domain:parrhesia.co
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11m ago
I think outside of the world building, there’s not much to Sanderson. It’s interesting in a kind of D&D setting way, but it lacks a lot of cultural elements, the characters and plot aren’t that interesting, the politics is nonexistent.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11m ago
I dunno, it's up against some pretty stiff competition. I think the ChatGPT generated tariffs are still worse.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
16m ago
There’s a difference between comedy satire and making fun of someone’s death. And a lot of statements made by news media and regular media today would have been so horrific to someone living in 1960 that they would have whisked these people off the air as soon as they said some of the things they said. There’s no chance that Kimmel would have been able to mock the death of a political figure in 1964 probably not even 1974. Not necessarily that people had thin skin, but you weren’t going to stay on the air even to finish the monologue if you were doing things like that. More than likely you would end up seeing Kimmel escorted off the set and the producers apologize to the audience for that bit.
JulianRota
18m ago
In my opinion, if you're mostly on the road, not doing serious distance yet, and not entirely sure what kind of riding you want to do, then a Hybrid is probably what you want. Usually they're mostly mountain bike frame and parts, but smoother tires, possibly road wheels, and at least slightly relaxed handlebars. They're usually okay-ish at pretty much everything and not terrible at anything. Maybe not quite enough tire grip and wheel strength for semi-serious trail riding, and not quite comfortable enough for long rides at high effort level compared to a road bike, but you probably won't notice until you actually try to do those things.
You probably want brand names on everything, but not top-end stuff. Usually means Shimano parts and pretty much any brand advertised and sold in actual bicycle stores. 2012ish Trek hybrid sounds decent as long as it comes reasonably close to fitting you. I don't honestly know what that runs these days, but used is probably a good deal. Bikes like this will usually go thousands of miles without breaking stuff, and are easy to fix or replace parts on if needed. The Walmart specials tend to start falling apart after a few hundred miles and be difficult to fix or find replacement parts for.
It may take some experience to understand how road bikes are really supposed to fit and work. You should be leaning forward enough to put significant weight on your hands. The drop bars provide several places to put your hands to help with this strain. Between putting significant force on the pedals most of the time and keeping some weight on your hands, there shouldn't be that much weight on the seat most of the time, so it's not meant to be that comfortable for just tooling around.
The only bike I actually have right now is a fixed-gear on a road bike frame I built many years ago. It's decently fun and comfortable for most things for me, and ugly enough to not be an attractive theft target. The lack of gears make it not that great for climbing hills/bridges, but it's okay for me on the ones near me. Also not great for carrying cargo, but I don't have much need for that now. I used to have a nice hybrid like the one I'm suggesting, which had decent saddlebags for cargo, but it got stolen a while ago. I do miss it a bit, but I wouldn't have storage room for it now anyways. I sold my nicer road bike a while ago too, since I don't ride long-distance much anymore.
It might also be worth getting a setup for changing out tire tubes that you can ride with if you are interested in riding at least moderately far away from home and civilization.
TeknOShEeP
21m ago
Incorrect, and known to be wrong since the time of Adam Smith - specialization is limited by the extent of the market.
You are talking about a generalization that doesn't apply to the specific situation- right now the the specialization exists. You can pay money to get it. As an example, FAANGs poach each others workers all of the time. But if you, out of a lack of affordable specialization, turn to alternate solutions, then maybe that specialization was not actually as valuable as once believed.
Are we to believe that there's no loss or inefficiency involved in keeping your accounts in a paper ledger rather than a database? What about the applications that are simply impossible without database engineers?
Database engineer is just a job title, and maybe some certs. I know at least three control systems engineers who took much bigger offers to become database engineers because the fundamental math behind optimization is the same for both disciplines, and they are all extremely successful in their new roles. When a FAANG says they cant find an American database engineer and need to parachute in an H-1B, that is, to put it politely, bovine excrement. At best it is incompetent recruiters, and more likely a flat out lie.
It is well known that academic and credential fraud amongst Indians is rife, which is why you see the most superhumanly qualified employees in the world apply for a job that pays 50,000 USD a year.
Come on. It doesn't pass the smell test. I am tired of addressing arguments to this effect. The only good faith reason I can see for people presenting arguments in this light is that they genuinely do not know anything about the subject at all. If that's the case, why do they bother 'just asking questions' over something that can be trivially researched. We have AI now, even. You don't even need to google search it anymore. They are undercutting wages by lying their asses off and credulous HR departments with no technical knowledge hire them because beancounters want to pump growth by cutting salaries this quarter.
I don't give a damn about your reverence for rules or processes. The human intestine is a process, but you don't praise its product: you flush it away. Breaking the rules in this case is a good thing. It should happen more.
aaa
29m ago
It's fairly common for indian and chinese hiring managers to only ever hire connationals.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
33m ago
But if the lack of labor drops the value of the output... the output was never valuable in the first place.
Incorrect, and known to be wrong since the time of Adam Smith - division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.
Say you are having difficulty hiring a database engineer, and eventually you give up and find another solution. Turns out you didnt actually need any database engineers at all.
This proves too much. There was a time when you could not hire a database engineer for any amount of money, because there was no such thing as a database. People found other solutions (clay tablets, books, etc). Are we to believe that there's no loss or inefficiency involved in keeping your accounts in a paper ledger rather than a database?
What about the applications that are simply impossible without database engineers? Well, if you can't hire one, you give up and do something else. Maybe you decide to shovel shit in Louisiana instead. But there was a reason you wanted to do the first thing, and the fact that it's impossible has a real, albeit hard to measure, cost.
zPvQINBQvfFR
34m ago
Now that's real grammar Nazism. The will to impose proper Kultur on us savages.
TeknOShEeP
34m ago
At some point, however, the price will exceed the value of the work, and the work just won't get done.
Which is a perfectly acceptable business tradeoff.
You see this with minimum wage employees getting replaced by kiosks as the minimum wage goes up
Yes, and I have happily stopped any transactions I would ever have with these sorts of places. I'll still patronize my more local chains (in the vein of In 'n out but better), or even national ones (like Chick-fil-A) that don't treat their employees like cogs. Same with grocery stores. If a business can't cope with rising costs of labor than it deserves to go under.
at the top, I expect you'll simply see progress crawl to a halt (and no, that's not a good thing).
Gonna start an engineering smug war here, but as I see it "tech" progress has already meaningfully ground to a halt outside of LLM babble, and even that is debatable. Ever better targeted ads do not leave the world better off. Recruitment pitch to all of you young programmers stuck in FAANG limbo- go look outside to those clunky old manufacturing, transportation, energy, and industrial companies. They are desperate for good embedded systems engineers, and you can do some fantastically cool shit that will actually make measurable differences in the average person's life.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
35m ago
Trump admin replaces rules-based system with corrupt exercise of personal executive discretion, episode 2847. The big catch in all this is that the administration can waive the fee.
Also, it's probably illegal, though that hasn't been a major impediment so far.
I'm also deeply skeptical of the 'productivity' of the vast majority of tech H1B hires
This seems incoherent. H1bs are simultaneously undercutting wages but also not actually a replacement for domestic equivalents?
TeknOShEeP
43m ago
But if the lack of labor drops the value of the output... the output was never valuable in the first place. Say you are having difficulty hiring a database engineer, and eventually you give up and find another solution. Turns out you didnt actually need any database engineers at all.
I do actually think there is something to this, as "tech" seems to be completely infested with solutions (and programmers working on said solutions) searching in vain for a problem. Adding in more people making more "solutions" is not a cure for the condition.
Goodguy
52m ago
I think probably part of why they maintain the large headcounts is because they're run by people who have absorbed the lesson of some of the early wave of tech companies, which is "never stagnate, never become too focused on a steady source of income, since it's temporary". So they use headcount to experiment with novel approaches to money-making in order to avoid becoming the next Intel or Yahoo.
For better or worse, the enormous data processing facilities and technologies that FAANGs built in order to run their marketing, e-commerce, and data analysis also formed an important part of the technological groundwork and infrastructure necessary to deploy AI at scale. The FAANGs did not plan this, though, they just knew that they needed to be able to crunch and store data on scales previously never created (outside of maybe something like the NSA).
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
53m ago
I mean the problem with incremental changes is that they’re often gamed along the way. If you make sudden drastic changes then you can’t simply keep going while your lawyer finds the loopholes. And thus you end up doing things like fudging job titles to make tge lower wages not taxable. Sure a senior developer might get 160K a year. But Pajeet is actually a junior developer (just ignore that his tasks are exactly like a senior developer). Or if it’s 180 days in country before fines or payments kick in, you just need to get the guy on a plane on day 180, wait a few days and bring him back on a fresh H1B. If you give the. Until tomorrow to cough up the money you can’t rules-lawfare your way out of it.
Syphax
56m ago
I found that multiplying the resource drop to x1.5-2 from all sources struck the right balance between grind and gameplay. It didn't trivialize everything, I absolutely needed to go dungeon delving on the regular for iron, but not an absurd number of times.
Goodguy
1hr ago
I think that probably most self-identified progressives do oppose the move for various reasons (brown people harmed, desire to oppose Trump in everything, etc.). However, I think that saying "progressives decry this move" is too simplistic. "progressive" is not well defined, and you only link one person writing on one website. From my online impressions of the last 24 hours, it seems to me that "dirtbag leftists" like the move. I think it would probably be fair to say that "leftists who care more about cultural issues than economic issues like the move".
If I seem overly pedantic, it is because I have observed how much political discourse on social media has been damaged by people's tendency to say things of the form " believe in / are doing <thing I don't like>". Which is often necessary, because it is impossible to discuss politics without generalizing, but I think that generalizing too much causes discussions to lack important nuance.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
"Congress has only authorized the government to set fees to recover the cost of adjudicating an application,"
On one hand, this sounds like a reasonable take, but I feel like getting into a "it can't possibly cost that much to do this" fight with the US government is inherently a losing one.
iprayiam3
1hr ago
This may be "directionally correct" but it's too much and too sudden.
With the pace of AI, I disagree. Everything is going to be fast and sudden and we need to be moving at pace.
There is going to be real economic fallout and unrest with AI. Look at the unemployment rate for CS grads. I suspect folks like Vance in the administration realize this, and this is part of getting ahead of it. People are not going to suffer massive white collar unemployment while we keep importing Indians to plug the gaps left.
daguerrean
1hr ago
Yes, I mean this is the central disagreement, and sadly I’m not sure it is possible to bridge this divide. Most people agree that if you were in Germany in 1928 that assassinating important Nazi activists would be justified, given foreknowledge of what was to come. So the question sort of becomes, are Trump/Charlie Kirk/2025 American Republicans comparable to Nazis in terms of the threat they pose? Of course I think this is an absurd comparison, but it seems like a substantial portion of the left believes at least semi-sincerely the answer to that question is “yes.” It is a divide that I’m not sure how to bridge. If I were speaking to someone like this I don’t even know where I would begin attempting to dismantle this. We’ve been inhabiting totally isolated media ecosystems for 10+ years at this point
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
If your coworkers are morons, that's kind of a skill issue.
MollieTheMare
1hr ago
Surely this would be Cannondale.
There is in fact an entire youtube channel that is at lest 50% dedicated to roasting Cannondale's Bottom Bracket system BB30. What a world we live in where such a hyper niche topic can have 120K subs.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
They're "fun" for the VP running the show. They're less fun for the guys working on something useless.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.
The price must increase unless reducing the supply of labor reduces the output by enough to make the labor not as valuable. There isn't a lump of labor to be done by programmers, who get paid inversely to the number of programmers in the field.
aqouta
1hr ago
Do I really need some kind of special reasoning to oppose sending scarce resource that already sells out in western markets to a geopolitical rival to not only not direct gain but very straightforward direct losses to domestic firms? To sell our opposition the rope it needs to hang us is something a particularly short sighted firm might advocate for, but to do so below market rate? This is madness.
This lock-in effect is just nonsense and has not worked for literally a single firm that has sold out to china. China is not going to forego building their own echo-system and hasn't for any other sector they've found strategically important.
Is this just banking on an AGI superweapon to make economic dimension irrelevant, or on the windfall from economic growth this is supposed to beget?
It's banking on the certainty that surrendering our major advantage in the AI race to china for no reason or gain will turn out badly for us, obviously. I can't even fathom how a thinking person could convince themselves otherwise. You've already highlighted their advantages, is your position that the race is already over despite us currently being ahead?
they will have a fully adequate and incompatible domestic ecosystem and Nvidia and others will never reenter their market, and American slice of it will be that much smaller.
This has always been the goal and the chips would only be used to push towards this goal faster. Our one chance at dominance in this sector is remaining ahead in AI and reaping compound interest on that lead whether it's AGI or simply accelerated AI and chip development. If it's not enough then I just don't buy this fantasy that selling out now is going to give us a better seat in the future.
I think honestly, I’d distance my family especially children from these people. You can be personally nice, but don’t let your kids hang around that family as the child is likely experiencing social contagion and his parents seem unwilling or unable to question it or do anything about it.
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