dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
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User ID: 583
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5hr ago
What's the funniest part? I could use the nostalgia!
I read a bunch of his books like 25 years ago. I recently re-read Snow Crash and chuckled pretty regularly. Hiro was my favorite first read through, but now that I'm older and wiser, it's Uncle Enzo that speaks to me the most.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5hr ago
Crystal Society (trilogy?)
I just started it. I originally put in my Kindle library a few years ago and then forgot about it. I don't even remember what attracted me to it.
Written from the perspective of an AI embodied in a robot coming online for the first time. The book is ostensibly about a society with no privacy and how it leads to dysfunction, but I haven't gotten there yet.
I've been on both sides of interviewing. For better or for worse leetcode style stuff has become the standardized testing of hiring. Generally better since you can't really grind leetcode enough and still pass tech interviews if you have a <100 IQ. But it also rewards smart dorks who mercilessly study it but are otherwise shit developers.
You definitely lose people sometimes because they brainfart during one of them, or they get anxious and underperform. More experienced interviewers know this and get a sense fairly quickly if you're going to actually get the right answer if you have more time and lower pressure. The best companies use these very quantitative measures as foils to have more qualitative deep technical conversations and see how well you work together. People get hired all of the time even though they thought they failed the coding interview since they didn't get the right answer or they only wrote out an O(N^2) solution but were clearly on the right track in discussions for an O(N) one and they thought you were cool and reasonable.
Maddeningly, you never truly know why you fail most interviews. Try not to read too much into it if you do.
A buddy of mine who's hiring (but is not allowed to hire in the US) gave me a mock interview and basically told me even basic competence is rare, and the technical interview for a normal company is basically testing to make sure you aren't a complete fraud. Some of the stories he told me about fraud in the hiring process blew my mind with their brazenness.
Yes, there's an adverse selection problem. The people looking for jobs tend to be terrible. (Also if a job opening exists, it probably sucks: good people fleeing a shit show or because incompetent hires were fired.)
Arguably the racial updates, making the setting less white, were more progressive. They were in line with the tech updates, though, splitting the difference between retro-future and future-future. So I have mixed feelings.
I still think the most preposterous and unbelievable parts of the game are not the wokeness or girlbosses or most of the tech, or that huge parts of SF have become the Tenderloin, but that SF has significantly more mega skyscrapers by 2077.
Pargin is hilarious. I didn't realize I was a fan of his until I connected him to some articles he had written for Cracked, originally under an Asian sounding pseudonym.
Favorite: 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person
I would love to send this link to mopey crybaby friends who complain about The System or society or whatever but I don't have the balls.
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