pmikesell (u/pmikesell)

pmikesell commented on Uber, Postmates Sue California to Block Gig-Worker Law bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/PretzelFisch

Waterluvian · 6 years ago

Can you comment a bit more on what you're referring to? I'm not sure I understand.

I learned about "woke" a while ago and I dunno what's PC these days but it's a huge red flag to me of controlled speech and samethink.

pmikesell · 6 years ago

Yes - I just meant that we're going to see a ton of comments here from people who want to let it be know that they think Uber, Postmates, etc are super evil and everything the government can do to shut them down is what they deserve.

It is samethink. A lot of people posting here hold these positions because they read them in the last story about these companies and they want to join in on the rabble. And discussion or nuance gets lost in this blizzard of conformity of opinion. It gets boring after a while.

pmikesell commented on The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius paulgraham.com/genius.htm... · Posted by u/pilingual

NPMaxwell · 6 years ago

You may think there is some rational choice to be made about obsessive curiosity. Maybe not. In 1960, my mom lived near a six year old who could fix electric stuff. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him and brought him things to fix. TV's were no problem; dead radios were great; telephones were cool. He was a super happy kid with a constant enthusiasm and a sparkle in his eye, running home from school every day to see what he could learn and what neighbors had brought for his help. He had thrown circuit breakers in the house many times. One day, there was a blackout and he came down from his room to apologize to this parents, again. They had an idea and they pointed out the window. "Well you really did it this time. Look, the entire city went down." And that was it. He stopped with electronics. At first he was morose and anxious, but his parents figured he would get used to his new life. He left for college the same disconnected and subdued kid he became at six. My mom bumped into him again around 1990, when he was about 35, and he never did recover: still sad, puffy, disconnected from people, uninspired, hating his job, unhappy with friends.

pmikesell · 6 years ago

Not the point of the story, but he didn’t do it though, right? It was probably this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965

pmikesell commented on You can fool some of the people, all of the time economist.com/internation... · Posted by u/pseudolus

thinkloop · 6 years ago

Isn't there an implied undercurrent with all this that genpop are idiots? I personally am not saying this, but if people say that "money buys elections", what do they mean exactly? They do not mean that massive election fraud exists, nor that people are being directly paid for their votes - there is no evidence of that. Everyone agrees that people are fairly voting based on their wants. What they are implying though is that the slovenly masses are non-discerning dummies incapable of critical thought that can be convinced to believe whatever drivel you are able to purchase with money. Is that not the underlying premise of such statements?

pmikesell · 6 years ago

Sort of, I guess. But it’s also the idea that most people receive a lot of information passively as a result of whatever ads are shown to them on tv, YouTube, Facebook, etc - so all that money goes to the volume of propaganda pushed out promoting one result or another. Important concepts often have nuance, and that means some good and some bad, and if you’re on one side or the other you can tell the part of the story you wish to become the narrative.

pmikesell commented on The Machine Learning Software Engineering Interview eng.lyft.com/how-lyft-des... · Posted by u/mgrover

davnicwil · 6 years ago

I think the trick here is have people talk through what it does, how and why (as in what are the tradeoffs, what other approaches could have been taken, etc).

You can't fake this. Or to put it better, even if the code isn't yours and you can do this well, it doesn't even matter that the code isn't yours as in doing this you by definition have the skills and knowledge to reimplement it anyway.

pmikesell · 6 years ago

You can absolutely fake this. There’s a huge difference between coming up with and implementing something vs understanding it enough to be convincing.

Have you actually tested this out?

pmikesell commented on A Forty Year Career lethain.com/forty-year-ca... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon

mcguire · 6 years ago

Yeah, but I'm now learning twelve different ways to spell the same damn thing that junior programmers were doing when I started in 1990. (My career in actually interesting things flamed out by the mid 90s. Don't work for IBM, folks.)

pmikesell · 6 years ago

“twelve different ways to spell the same damn thing”

Sorry, what does that mean?

pmikesell commented on What Happens to the Body on No Sleep outsideonline.com/2292806... · Posted by u/lxm

harikb · 6 years ago

Lucky you. In my case, I end up thinking about the problem in my sleep, come up with solutions that are a mix between reality and fantasy within the dream and usually end in a horrible loop of the above while I desperately try to break out of it. In short, spoils my whole night sleep ( at least how I feel about it next day ). Rarely have it actually produced a successful solution!

pmikesell · 6 years ago

I secretly suspect this is everybody, and the people who claim to be coming up with real solutions in their sleep are back justifying what happened when they had enough time to sleep well and felt nice.

pmikesell commented on Experts who say we shouldn't worry about superintelligent AI are wrong? spectrum.ieee.org/computi... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

bko · 6 years ago

What I never understood is how you would go from:

Hey, I found this series of numbers and if I take some numerical representation of an image/text/sound and I multiply/add/perform non-linear function them through these series of numbers it will map to a number which I can interpret as something meaningful to me

to

This thing is alive and will kill us all in maximization of its utility function.

pmikesell · 6 years ago

Because that’s also what a brain is doing. The thoughts of a housefly may not be very apocalyptic, but there’s an evolutionary path from there to humans, which definitely could be.

pmikesell commented on Kickstarter doubles down on its anti-union stance currentaffairs.org/2019/0... · Posted by u/kaboro

pmikesell · 6 years ago

I worry that tech workers may be under-informed about what a union may mean. A union can be in many ways similar to a corporation with its own power structure and demands.

Just 4 examples from my time in a union shop:

  1) Pay raise and promotion via seniority only

  2) Being warned by the shop steward that I was "working too fast"

  3) Heavy coercion to contribute to specific political candidates

  4) Going on strike for reasons I didn't agree with

Maybe a tech union would turn out better somehow. I for one would not want to go back to that situation.

pmikesell commented on Kickstarter doubles down on its anti-union stance currentaffairs.org/2019/0... · Posted by u/kaboro

SomeOtherThrow · 6 years ago

The lack of unions in the industry is making me leave. It’s going to leave out many of its current employees to dry: I want something better than the word of an entrepreneur.

pmikesell · 6 years ago

Have you ever worked a unionized job before?