wlxd
1yr ago
Sorry, who is the “ethnic brethren” of European Gypsies in North India? Are there Gypsies in North India? Do they often emigrate to the West? Because if you think that regular North Indians are “ethnic brethren” of European Gypsies, you are extremely wrong. They don’t even speak the same language, much less share other ethnic background.
wlxd
1yr ago
What I find interesting is how much easier your actual (ie. not the warmup one) problem is, relative to the problems I was given when I interviewed at the exact same company a decade ago. Then, when I worked there, the problems I was giving people during interviews were easier than the ones I was given, but harder than the one you are giving.
I think that this was ultimately unavoidable, given the number of people the company wanted and did hire over this time period. It did result in the transformation of the image of the company within the industry though, from the coolest place that everyone wanted to work at, through a place that everyone wanted to have on their resume, to another Microsoft: a steady job paying well, but not particularly exciting or hard to come by.
wlxd
1yr ago
Once upon a time, people working there cared about the company culture. Now, most of my friends who still work there are extremely detached, and only do it for a paycheck. In fact, given the current climate, going against the recruiter and the candidate in this particular case is a move with rather low upside to you (due to the tragedy of commons) and very high downside. You’d have to be pretty autistic to try, like, for example, James Damore.
wlxd
1yr ago
It is true that for an established company, not destroying it is the first order of business. That said, even if you ignore how lousy Google is on product side (recent story of Stadia being probably the best example of the fundamental problem it has), if you assume that it could come up with a great and compelling product, the ability to effectively execute on this is simply not there. Chrome was originally built by a team of 10 people or so. A team I was on for a whole, which is responsible for the project that is absolutely fundamental to GCP’s existence, was 15 people when the software was 95% feature complete (and the remaining features, including the ones I worked on, are mostly useless crap), is apparently above 60 people today, I have no idea what they all even do. This means that even if the promo driven culture was not a thing, projects like Stadia couldn’t survive anyway, because Google is not efficient enough to run projects that don’t have insanely good margins and quick growth. Their current cash cow of AdWords is going to slowly but steadily lose value, as general search slowly loses relevance on modern web.
I’m just rambling here, but I find it sad to compare how cool Google was in mid-to-late 2000s, vs the sad thing it is now. And that is even before you consider loss of open company culture, DEI etc.
wlxd
1yr ago
With experience, you can easily guess what the real problem will be, based on input and the warm up part, but in any case, he does say what the problem is in another comment.
wlxd
1yr ago
Nothing more than this HN comment from 2019 very concisely puts. Stadia’s failure mode is extremely typical to Google. I actually sat very close to people who worked on what became Stadia back in 2015 (which is also instructive as to how long it takes to develop products at Google: Stadia was in development before the launch for longer than it was in GA), and I could reach to them, but I doubt I’d learn anything I cannot guess from the outside: indeed, I doubt that these particular people who I knew that worked on Stadia in 2015 have still worked on Stadia in 2022! Many such cases.
The new arrivals are, indeed, refugees, but even before the war, Poland was actually swamped by “temporary” workers from Ukraine. But that’s not the point: the difference between Ukrainians in Poland vs Africans in Germany or Sweden is not so much based on legal status, but rather cultural similarity. If US today got mass immigration from English Canadians, who just happened to speak as incomprehensibly as rural Scottsmen, but quickly learn local dialect, it wouldn’t be seen as that big of a deal, compared to mass immigration from Latin America. This is closer to the today’s relationship between Poles and Ukrainians, despite recent history of genocide of Poles perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists (unlike with Blacks in US, in Europe grudges are not so persistently held, especially if they happen to become very inconvenient due to changing political realities).
wlxd
1yr ago
The current wave of refugees is women with children, which is much different than single young males from Africa. If they end up staying, then given cultural similarity, that’s a win too, considering the dire state of demographics in developed world. Germany will not have civil war, and if Turkey has one, Poland simply will not admit any of them, as it did not admit the big wave of Middle East refugees a few years ago, or the ones trying to illegally crossing through Belarus.
What you seem to be missing is that the current government of Poland, as much as they screw around with the rule of law and principles of republican government, they are not hostile to their average constituents, in a way that, say, US government often is. This reduces the downside risk.
How much first hand experience do you actually have working for the large corporations?
In mine, money is not the sole driver of decision making, or even necessarily the biggest one. That’s because it is not the abstract rational profit-maximizing agents who are making these decisions, but actual, real people. Moreover, these people often don’t even stand to lose or gain the actual figure that their decisions result in. You get paid in Amazon stock, not in your project’s stock, which creates a sort of tragedy-of-commons situation.
Next, if product is less profitable that it could conceivably be, how would anyone even know that? If you’re a mid level exec, you can present your case to higher level execs in a light positive to you, you can cherry pick metrics, shift blame some unrelated causes or some poor schmucks etc. You can pull it off, because you are good at corporate politics, why, that’s how you became a mid level exec in the first place.
As you can see, the incentives to focus on the bottom line are less strong than you suggest. This is why economists keep talking about principal-agent problems. Would people actually do that? I’ll say this: if was in a position where I’m in control of significant amount of resources of a wealthy corporation, and I can use it to nudge it to achieve my own political/social goals with small risk to my own career, and with damage to company’s bottom line, I would have totally done it. Would SJW-aligned execs, unlike me, stick to the moral principles of the gods of capitalism, and only care for the bottom line? Obviously not.
wlxd
1yr ago
"not the sole driver" brings to mind 99%, maybe 90%. "Not necessarily the biggest one" immediately brings us below 49.9%. Which?
That obviously depends on the circumstances, people involved, etc. What do you expect me to do here, give a rigorous, quantified analysis of a rather qualitative statement?
Actual, real people who are very skilled at, and work very hard at, profit-maximizing - as in, specifically, understanding how the company makes money and making decisions to increase profit.
Some are, but so what? My argument is not that nobody ever tries to maximize profit for the company, but that it is not the sole, or often even main goal of people who make decisions.
Executives often have compensation plans that directly hinge on stock price, though?
Let me quote the next statement that comes after the one you quoted:
You get paid in Amazon stock, not in your project’s stock, which creates a sort of tragedy-of-commons situation.
Did you miss it, or do you need me to elucidate what I meant here?
Less strong than 'total universal law' ... sure, but how much so? Enough to be 'not even the biggest driver'?
Well, let's be specific then. Consider Melonie Parker, Google's Chief Diversity Officer. In what way, do you think, she focuses on the company's bottom line? How exactly do you think her initiatives and decisions can quantifiably lead to differences in profitability? How can the CEO or the board track her performance year over year? Or compare it to her predecessor, Danielle Brown? Clearly, not by tracking the revenues and profit margin of her department. What tools does the board have available to measure her impact on quarterly earnings with any reasonable degree of confidence? The answer is, really, none. It's all gut feeling.
Do you have any real first hand experience working in a large corporation? Do your meetings and decisions always focus on bottom line first and foremost? This has very much not been my experience.
But would you have specifically made the cast of a TV-show all white
I actually find this suggestion pretty funny -- it really tells more about you than you think. This is a real failure to understand the other side, it's like Christians who think that the atheists oppose prayer in school because they secretly worship Satan.
To the point, no, if I had my way, ensuring specific skin color standards among the cast would not be my priority. I find the race-based casting practices grating not because I have some kind of aesthetic preference for white-skinned actors, but rather because it is often done deliberately to not cast white-skinned actors. This is similar to why progressive would complain about an all-white cast (including all extras) of a Hollywood movie set in modern day America, but do not mind an all-white movie produced by Czechs, set in Czechia: the former can only be done to make a particular point, whereas the latter is just normal.
when the market research showed having it be 50% hispanic and 50% black would get the most views because the viewers want diversity?
You're talking as if "market research" was activity akin to determining tensile strength of a steel alloy, for the purposes of minimizing amount of material used given the desired load bearing capacity. The truth of the matter is that you can make "market research" say anything you want (in fact, this is the main purpose for the existence of consulting firms like Deloitte: to get the "independent experts" to say that the company needs to do what the execs wanted to do anyway), and if the movie flops, you can always blame something else, because there's always more than one cause of a flop anyway. It's not like government regulator of movie industry will start an independent committee to study the cause of the flop, and will unearth the shoddy report made by paid-off consultant. Again, all of this is obvious to people who actually have corporate experience.
We've totally avoided things like 'how common is this', or the specific contingency that could lead here, in favor of broad, general statements that don't connect to much.
This is just an isolated demand of rigor. What do you expect me to do, get quantitative data on what happens in closed meeting rooms?
Like, the above style of argument really isn't gonna prove much.
But see, I'm not actually trying to prove much, only that the focus on the financial bottom line is not the sole driving force of corporate decision making.
wlxd
1yr ago
I haven’t actually watched The Expanse, but I read it, and I wouldn’t mind reworking some plots and characters in later novels: they just weren’t all that good in the first place. Same with the last books of Witcher series (though I read these close to two decades ago, so maybe they were actually better than I remember them).
The real issue is not so much lack of fidelity, but rather changing things in order to make some kind of political or cultural point, especially if they change good parts to be bad. But, I don’t watch any of the new moving pictures anyway, so I’m probably not the person to talk to about it.
wlxd
1yr ago
-Much like Google, there is an incentive for starting new projects, but not necessarily finishing them,
I don't think this is a problem at Google. Google actually has rather strong focus on launching things, and the promo process strongly incentivizes it. The issue is rather with maintaining it post-launch. The typical story is that you get the project to launch, stay for a quarter or two to bask in the glory, and then move on to fresher, greener pastures.
wlxd
1yr ago
I am very interested in hearing how much it is going to cost you. My 15 year old heat pump broke last winter, and I was considering replacing it instead of fixing, but the quotes were in $16-20k range, compared to $1000 to repair, so I decided to punt it. This is in expensive liberal coastal city.
wlxd
1yr ago
The $16k quote included the following hardware:
4A6L6024A1000A 4A6L6024A1000A Single Stage, 17 SEER, 9.5 HSPF, 24,000 btu 2 Ton, 20 Amp
1.00 $8,844.78 $8,844.78
AMSTEM6A0B24H21SB AMSTEM6A0B24H21SB Air Handler 2 Ton, Communicating, Variable Speed Blower
1.00 $5,925.21 $5,925.21
Install and permits were listed as ~$1500. I was trying to find out how much these actually retail for, to see how much I'm being overcharged, but apparently the suppliers hide the prices from end-users for some completely inexplicable reason.
The heat pump I have also works as AC in summer, in case this is relevant for pushing up the price of the device (which I don't think it really should, given that pretty much all that is required to make a heat pump work as AC is a reverse valve).
wlxd
1yr ago
I’m pretty conflicted here. On the one hand, I think people should have right to commit suicide: prohibiting people from doing that, keeping them prisoner in this world, is rather ghastly. At the same time, I don’t think that anyone should actively assist in the process, except in cases where the person is literally unable to actually proceed at the task, and only to the extent of their actual physical inability. For example, quadriplegics who can still move their heads get a setup where they get a button that they can press that will inject them with lethal drugs, people who have enough motor control to inject themselves could have the drug delivered to their beds, so that they can pull it into syringe and inject themselves, and people who are “just” depressed, but otherwise physically fine, get no help whatsoever.
I find the idea of euthanizing a healthy young person rather morally revolting. If they want to kill themselves, they should just do it, and if they can’t bring themselves to do it, this strongly suggests that the person is not actually fully into this. The person in question has, allegedly, two prior suicide attempts. Normally, most suicide attempts from young women are just performative attempts at getting attention, so they are not meant to succeed, but here it is more likely to have just been ineptness at getting things done, given that you do not sign on a professional to do the job done if it’s just performative. Still, I would be more fine with the setup of 1) getting a professional advice on an appropriate method, 2) creating some kind of DNR statement, so that if you fail at killing yourself quickly, nobody will try to rescue you, and 3) doing it in some place and time where and when you are unlikely to be get interrupted in the process, so that nobody is actually put into position of having to decide what to do about your not quite yet dead body.
This way, while healthy young people killing themselves will still be a tragedy, at least nobody will be complicit in this. Euthanizing healthy young people due to “mental health trauma” seems akin to me to deciding that giving heroin addicts as much heroin as they want is actually a perfectly good solution to the problem of heroin addiction, or, at even more basic level, giving a child a candy any time they ask for one. Indulging someone else’s wishes is not always good for them, and killing a healthy young person is definitely a central example. We should inculcate virtues, instead of maximizing expressed utility functions.
wlxd
1yr ago
You’re missing the entire point. If she simply killed herself, we wouldn’t be discussing it here. Instead, she said that she want to be killed, the system ground its gears, approved her killing, and as a result someone killed her. This is fundamentally different, because it affirms her choice and, in fact, means that people are complicit in the tragedy. That’s the opposite of virtuous.
wlxd
1yr ago
I don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Killing yourself gruesomely in public is deplorable, same as defecating in public. We manage to have people avoid doing the latter, we can also have them avoid the former. Just because you want to kill yourself doesn’t mean that you’re released from all societal expectations as to your behavior. For example, a mother of small children killing herself to escape from her psychological or mental issues is despicable: you are expected to provide for your children without shirking the responsibility.
That I allow people killing themselves doesn’t mean I condone that decision in every circumstance. My view is rather (and this is also a response to /u/VelveteenAmbush) that suicide is in some situations not a sign of mental illness, but instead a quite reasonable decision given the circumstances. If a 20-something girl tries to off herself as a result of “psychological trauma”, yeah, I think she most likely should be involuntarily committed. However, keeping elderly, sickly and suffering people alive despite their wishes is pointless and disrespectful.
wlxd
1yr ago
Frankly, I don’t find this whole angle of “who sees the body” to be very interesting. It is highly unlikely that this will affect my thinking about the issue in any significant manner. Finding someone’s body is normal, if not exactly everyday part of human existence. I don’t think that the issue of dealing with dead bodies should be the driving factor in the matter.
wlxd
1yr ago
It is definitely possible that someone lecturing them might cause them to change their behavior. It definitely did and does happen in many contexts and for many behaviors. Humans behavior is most definitely malleable.
Now, will this cause the outcomes to converge across the board? I wouldn’t bet on this.
wlxd
1yr ago
I have a good number of friends who had pretty good results in programming competitions like Google Code Jam (think, top 5 scorers). They come from an Eastern European country, and, most probably, they are more intelligent than basically anyone you have ever personally met. Among them, they boast dozens of IOI/IMO/ICPC medals etc. Top tiers of sheer brainpower, by quote objective standards.
Here is something to understand about them: based on their individual background, those international competitions were some of the best options to gain success and status available to them at the time. After these competitions, they went on to become grad students at Harvard, Columbia, CMU and the like, and/or got a job at top FAANGs, making $500k today (roughly a decade after their competition successes). These options simply weren’t open (or even, for that matter, conceivable) to many of them when they were honing their competition skills way back in high school, or freshmen years at university, purely because your options are much more limited in second or third tier countries.
Now compare this to the options available to a highly intelligent and driven American young adult. Is try-harding at these objective merit-based competitions worth it? Not really: you will be competing against literally billions of people across the world, and your inborn advantage of being born in US, the land of many opportunities, will help you very little.
The more typical way of succeeding in current day America, which is getting to an elite college, are in fact conflicting with tryharding at competitions: practicing for those will take a lot of your time, which could be more effectively spent on honing items that will look better on your college applications. Quite simply, foundational Americans have better ways of enjoying success and status than these competition.
This is even better seen in those gaming competitions, which are dominated by lower class people from poor countries, as for them, spending 12+ hours a day playing video games have lowest opportunity cost. I would never allow my son to even try to get into that “career”.
This is also why Soviet science was such high quality: for the top people, there was little way to achieve success “in the industry”, and so the position of university professor was relatively really good compared to potential earnings and responsibilities you’d have at a high level position in some state owned enterprise. The wage and status differential was not huge. Compare this to today’s enormous differential between what you can make in US academia, vs the industry, and note also the incentives of US immigration system on foreign researchers (I can expand on this at some other occasion).
wlxd
1yr ago
Being poorer is an asset, not a drawback, at competing in things which most wealthy people dont find worth doing. It drives down your opportunity cost.
wlxd
1yr ago
You didn’t pay attention to this stuff back in 2020? We discussed it extensively at the motte.
Pfizer execs didn’t have to “acknowledge” that they didn’t test for transmission reduction, it was quite obvious from the get go, based on the actual design of the clinical studies. This was never seen as a requirement for approval.
It sure would have been nice if vaccines stopped transmission, and many (including me) believed at the time that the vaccines will in fact do so. This turning out not to be the case was initially a big disappointment, and then, when they started doing forceful vaccination mandates when we already knew they don’t do shit for stopping transmission, was pushing me into white rage every time I thought about it. Nevertheless, the actual studies never tested that.
The reason was twofold: first, the higher priority was to figure out if there actually is reduction in symptoms and negative outcomes — this is what was meant by “efficacy”. Initial studies used for approval showed pretty huge risk reductions, on the order of 90% reduction in having observable Covid symptoms with positive tests. I don’t believe that anyone believes that the vaccines have this good efficacy at blocking symptoms today. I am not sure what is the reason for this discrepancy. Maybe it’s because the vaccines were targeting original variant, and the virus evolved to be much better at spreading. Maybe the elevated response from vaccine lasts for very short time, couple of months at most. I don’t know, stopped paying attention at Covid science altogether somewhere in the middle of 2021, when I realized that the science and the truth were mostly irrelevant for the policies and narratives.
Second, it is actually pretty hard to design a study that measures efficacy at stopping transmission with any good degree of confidence that would be approved by IRB, a notoriously NIMLY (Not In My LaboratorY) bodies. Useful studies are “””unethical””” to run, so we’ll let the virus spread to billions and kill millions without trying to understand how it does so through direct experiment, instead we collectively decided to just watch its shadows on the cave’s wall.
Yes, I agree with you that most of the covid restriction have made very little sense at best, and starting from somewhere in 2021, they were basically a lunacy. But, dude, Covid is so last year, we already litigated this here to death, there is probably nothing new you can say here on this topic that hasn’t been already said last year by others. At this point, I’m so over it that I’m actually puzzled when someone around me even brings up Covid unironically. I will never trust the “””experts””” on this, or any other topic that actually matters to the society ever again, but, again, I already said it last year as well. It’s over, current thing is different now.
wlxd
1yr ago
In late 2020, I believed the same thing as your friend, that vaccines will stop transmission. It was very reasonable belief at the time, especially given the vaccine trial data. Had it actually been true, vaccine mandates would have made much more sense, and I wouldn’t have had minded them. Too bad it turned out false.
Healthcare workers, in fact, are not mandated to take influenza vaccine in most states. Neither is military required to get a flu shot, for that matter.
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