egsmi (u/egsmi) - Readit News

egsmi commented on Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us? scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/laybak

baja_blast · 5 years ago

I disagree that Aliens even if we share the exact same building blocks would look similar to us. For example even for planets that would be habitable for us would have minor differences in atmospheric pressure, gravity, the types of radiation their star produces would result in drastically different evolutionary paths. Also even if there was a clone of our solar system evolution would be random and the life would look different from each other, I mean look at Australia, or even look at Earth's history the fauna during the Jurassic looks way different than what we have today.

egsmi · 5 years ago

Every snowflake is unique [1]. That doesn't mean you study every snowflake that means you study the system that makes snowflakes.

[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atm...

egsmi commented on Undocumented arm64 ISA extension present on the Apple M1 gist.github.com/dougallj/... · Posted by u/ytch

rwmj · 5 years ago

If the compiler generates these instructions, won't old binaries break if Apple later make changes in the hardware? (For shared libraries it would be "ok" because the old binary could use the new library, as long as Apple didn't also break the ABI).

egsmi · 5 years ago

In theory that’s what bitcode protects against.

Today, that doesn’t save binaries not distributed through the store or ones you compiled yourself via other compiler chains.

It is possible to change that. One could even imagine it as part of the loading procedure.

https://lowlevelbits.org/bitcode-demystified/

egsmi commented on Working at Apple (2011) worrydream.com/#!/Apple... · Posted by u/sturza

Arainach · 5 years ago

Monocultures reinforce bad habits. I have friends at a wide variety of tech companies - Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tableau, AirBnB, and more. All of us know, in broad terms, what the others do. We don't discuss trade secrets or specific unannounced projects, but we're able to talk about things like "X works on Storage Spaces for Windows, Y works on WebXR, Z works on security, etc."

We're also all able to talk freely about what aspects of our jobs and employers we like and don't like. This is valuable information - for instance, I've heard enough first person anecdotes from various teams to know that I'm not interested in working for Amazon unless all other avenues to pay my mortgage have failed.

The Apple experience sounds like my interview with the NSA years ago. All of my attempts to ask any questions were met with a "no comment" for the most part. Very frustrating experience. I walked away with not much more idea of what a job there would be like than you could get from reading Wikipedia.

egsmi · 5 years ago

> Monocultures reinforce bad habits.

Very true but it is interesting that Apple is often used as an example to follow on avoiding a monoculture. In the business press anyway.

https://www.torbenrick.eu/blog/strategy/avoid-an-organizatio...

egsmi commented on Working at Apple (2011) worrydream.com/#!/Apple... · Posted by u/sturza

nrp · 5 years ago

Actually, Apple is siloed internally as well. I worked there for a little over three years and had friends there in other departments with whom we could mutually not share what we were working on. It both makes for a worse working culture and causes issues in practice as people relearn the same lessons and reinvent the same solutions in different areas.

egsmi · 5 years ago

Apple is a huge company so certainly experiences will vary but all the anecdotes, podcasts, and books written by former employees mention the highly collaborative environment, even within very secrete siloed projects [1].

Honestly, the reality is most engineering is tedious and boring and mired in context. The old 10% inspiration 90% perspiration quote always rung true for me. I think you’ll struggle to have anything other than a superficial conversation of any hard problem or question with any engineer whose not closely associated with your team.

[1] Examples abound but this is my favorite: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37638098-creative-select...

egsmi commented on Working at Apple (2011) worrydream.com/#!/Apple... · Posted by u/sturza

dannyw · 5 years ago

What if confidentiality agreements had a maximum duration? The author worked at Apple a decade ago. Perhaps their NDA agreements should expire about now.

Yes, it can be abused, but it’s kinda like copyright. It’s just like parents having a limited term: it (in theory) catches everyone up to best of X years ago.

egsmi · 5 years ago

They expire. People legally write whole books about their time at Apple.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37638098-creative-select...

egsmi commented on Working at Apple (2011) worrydream.com/#!/Apple... · Posted by u/sturza

sharken · 5 years ago

So on one hand you get to do some cool stuff for one of the most successful companies in the world. On the other hand you cannot talk about anything you do at all, as if the time spent there does not exist.

Personally I'd rather spend my time at a company that allows for some discussion.

egsmi · 5 years ago

> On the other hand you cannot talk about anything you do at all

... to people outside of Apple. Apple has 137,000 employees in 25 countries. I’m sure you’ll find someone to discuss your work with.

egsmi commented on What Shape Are You? tynan.com/shapes... · Posted by u/neilkakkar

biren34 · 5 years ago

I really like this way of thinking. For entrepreneurs, you could even go far as "all the work" being to subtract all the key risks/unknowns.

It's not about building a product (i.e. writing code or designing/manufacturing physical stuff), it's about making a list of all the reasons your idea won't work and then subtracting them all as cheaply and quickly as possible.

This is definitely something I wish I could back and beat into 20-year old me. It would have saved me so much time and effort between then and now.

egsmi · 5 years ago

It’s an interesting thought exercise but there are reasons a product may not work that are not necessarily under your control.

egsmi commented on I assume I’m below average (2010) sive.rs/below-average... · Posted by u/enigmatic02

TheOperator · 5 years ago

I've been routinely graded WORSE than the average student and believe this rather confidently. An impression I get from having had teachers yell at me in the hallway about wasted potential and other students cracking jokes about how my friends had "ruined me" after my grades fell off a cliff after making some new ones. Grading doesn't prevent inflated delusions of intellectual superiority if people believe grades are a matter of hard work rather than intelligence.

What drove a sense of inferiority for me was somebody getting better grades with seemingly less effort.

egsmi · 5 years ago

I understand your point and, as I am sure you know, life can definitely be unfair.

Do you think it's so unfair that 90% of students would feel the same way? It's not impossible but personally, I would be surprised by that. Which is the point. Experiences vary dramatically, especially if we broaden the statement internationally, so knowing who was asked what is just as important as the claim.

egsmi commented on Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone foundation.mozilla.org/en... · Posted by u/nojito

jefftk · 5 years ago

Most of the time, privacy and fraud both benefit from the same changes. To prevent tracking online, you want your device to look just like everybody else's devices. To prevent fraud, you want devices to look different so you can tell when a device does not represent a real user.

At the extreme, imagine if every person has a unique identifier that was automatically sent whenever they used any device: preventing ad fraud would be really easy, and you would have essentially zero privacy. At the other extreme, imagine if every device looked exactly the same, with no user agent, no IP, no cookies, no way to tell my traffic from yours. In that situation, people would have pretty strong privacy, but if you had headless browsers loading the ads on your site no one would be able to tell that those views were not from real users.

As the GGP says, removing IDFA shifts the balance toward both privacy and fraud. See https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass... and https://web.dev/trust-tokens/ for attempts to separate these.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself.)

egsmi · 5 years ago

> To prevent fraud

Honest question, I am not trying to be obtuse, but in this context can you more specifically define fraud? Is it just "ad fraud" as defined here: https://www.clickcease.com/blog/what-is-ad-fraud/

I get why businesses should care about ad fraud, but why should I, as a consumer care about it? Frankly I don't even want to know about my traffic, let alone yours.

egsmi commented on I assume I’m below average (2010) sive.rs/below-average... · Posted by u/enigmatic02

egsmi · 5 years ago

"Ninety percent of students think they are more intelligent than the average student."

Does anyone know which study this came from? I was trying to figure out exactly how the survey question was worded because this statistic seems somewhat amazing to me. The driving one I get because drivers are not being routinely graded, but students are.

I googled the phrase and I basically got related quotes, this article (from 2010), and a couple of studies that came after this article was posted, and they were mostly looking at gender differences in preceived intelligence and after a quick glance, didn't seem to support this statement.