throwaway892238 (u/throwaway892238)

throwaway892238 commented on Why are most sofas so bad? dwell.com/article/dtc-sof... · Posted by u/jtsnow

SauciestGNU · 2 years ago

Like hell it is. What they want their kids learning is irrelevant, it's a travesty of "religious freedom" that we don't require this cult to educate their children to the same uniform standard as every other person in our society.

throwaway892238 · 2 years ago

I dropped out of school in 9th grade. I make $200K a year. A friend of mine has a college degree and has been unemployed for a year.

There is no uniform standard of education in the US. Kids in the South are being taught that evolution is on par with intelligent design. Poor black kids in Baltimore have on average a 3rd grade reading level in high school, while rich kids a few counties away are taught when to use a backdoor roth ira. Don't even mention "no child left behind".

Maybe let's calm down a bit with the judgement.

throwaway892238 commented on Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location cellio.dreamwidth.org/202... · Posted by u/throwaway_08932

SavageBeast · 2 years ago

If this is how they're going to play it, RIP Glassdoor. Seems like a MAJOR breach of trust to allow users to submit content and participate anonymously THEN start revealing their names!

"If you are not willing to allow your name on your profile, you will again need to complete Data erasure once you are able to. However, we cannot remove this for you or make the changes you wish to see for your name."

I guess we know the appropriate action to take here. This is an absolutely BONE HEADED decision with regards to the operation of Glassdoor but I wonder what was the impetus for this? It looks like they're trying to convert their anonymous, Reddit-like, users to First Class Named Users for the purpose trying to compete with Linkedin to me.

I find the rationale here questionable and the execution plain nutty personally.

throwaway892238 · 2 years ago

They're not revealing anyone's names. Names are anonymous by default until you elect to share yours.

throwaway892238 commented on Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location cellio.dreamwidth.org/202... · Posted by u/throwaway_08932

throwaway892238 · 2 years ago

It's both funny and sad when people find out how the real world works and get all indignant. "How dare they do a thing they're legally allowed to do! Rabble rabble rabble!!!" Glassdoor is trying to make money off you, like every other free site on the internet, and they will do whatever the law allows them to. Welcome to planet Earth.

Meanwhile, all the commenters in here are overreacting as usual, clearly not having read any of the terms of the website, like the part where it says your name is not disclosed until you explicitly elect to share it. But hey let's not let facts stop us from freaking out.

throwaway892238 commented on S3 is files, but not a filesystem calpaterson.com/s3.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

svat · 2 years ago

> It means having the fewest parts needed in order to accomplish your requirements.

That is exactly what "deep" means, in the terminology of this post (from Ousterhout's book A Philosophy of Software Design). Simple means "not complex" (see also Rich Hickey's talk Simple Made Easy: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/), while "deep" means providing/having a lot of internally-complex functionality via a small interface. The latter is a better description of S3 (which is what you seem to be saying too) than "simple" which would mean there isn't much to it.

throwaway892238 · 2 years ago

Hickey's definition of simple is wrong. It's not the opposite of complex at all. They are not opposites, nor mutually exclusive.

  - Easy is when something does not require much effort.
  - Simple means the least complex it can be and still work.
  - Complex means there are lots of components.

These are all quite different concepts:

  - Easy is a concept that distinguishes the amount of work needed to use a solution
  - Simple is a concept that distinguishes whether or not there is an excess number of interacting properties in a system
  - Complex is a concept describing the quality of having a number of interacting properties in a system

Hickey's talk is useful in terms of thinking about software, but it also contains many over-generalizations which are incorrect and lead to incorrect thinking about things that aren't software. (Even some of his declarations about software are wrong)

"Deep", in the context of software complexity, probably only makes sense in terms of describing the number of layers involved in a piece of technology. You could make something have many layers, and it could still be simple, or be complex, or easy.

throwaway892238 commented on S3 is files, but not a filesystem calpaterson.com/s3.html... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

throwaway892238 · 2 years ago

> The "simple" in S3 is a misnomer. S3 is not actually simple. It's deep.

Simple doesn't mean "not deep". It means having the fewest parts needed in order to accomplish your requirements.

If you require a distributed, centralized, replicated, high-availability, high-durability, high-bandwidth, low-latency, strongly-consistent, synchronous, scalable object store with HTTP REST API, you can't get much simpler than S3. Lots of features have been added to AWS S3 over the years, but the basic operation has remained the same.

throwaway892238 commented on E-Bikes Overtake Buggies for Some Amish (2021) thisebikelife.com/e-bikes... · Posted by u/thunderbong

daemonologist · 2 years ago

I was struck by the number of people pictured wearing high vis but not helmets; I suppose it might partially be because they're riding in places where pedestrians are otherwise very rare so cars are an even greater danger than usual. The article mentions:

> At the same time, helmets pose special problems for Amish women. They grow their hair long and keep it wrapped in a bun covered with a cap. For this reason, most bike helmets do not fit Amish women. Mullett said he has talked with some helmet manufacturers and encouraged them to build helmets suitable for Amish women, so far without success. For now, far more men wear helmets than women.

Seems to me that if you could make an exception/determination that ebikes were okay, it would make sense to adjust the rules around hairstyle and cap wearing as well. Not really my place to speak though.

throwaway892238 · 2 years ago

The high vis is paramount. The helmet... well, I just don't know how much good it would do if you get clipped by an F-150 going 60mph

throwaway892238 commented on E-Bikes Overtake Buggies for Some Amish (2021) thisebikelife.com/e-bikes... · Posted by u/thunderbong

throwaway892238 · 2 years ago

The scary part of this to me is biking on country roads, especially with 55mph speed limits that big pick-ups regularly blow past. I live in a rural town, and I would be terrified to bring a bike outside slower town roads.

throwaway892238 commented on Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows why. technologyreview.com/2024... · Posted by u/branko_d

astrange · 2 years ago

You don't have flying cars because if you think traffic jams and collisions are bad in 2D wait until you have it in 3D.

throwaway892238 · 2 years ago

That's just one logistical problem (of many). The real reason we don't have flying cars is because we don't want them bad enough. If we spent enough capital, we could solve all the logistical and technical challenges and have flying cars. But the cost and effort it would take is so significant that nobody has yet had a good enough reason to do it.

Planes are good enough for going a long distance fast, and cars/trucks/trains are good enough for going a long distance slow. We could make a flying car, but for what? For individual people to go a moderate-distance fast? To go a short distance really fast? Cars and planes are good enough for our needs today without the huge investment in development of a new tech.

This is exactly the same reason internal combustion engines have ruled the roads for 100 years. Electric cars were preferred over ICE 100 years ago, but gasoline enabled us to go further for cheaper, so we accepted all the downsides, and industry made it convenient. It's only because we're suddenly afraid of our climate killing us that we're switching back to electric.

throwaway892238 commented on PG&E claims no connection between rate increases and $2.2B jump in earnings abc7news.com/pge-rate-inc... · Posted by u/_dp9d

sevg · 2 years ago

For people outside USA/California, PG&E serves gas and electricity to two thirds of California.

They're featured in the film Erin Brockovitch for knowingly dumping 1400 million litres of hexavalent chromium contaminated water in the 50s and not informing the water board until the 80s, resulting in countless cancer deaths in Hinkley, California.

Their equipment has led to many wildfires (eg, approximately 40 of the 315 wildfires in PG&E's service area in 2017 and 2018 were allegedly caused by PG&E equipment). They've been guilty multiple times of criminal negligence, including for gas explosions (see comments below from epistasis and toomuchtodo).

They've had controversies surrounding tax dodging, deforestation, dirty tactics to maintain monopoly, collusion with regulatory agencies, and rates that are among the highest in the US (eg, electricity rates in 2021 were 80% above the national average).

Overall, a real treasure of a utility company.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Com...

throwaway892238 · 2 years ago

Every American utility company I have ever looked into has numerous crimes and controversies associated with it. It's kind of weird.

I actually suspect it's due to them being publicly traded. They literally are not allowed to do things that would jeopardize the share price, so they will hurt themselves and people in order to make a minor profit increase YOY. You shouldn't need to be a capitalist enterprise (with the whole "infinite revenue growth" thing) if your purpose is just to make sure your customers - who won't ever really grow much, because, you know, only so many babies born etc - have power, water, etc. But as publicly traded companies, their first purpose is just to increase shareholder revenue. If you end up (accidentally) burning down a forest, poisoning some communities, or compromising a state election with a fake candidate, that may just be an unfortunate side effect in the service of increasing the stock price.