magice (u/magice) - Readit News

magice commented on Eight Futures of Work: Scenarios and Their Implications weforum.org/whitepapers/e... · Posted by u/tobeme

magice · 7 years ago

So, according to this, the assumptions are: 1. NO NEW TAXES!!!!! 2. No safety nets! If you are out of jobs, you are ed. 3. Thou shall work 40hr a week. 4. Governments can only act for/against immigration.

All of which are, obviously, interesting. I mean, even today, people are asking "the rich" to pay more taxes. Even today, people are looking for way to help their fellow human beings (in US, the current fights are cheaper education and protection for pre-existing conditions).

So, imagine a future with higher taxes and basic income. In that case, the whole shebang about "competition for jobs" looks really different. I mean, if you are guaranteed livable income, low-skill jobs will be the first to go (surprised! Raise your hand if you like to scrub toilets for $7/hr). If you are guaranteed livable income, skill acquisition becomes much less risky.

But of course, read their lips: no new taxes (and thus no new social safety nets whatsoever; don't you know that if you bail out the poor, society will disintegrate into chaos?)

magice commented on Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time blog.bradfieldcs.com/perf... · Posted by u/ozanonay

magice · 8 years ago

Hmm. Yet another day, yet another bashing of performance review. Very sad.

I will readily agree that most common systems unnecessarily bundle multiple high stake issues. For example, most people (me included from time to time) stop listening past "you get a raise of x%" in an annual review.

However, 1 wrong thing (i.e. unnecessary bundling") doesn't invalidate whole whole process.

For example, most performance processes involve goal-setting (I don't know about you, but I find that very very appealing), performance evaluation against goals, soft skill review (i.e. how much do you stress out your teammates?), and plan of action for the next year. Have I received career changing advices through performance review? You bet I have. For example, I pick software engineering because of distribution of my grades (performance review at K12 level!). For another example, don't make stupid & potentially misunderstood jokes.

Sure, continuous & informal feedbacks are important. However, so are formal processes, including feedback and evaluation. Have I improved? How the hell would I know if I don't have things noted down? Should I be promoted? How the hell would another person know if there is no papertrail of evidence of excellence? What am I good at? What role should I play in this team? How should I grow? All of these questions require careful contemplation over behaviors and performance in a long period (a year or at least a few months). Maybe all of you Bill Gates are so smart that you don't need them. But I am mere mortal, and I love feedback.

So, for the love of craftmanship, dedicate time and resources to performance review. It will only matter WHEN YOU MAKE IT MATTER. That's the thing. You can drive the best car the in the world badly if you hate driving. Similarly, if you think that you are so smart that no system can properly evaluate you, well, the system will fail. To be more precise, you fail the system.

magice commented on How to get rich without getting lucky threadreaderapp.com/threa... · Posted by u/madmax108

magice · 8 years ago

Man, I disagree with about everything from this opinion. And I hate that I have this urge to write out the point-to-point rebuking:

+ "Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep." : Really? Are we playing the "let's redefine everything so that it works out like I say" game now?

+ "You’re not going to get rich renting out your time." : the top 1% of Americans are dominated with doctors and lawyers who, guess what, rent out their time.

+ "You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get." : The concept of "first-mover disadvantage" should really solve this. Look, Palm produced a smartphone, and Apple also produces smartphone; Apple make trillions, Palm died. The society clearly want smartphone. Why did Apple succeed but Palm failed?

+ "Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you." : please see above for doctors and lawyers, whom are all trained by the society. Plus, if other humans (i.e. the society) can't train you, who does? God sends angels to you?

+ "Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now." : And if you are interested in, says, building rafts (or horse-drawn carriage, or any of these things), you will get rich so fast that your stomach will starve.

+ "Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others." : sigh. Right.

+ "The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon." : Ummm. One, Trump brand and accountability have adverse relationship. Two, some of the most rewarded people on earth don't do business in their names. Bill Gates used Microsoft, in case you forget. Corporations exist for a reason.

+ "Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true." : Yes, and the best vendors always win! And Windows is the greatest OS on earth! And Facebook is the best social network! You get my sarcasm.

So, conclusion?

My father taught me this, which I believe to be true: small wealth is by hardwork, great wealth is by Heaven. If you want to be affluent, be industrious at work, be acceptable to society, be prudent in finance; and you will eventually get there. If you want to get richie rich rich, well, pray (plus all of the things for little wealth). This kind of "I get lucky now I will give stupid advices" things really should go away.

magice commented on Is there a fix for impostor syndrome? interactions.acm.org/arch... · Posted by u/snaky

magice · 8 years ago

Frankly, are we overthinking this?

IMHO, 99% of human emotions have reasons of existence. It just makes evolutionary sense (or, if you prefer, it helps us serve the intelligent maker(s) better). Maybe we SHOULD have impostor syndrome, as well as shyness and awkwardness and diffidence and stress and whatnot. Maybe we should EMBRACE them instead of treating them like unwanted baggage of lizards.

One of my memory on this: one night (2 yrs ago?), I woke up with cold sweat, with a terrible dream: I just got paged and I didn't even know where to start debugging. It's horrible time.

You know what happened next? Next few days, I compiled a list of "essential documentations" (plus all the juicy links for debugging). On-call rotation came. I did get page. Different from the dream, I did not forget all of the crappy code (that I had lovingly written). However, the list helped immensely. And whenever my teammates had on-call cold feet, I shared the list. Life rocked. (for a while....)

I was told that we humans freaked ourselves into actions. Deadlines press for action. Pressure elevates the flow and sharpens the focus. Challenges inhibit daydreams and sweeten successes.

So, again, here is my take: why can't we just embrace impostor syndrome? After all, we need some fire on our behind of get our acts together, no?

magice commented on Scuttlebutt, a Decentralized Alternative to Facebook inthemesh.com/archive/sec... · Posted by u/bpierre

notheguyouthink · 8 years ago

> The whole Cambridge Analytica issue was caused by APIs that are too open. For distributed systems there are more ways to exploit the APIs and gather data on users.

Huh? Scuttlebutt is fully encrypted.. doesn't that make the API vastly more locked down than Facebook/etc?

> There is a clear issue with Facebook's accountability in these areas. Distributed systems are typically open source, they run on multiple servers by different owners, this leads to zero accountability.

This is no worse than Facebook though. With Facebook, your friend could steal all of the data you let them see. With Scuttlebutt, your friend could steal all of the data you let them see.

At least with this I control who sees my data, no? Sure, I can't have accountability with a friend, but at least no company/etc has access to my data.

> GDPR compliance about deleting data is almost impossible in a distributed system.

Doesn't GDPR apply to companies? If my mom sends me a physical card, do I have to adhere to GDPR laws with her address/name? How is that any different than Scuttlebutt?

magice · 8 years ago

I see that you don't understand the problems raised.

About accountability: if YOU are compromised, your friends' data are compromised, and vice versa. Are you saying that the median security skill of your friends are higher than Facebook? Because any of them can leak your data unintentionally.

About encryption: it's freaking useless in this case. Remember, some people fall for Nigeria prince scam. And what happen when their keys are compromised? See above.

That's the crux of the argument: you can't guarantee that your precious friends and family can safeguard their keys (in fact, I doubt my personal security practice is remotely as good as FB or Google or Amazon or MS or Apple). In that case, by the virtual of distribution, your data is copied everywhere, waiting for any key to compromise.

magice commented on Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/uptown

magice · 8 years ago

I sometimes wonder why Apple would do this. I mean: i) the end-users frankly don't care. Seriously. ii) 90% (if not 99.99%) of dev would not (be able to) care

I mean, I doubt if more than perhaps 5% of Apple internal dev can take advantage of "tight integrat[ion] of new hardware and software." This integration probably takes form of either some specific app (think Pixel camera phone), some specific library, or compiler optimizations. The first one (specific app) can be accomplished much cheaper through add-on chips (guess what, that's what Pixel does). The 2nd and 3rd can be done much more effectively through a generally available chips (like, well, Intel's chip) since more people, from vendor's engineers to researchers to random open source ninjas, would be able to experiment and help out.

In other words, from a purely technical point of view, there is absolutely zero reason to do this. Whatever happens, Intel is among if not the best capable chip producers. And Apple is not "disrupting" (i.e. focuses on unaddressed aspect), but merely directly competing with Intel's core competencies. It's not Amazon entering details against WalMart's. It's Target's competing against WalMart's, except they don't have Target's existing competencies. Which, again, makes no technical sense.

On the other hand, if they want to completely lock in users......

magice commented on Towards a world without Facebook techcrunch.com/2018/03/25... · Posted by u/middle1

magice · 8 years ago

How on earth is blockchain going help? Seriously! There is no conceptual situation, in theory or practice, that blockchain will improve upon Facebook situation.

Generally speaking, Facebook is bad for about 5 reasons: 1. Privacy: unexpected people see your data (legally). 2. Right-to-be-forgotten: your data sticks around longer than expected. 3. Data Security: your data is stolen from your data keeper. 4. Cyberbully: Unwanted data surfaces without your control 5. Fake news: wrong information is fed to you.

How do blockchains help with ANY of these? 2. is certainly getting WORSE, since blockchains never forget. 1. is probably getting WORSE, because most blockchains are public. 3. is getting SO MUCH WORSE, because so many other people will now store data, and compromises in any of them will expose everything (think African Prince scam). 4. will become impossible to solve, because the data is going to be public and cannot be deleted, and because all of those anonymous mechanism will ensure that the culprit is impossible to track. 5. won't be impacted.

So, tell me, how the hell do blockchains help? Seriously.

Look, I know blockchain is a cool idea (yay! no need for central database!). However, central database can help in many situation, especially in anything involves history, limit of access, and regulation.

magice commented on Advice for Coding Bootcamp Graduates thinkfaster.co/2018/02/my... · Posted by u/wayofthesamurai

magice · 8 years ago

"if you take one of the 6 month programs, you’ll get a similar amount of experience as in an undergrad curriculum."

I am sorry, what?

Look, I know that people are all about "disrupting" the world. But, for the love of hard-work and whatever goodness left in your heart, can you please stop insulting people?

I once worked as TA for an introductory class in Computer Science. It takes about a semester for students to wrap their heads about what is "programming." It takes at minimum another semester of honest to goodness to absorb the fundamentals of computer science (incl. formal languages, basic complexity theories, and basic algorithm). It takes at least another semester to work through how the computer (you know, the silicon?) works.

Of course, I have only talked about the theory side the programming world. A good CS program also needs to introduce at least 2 (if not 3: one introductory, one system, one industrial) programming languages, plus at least 3 paradigms (corresponding the languages above: functional, system/procedural, and OOP), plus some discussion over the industry. And they should ensure that the students get stock overflow at least once, infinite loops at least a few times, and (on the verge of?) kicking their classmates/teammates at least once on some stupid bugs.

More challenges: a brain isn't a hard drive. Cramming is about the worst way possible to induce understanding. All of these above need time and space to work themselves through various layers of consciousness.

(BTW, all of the above are just the basics; if you notice, I have not brought up any "sexy" topics like networking or cloud computing or AI or what-have-you)

Imagine for a minute: what happens if a person walks up to newly minted chemical or mechanical or even electrical engineers and tells them that their 4 years of education can be done in 6 months. What would the new engineers think? Well, here is the nice version: such "disrupter" is laughed out of the room. The less nice version involves some honor-defense beating. The pragmatic version probably involves some lawsuits over how such claim is a fraud and may endanger the consumers (not to mention co-workers).

And yet, here we are. Software engineers, who spent years to acquire immensely complicated skills, are forced to sit through and agree with such insults, then to give comments like "oh yeah, maybe you should learn more about big-O notation." You know what I think about big-O notation? It's about as useful as calculus. Remember, doing something twice does NOT cost as much as doing it once (and this is before factor in goodies like cache miss and waiting for OS and whatnots). It's like push-ups: good mental exercise, but not actually used. So, telling someone "you need to learn big-O notation after 6-month bootcamp" is like saying "learn football for 6 months, add some push-ups, and you are ready for NFL." Am I the only one finding this ridiculous?

magice commented on Why Microsoft Is Ruling the Cloud, IBM Matching Amazon, Google Is $15B Behind forbes.com/sites/bobevans... · Posted by u/kimsk112

briffle · 8 years ago

This appears to be an interesting comparison. Microsoft Cloud includes Office 365 subscriptions.. Which can have some 'cloud' components, but also gets installed on your PC. Likewise, I have never heard of someone running a startup out of salesforce.com, or Oracle.com. I would guess they are cloud based offerings of their software stacks.

I guess 'cloud' can be said about all of them, but as a tech, I would consider true 'cloud' to be full Infrastructure as a Service.. not just applications as a service.

magice · 8 years ago

I completely agree.

Microsoft and this article try very hard to fuzz the meaning of "cloud computing" to make their numbers look prettier. If we start counting Office 365, than Gmail should also be counted, as is Amazon Prime related products (Cloud Drive, for example). Why stop there? Isn't the whole Google search on "the cloud"? Isn't the whole Amazon retail shopping on "the cloud"?

Counting only AWS and GCP against "Microsoft cloud" and salesforce is more financial marketing than anything else.

magice commented on Why are bones not made of steel? (2010) materialstoday.com/mechan... · Posted by u/diziet

Gatsky · 8 years ago

Bone is an organ with multiple functions beyond structural support. It creates a reservoir for calcium and phosphate homeostasis and of course contains bone marrow. It also has attachments for muscles and connective tissue, and adapts to environmental conditions (eg see a tennis player's forearm). A titanium bone could do none of these things. The question should really be why are bones not reinforced with metal or metal composites. In general if greater strength is needed it can be achieved with thicker bone, which has a far lower evolutionary barrier than eg metal composite bones. Additionally, the material properties of the whole biomechanical apparatus need to be considered. A super strong skinny thigh bone isn't much good if the area available for ligamentous attachment is so small that the tendons keep tearing. Most injuries involve connective tissue and muscle rather than bone.

magice · 8 years ago

Extra functions of the bones cannot explain fully his question.

If it is possible to for the body to synthesize whatever material, it can create a frame for the bones, then wrap that frame in bio-active layers. Basically, a skeleton for the skeleton. Given the intricacies of other body organs (think the sizes and complexity of the eyes, says), such is not too hard of the task.

In fact, this probably answers all other concerns raised here. Corrosion and electric-conductive? A bio-compatible wrap (similar to enameled steel) solves that. Grinding between different bones? The ends of the bone can be built out of different material than the fragile length.

Furthermore, none of these concerns matter for, says, horns, especially the tips. Evolutionary speaking, it makes complete sense for animal to evolve steel-tipped horns: these steel parts hurt no one but their enemies.

(also note, carbon fiber avoids a lot of these bio compatibility issues).

In other words, animal kingdom did not have metal parts because synthesis is impossible, rather than because of disadvantages of metals per se.