My father is a data point in this. He was a farmer all his life and ultimately it was Parkinson's that did him in. While we took some precautions, I have no doubt that the herbicides we used should have been handled more carefully.
Readit Newsthelittlenag commented on Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a deadly pesticide mlive.com/news/2025/12/th... · Posted by u/bikenaga
I've really liked interviews where I either present a personal project I've worked on, or get to interview someone about their own personal projects. It's just more fun.
Their major complaint of the project approach is not getting signal on adaptability to new codebases. That has never been a first concern at any company I've worked at, and frankly if engineers are touching a new codebase every month then I'm getting a bit worried.
Yes, a discussion of the tradeoffs of different solutions is exactly what I want to hear in an interview.
I've now done probably close to 100 system design interviews. One of the main things I've looked for in candidates is their ability to identify, communicate, and discuss trade-offs. The next thing on my checklist is their ability to move forward, pick an option, and defend that option. Really nimble candidates will pivot, recognizing when to change approaches because requirements have changed.
The goal here is to see if the candidate understands the domain (generic distributed systems) well enough on their own. For more senior roles I look to make sure they can then communicate that understanding to a team, and then drive consensus around some approach.
Boost is an awful whole with a couple very nice tiny parts inside.
If you can restrict to using the 'good' parts than it can be OK, but it's pulling in a huge dependency for very little gain these days.
I'm old enough to recall when boost first came out, and when it matured into a very nice library. What's happened in the last 15 years that boost is no longer something I would want to reach for?
thelittlenag commented on The untold impact of cancellation pretty.direct/impact... · Posted by u/cbeach
I don't get why he is so determined to stick with Scala. It's just a programming language. The Scala community is forever going to hold extremely negative associations for him. For someone with his level of experience and motivation it presumably wouldn't be too hard to switch to Rust or something. Some people will still reject him out of hand due to his googleable name, but I still feel like he'd be happier and better off leaving.
Jon has addressed this elsewhere, but the gist of the argument, as I understand it, is that he hasn't worked professionally in any other ecosystem or language. So leaving Scala is tantamount to abandoning his entirely professional experience (20+ years!), skill set, and all open source contributions, and then restarting from scratch in a new ecosystem. All without any guarantee that the allegations around him won't just follow him. Its a really tough position to be in.
thelittlenag commented on The untold impact of cancellation pretty.direct/impact... · Posted by u/cbeach
I have mixed feelings. Cancel culture sucks. I think it's root is a culture of indulging in righteous indignation based on very one-sided information.
Even if the allegations are true, his life should not have been ruined over this.
On the other hand, when I read the accusers' accounts someone else linked in the comments, they sound credible. It fits behavior patterns we've all seen before.
I don't know who to believe.
My comment here is a very narrow one. In general I agree with your sentiment and thoughts, so please don't misread me. There is one nit I need to pick, however.
There is a subtle, but worthwhile, difference between "plausible" and "credible". Lots of stories are plausible. Few are credible.
In emotion laden cases like this we tend to want to believe stories we already agree with, or have some investment in. I'm no exception to that.
We need to not be misled by what is plausible, or confuse that with what is credible.
thelittlenag commented on Facts don't change minds, structure does vasily.cc/blog/facts-dont... · Posted by u/staph
If you found this interesting, I highly recommend reading "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. It's deeply impacted how I think of morality and politics from a societal and psychological point of view.
Some ideas in the book:
- Humans are tribal, validation-seeking animals. We make emotional snap judgments first and gather reasons to support those snap judgments second.
- The reason the political right is so cohesive (vs the left) is because they have a very consistent and shared understanding and definitions of what Haidt calls the 5 "moral taste receptors" - care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Whereas the left trades off that cohesive understanding with diversity.
I've really enjoyed Haidt's book, though its really a couple of different books in one. I need to read his other work.
To your point about left and right, an interesting point I heard recently is that the left is coalition-driven whereas the right is consensus-driven (at least in US politics). Mapping this back to Haidt, one of his findings is that the left tends to greatly emphasize one or two of the "moral taste receptors", with the right having a roughly equal emphasis between them. It isn't clear to me how these two points might explain each other, but I do wonder if there isn't some self-reinforcement there. If there is, I wonder how/if that might explain political systems more widely.
I think you need to look into your hiring portal. I have actually applied to this position (or a position with the exact same description) many months ago. Never heard anything. Which is strange since I have decades of video encoding, video player, c++, and cross platform development experience at both startups and FANG.
Send me a resume at mark.kegel@disney.com.
Disney | Senior Software Engineer | Onsite | Full-time | San Francisco, Santa Monica, Seattle, New York
Disney (Video Player Engineering) is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help us deliver excellent streaming experiences for Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN+ as a developer of our client player. Our team is responsible for playback across several devices including gaming consoles, mobile devices and set top boxes. You will have the opportunity to lead in the design and implementation of our cross-platform C/C++ and Rust player that runs Disney+ and Hulu on these devices.
We’re looking for an experienced C/C++ or Rust engineer who has video player and cross platform development experience. You should have a passion for coding and debugging hard problems, and an eagerness to help us deliver seamless video to our subscribers. Being a Senior member, you will get to own large features, lead the technical direction of our work, and mentor and provide technical expertise to other engineers. You will work closely with other technical teams in the application layer and backend video services to deliver features.
https://www.disneycareers.com/en/job/seattle/sr-software-eng...
Feel free to DM me for more details.
thelittlenag commented on I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/n1b0m
As a Canadian living near the border (as many Canadians are!), I would often drive into the US for shopping. There are a number of towns that seem dedicated to serving Canadians, like Watertown, NY. I've found that often the US border guards would be much nicer than the Canadian border guards, probably because the Canadians are the ones that need to deal with the customs rules (Canadians aren't trying to smuggle their new purchases back to the US without paying tax!).
I haven't been on a shopping trip like that in a while though, and I find it hard to believe I'll ever do it again now. I feel bad for Watertown, but with the tariffs and the risk of detention, its not worth it.
That's an interesting anecdote. I grew up on a border town, but as a US Citizen often going up into Cananda. Without fail it was always the US border guards who were the jerks (I went to school with their kids!) and the Canadian guards who were gracious and courteous.
Given that I've NEVER had what I would call a great interaction with a US border guard, it warms my heart to hear that at least they could be kind to some one ;-)