picture

MrSqueezles · 3 years ago

Education has always done a terrible job of keeping up with technology. Kids in school now will graduate into a world in which all information will be instantly available and will be presented in whatever format is most suitable. They'll have computers correcting their grammar, improving their ideas, completing their sentences and paragraphs. Instead of learning those technologies themselves and instructing students how to best utilize them, teachers tell kids, "that's cheating". When you graduate and get your first job, your boss isn't going to take away your books, phone, and laptop, and ask you to write a report about a well understood subject. I understand why that's a common practice in education. Maybe it's time to change.

MrSqueezles commented on Google Fires Employee of over 16 Years with Automated Email medium.com/developer-purp... · Posted by u/Tozen

MrSqueezles · 3 years ago

I was laid off from Google. I keep seeing posts from people who, I have to assume, just figured out how the world works and want to teach us. Guys, seriously, who didn't already know this?

Some companies stay lean, plan for difficult times. Others spend like crazy in good times and cut back in bad. Google always prided itself on being small and scrappy. That changed under Sundar, the current CEO. They started hiring a ton and now they're cutting back. The CEO still hasn't come to terms with the fact that he fucked up. He made comments in leaked meetings like, "Just imagine if we continued to grow and didn't have all of those extra people. Where would we have been?" Dude, you would have been fine. You don't grow a business by sticking more people in it. This is how accountants think about business, not leaders.

MrSqueezles commented on Lone Wolves: Why do some people hate teamwork? (2017) queendomblog.wordpress.co... · Posted by u/rzk

Shinmon · 3 years ago

Great post. Not sure, how much research is behind everything but the overall sentiment hits it pretty spot on.

MrSqueezles · 3 years ago

Yeah, I don't know whether I believe they actually found 18,000 people and somehow sorted them accurately into high and low performers.

I've worked with people who don't like teamwork because they're afraid of being discovered as not knowing what they're doing and others who can't compromise on literally anything, so claim they're the smartest and best and nobody can keep up. All have in common that in the long term, the things they build are unmaintainable Jenga towers nobody else understands. The rest of the team used 5 people's input to build robust systems. The silo workers just had themselves. It shouldn't be surprising that even with design and code reviews, what they create isn't as good.

They also have in common that they love to be called "lone wolves" because it makes them sound cool. I'm about 99% sure this article was written by one.

MrSqueezles commented on “I’m selling data of 400M Twitter users that was scraped via a vulnerability” breached.vc/Thread-Sellin... · Posted by u/prakhar897

MrSqueezles · 3 years ago

Pretty sure this comment is related to that recorded teleconference Elon joined to let everyone know that if you dox, even if you tweet about someone else doxxing and link to them, you're banned.