I often give similar advice to colleagues that ask me for pointers on getting their recommendations approved.
"Make it as easy as possible for them to say yes"
Don't dump 14 paragraphs in front of someone expecting them to get onto the same level that you've been after many hours of studying a problem. If you're confident in your approach (and you should be, if you want an easy yes!), then be succinct, briefly describe the problem and why your solution is correct. Optionally link to a document that has more information if a reader wants to go deeper. Make sure you've already gained "approval" from your other team mates or product owners.
"We're going to solve X by doing Y. Team are all onboard. Proposal document is at [link] if you want the detail. Going to begin on Tuesday unless there's any more feedback we need to address."
Managers etc don't have time to get into the detail of every little thing, and appreciate when you've done the work, including gaining support from the wider team, so if they need to approve, they can just approve.
While and after taking ciprofloxacin, I had pain in my hands for weeks, injured my ankle, forearm and biceps tendons, was unable to work out for months and bashed in a door with a dumbbell when the psychosis hit.
There is almost always an alternative to fluoroquinolones and next time I get mycoplasma genitalium I will fly to fucking Paris to get me some god damn pristinamycin.
Consulting is a flaw in free market capitalism. The key idea behind free market capitalism is that if you make poor decisions, there are negative consequences for those poor decisions, regardless of your size. Now there is a way to avoid accountability in big companies: hire consultants. If they screw up, the decision-makers at big companies can always point the finger at the highly paid and highly credentialed consultants and say 'Guys, we did our best and hired the best. Who could have seen all this coming?'. The consultants are also free from accountability because technically, they only 'provide advice'. It's a win-win for both management and consultants.
The losers are only
(a) Investors, but they are often passive investors with no power to change management power structures.
(b) Customers, but they often are captive to monopolies because of network effects, moats, etc.
(c) Employees, but they usually are captive due to asset-specificity, etc.
My little old hosting business lived and died on this particular hill, I just didn't realise what was happening at the time.
When we grew up in the early 2000s, our bigger sales usually featured complicated stacks. They had redundant load-balancing, redundant firewalls, way more than many customer never needed. (But they did ask for it). The failover often cost more in management complexity than it saved when a box died in the "right" way to trigger the planned failover event.
We sold ourselves on cleverness when people asked for that. It worked to grow our business to 30 staff, a data centre in our home city, life was good! We responded to AWS with an API-based cloud hosting platform. But sales still peaked in 2012.
Customers wanted even more complex solutions than the ones we were selling - partially or wholly based on AWS. But - we figured - the hardware we were buying was hugely powerful compared to 10 years previously, and sites weren't that much more complicated. The bigger customers would (surely!) want fewer, less complicated boxes as a result. Unfortunately that is not selling on cleverness, that is selling on price. We never understood the financial ambition needed for that pviot. Nobody trusted a single cheap server, and even if they bought two, where was the scalability? It worked enough to keep revenue flat, but we obviously couldn't compete on building managed service stacks and software ecosystems quicker than Amazon.
When the new technical challenges had long dried-up, we sold in 2018.
My thinking (and so most of the company's product design) came from being bootstrapped where the possibility of an uncapped hosting bill seemed like an insane risk to take. Who would take it? (wait - what - why was everyone taking it??!)
AWS are embedded not just because VC makes their high-priced products feasible, but because their particular brand of cleverness is embedded in a generation of software developers. It obviously works! But the knowledge of when you might not need their cloud (or what the alternatives could ever be) feels quite a niche thing now.
Sounds like a good way to kill off open source entirely. This is luckily unlikely to happen.
As for throwing money at the maintainers, honestly, it’s complicated. A lot of people aren’t doing open source work for the money. Money too often comes with strings, requirements to prioritize what the funder wants to prioritize, pressure to perform consistently, it becomes an actual job.
Not only does this turn off a lot of the types of folks who make the best contributions to these projects, but it bends the priorities toward what would make the most money for the funder. And as this article points out, real security investments often fall by the wayside when profit is involved.
So yes, companies should encourage their workers to contribute to these projects, donate money to the foundations that fund them, hire important maintainers and give them carte blanche to work on open source. But we have to be careful. Making it all completely transactional is directly contradictory to what drives a lot of the contributions.
You're missing that plenty of people lack the intelligence, education, media literacy etc to actually recognize that "fake"ness. You can still pull in a hundred grand scamming people on instagram by posting a selfie with a rented or parked Lambo and a caption reading "Send me <shitty cryptotoken of the day> and I'll double it and show you how to be rich just like me!!!"
There are people on this very forum who are 100% subscribed to the "if you work hard you will make it" propaganda and also the often unspoken corollary of "if you didn't make it, it's your own fault". Arguably that's the entire ethos of this VC/startup focused community.
We are extremely irrational creatures, who have pretty much only advanced by being able to write down information and curate that body of work over the centuries, enough to tease out a couple semi-working systems that produce better than a coin flip results enough of the time to manage to advance. Even the best educated, smartest, or most successful of us are absolutely chock full of irrationality and bias opposed to direct evidence. Even Einstein abandoned the data when it disagreed with his beliefs.
There's also some preliminary data that younger people consider the awkward, scammy, low production value feel of things like tiktoks to be "more authentic" and therefore more trustworthy to them. All you have to do is say ten words very confidently and some insular community will adopt it as part of their belief system. Look at all the absolute dreck, nonsense pseudoscience that makes up the incel community.
Media literacy is completely irrelevant to all the people who lack it. When you haven't learned HOW to pick apart and interrogate a source of information, you have no option but to fall back to shittier, brand or ideology based source analysis.
Viewing humanity like a single organism, this is the strategy where like a slime mold we expand to consume all resources, then most of the organism dies off while some number of spores go on to continue to the process elsewhere.
If we'd like that not to happen, because we like our civilizations and like not to see them crumble, we must develop some kind of governance mechanism to prevent slime mold behavior.
Seeing so many conversations about resource exhaustion/climate change/ecosystem collapse boil down to "nunht uh" is.. I can't even say tiring anymore. I'm beyond tired. At this point we're gonna find out exactly what behavior is encoded in human nature one way or another.
- 4K HDR video, not whatever the heck the buggy client delivers.
- Atmos/TrueHD audio track that actually works, not whatever the broken app delivers (I'm looking at you Sky and rest of the ilk that still deliver HBO content with stereo).
- Subtitles for ALL the languages, not just one or two. And those languages don't disappear when I go on a vacation, leaving me stuck with german audio and french subtitles.
- Properly functioning offline playback for when I'm traveling, not randomly broken and disappearing offline mode (Netflix, Spotify and YouTube all blessed me with "all your downloaded content is gone" experience on long flights).
- Works on all my devices not a random subset independent on which way greedy execs tried to extract "ecosystem" money from my playback device manufacturer. Looking at you ATV+.
- Is actually available in my region and doesn't randomly disappear from my devices just because I decided to travel to visit my parents or have some time off.
- Doesn't randomly disappear after 6 months when I started watching the series because some license expired.
As you can see, I really tried to pay to get content from these people. And all I got was bunch of frustration. F'em, they brought this upon themselves for being user hostile arseholes. Again.
> don't really see the point of raising money if you aren't going to go all in and try to build a billion dollar startup
Angel investor here. I've had startups ask me about a $10mm exit. The team was tired. I'm not running a professional portfolio. I said go for it. I approximately 2x'd my money over as many years, while the founders became millionaires. (To be clear, I was being asked for advice. The founders had complete agency.)
None of those businesses, mind you, were compatible with bootstrapping. (And to the extent a business can be bootstrapped, I won't invest in it. Because that reflects its barriers to entry.)
As I stand there next to the river, atop a mountain of lifejackets so numerous I need to employ people just to count them - ten thousand lifetimes worth, I see someone floating past in the water struggling and gasping as they thrash trying to stay afloat. They scream for help, although I can't hear them that well because I'm so high up on this pile and the water keeps getting in their mouth.
I am no longer interested in them and look away. As they drift out of earshot I hear them shout at me. How rude! I have done nothing to them.
It is yes. It's a separate profile which is open at the same time as the regular profile (unlike the multi user function of Android where only one is open at the same time)
It separates your app list and files into two sections, work and personal. The work apps get a briefcase overlay icon.
I use it to separate my work apps and to shield privacy invading apps from my main profile. You can use the insular or island apps to invoke it on pretty much any phone. Even AOSP has it. MDM can also invoke it, which is what it's intended for.
It also allows you to turn off the whole work profile with one button. Great if you do use it for work and you want to have a quiet weekend. The benefit for your employer is that it stops you from copying work data to private apps.
If you do use it for work it stops your employer from seeing your personal side like what apps you have installed. This can be pretty privacy invasive. For example if you have tinder or Grindr installed. I work in MDM management and on apple I can see this. On Android when work profile is used I can't.
> Operations always felt like “the things around the Thing” - a supporting cast that is important to making something happen.
In the short term, it can feel that way.
But in the longer term, at least in the part of the industry I'm in, operations are the core thing. Everybody I know who has become good at building resilient and robust systems that survive contact with the real world has a lot of experience understanding and fixing broken systems. A lot of humility of seeing good plans go wrong, and good ideas turn into bad ideas. The best have all this experience and still deep optimism about what's possible, about what can be built next, and about being able to fix the problem this time.
> How do ops people thrive and grow as those who take care of the systems around us, without letting the systems consume us?
An excellent question. In my career, I've optimized for working with people I can trust, and people I know who care as much as I do. In the short term, that can be stressful, because people express caring in different ways that aren't always productive. In the long term, its all worth it. The times in my career (careers?) I've felt most burned out were when I worked with people who didn't care, who I couldn't trust to care, and so I ended up being the only person in the room who cared. That's exhausting.
> In what ways are the systems we maintain mirrors of ourselves?
One of the escape analysis examples in the article got me thinking. Turns out this is one of those cases where marking a local variable const _does_ result in different code.
As I understand it, performing a const_cast itself isn't undefined behavior, which is why the compiler cannot assume function f doesn't modify the local. However, if we mark the local variable as const, the compiler is able to assume no modification will occur (because that would be undefined) and optimize the return.
The article considers "an entity that is allowed to propose new entries to the CSAM database".
You don't even need this! You could target a whole "social cluster" of people without having any special privileges within this system.
As an example, lets say you want to attack environmental protesters.
For image A, you create a meme about climate change.
For image B, you procure something that looks, to humans, like CSAM (as described in the article).
Craft B′ such that f(B′) = f(A) (also as described).
Now, all you have to do is anonymously publish B′ to a platform that is actively moderated/monitored. Unfortunate users will see it and report it as CSAM, and if the platform fulfills its obligations, that report will bubble up to the relevant authorities, who will review it and add its fingerprint to the database.
Now you can start sending out image A, the meme, to your target demographic. You won't be able to post it on "mainstream" platforms with server-side fingerprint scanning, but there are plenty of other avenues for it to spread. If it's a good meme, it will propagate organically through group-chats and DMs, and eventually find its way onto devices with client-side scanning.
Apple's proposed device scanning system had a threshold before your device would be flagged, so repeat all these steps a whole bunch of times, until the average meme-savvy environmental protester's device gets flagged for further scrutiny.
Unwitting victims who do try to post the meme to a mainstream platform with fingerprint matching may risk getting their accounts flagged and taken down, and they might have no way of knowing what triggered it. This would lead to, of course, automated censorship of environmental protest groups.
Please fill this out as it’s educational, I don’t mean it as snark:
Dear battery technology claimant,
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by the time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
> "Stories often touch on topics like space travel, benevolent robots, disease-curing nanobots, and deep-sea exploration. They lack aliens and beings with superpowers. Instead, the real superheroes are the exceptional North Korean scientists and technologists who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders."
Here is an interesting symmetry as reflected by ideological mirrors. In NK, the state sanctioned imaginal worlds lack others that are superior, and superheroes are loyal technocrats. Here in the West, "market driven" Hollywood insists superheroes are distinct tiny subset of humanity and that it is to our benefit that they are hidden but highly organized. And no, you can't just become one of the special superheroes. Both are aiming to pacify the target society.
I think when you look at history it doesn't predict the future, but it tells you what is possible.
What we had is possible, it did happen. Why? What was the system of alignments and incentives that led to that being the case, and how are we different now?
I do think that if you want to bring back asylums, a place to lock away people who are too expensive or are otherwise uneconomical to treat, you must have an answer.
Talking about taxation in America is a political death sentence. Privatization of public services is still extremely rampant. How are you going to get well run asylums if you can't tax or you have a for-profit model?
If you want nice things, we have to be getting less corrupt as a country, not more corrupt, and we are most definitely getting more corrupt. I absolutely do not want asylums as long as we are inching towards literal oligarchy, and we definitely are inching closer to it than farther away. Our supreme court justices openly take bribes, and our representatives think it's ethically okay to trade stocks. Our politicians are choosing to carve up districts to keep themselves in power, and some want to absolve the idea of voting altogether and just choose federal candidates from state legislatures.
Asylums are running when we can't even walk. The post office was in the process of being dismantled to create pretext to steal an election and you think we can run an asylum?
Do you really want an asylum in the context of Ron DeSantis's Florida and GOP rhetoric against trans people? That seems like a bad mix.
Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Having read the Matt Levine piece linked below (https://archive.is/KcL2P) I think that J&J did the right thing by attempting to use bankruptcy to organize payments.
It was not avoiding liability at all.
The court that dismissed the claim in general agreed with J&J's process, but said it was too early.
Some key quote from Levine:
> Juries in the US don’t like it when companies make products that kill people, and they tend to award enormous damages in cases like that. You multiply enormous damages by lots of cases, and you can easily end up with damages that exceed the value of the company. This can lead to unfair results, not for you — who cares about you — but for your victims: If a $1 billion company has killed 100 people, the first 10 who sue might get $100 million each of damages, leaving nothing for the remaining 90.
> one pretty practical approach [to how to solve this problem] is bankruptcy. This, after all, is what bankruptcy is for: It is a system to make sure that creditors are all paid fairly out of the assets of a company, rather than paying some creditors a lot because they are early and others nothing because they are too late.
> Bankruptcy courts are run by judges, who are bankruptcy professionals and who are used to dealing with companies that are, you know, bankrupt. They are used to not having enough money to go around; they are not temperamentally lavish with claims.
> That is, LTL — the box where J&J put its talc claims — could draw at least $61.5 billion from J&J to pay off those claims. The point here, the bankruptcy court concluded, was not to keep J&J from having to pay talc claims; the entire value of J&J’s consumer business was still on the line for those claims.
> But the Third Circuit disagreed, not because it thinks that the bankruptcy court is a bad place to resolve claims, and not because it thinks that J&J is avoiding liability with the Texas two-step, but because LTL isn’t bankrupt enough
> In some ways this is a sensible reading of the bankruptcy code, but it is a little bit of a weird result. The point of doing any of this is to do it early, before you are out of money, so that you have plenty of money to pay all the claimants fairly. The court realizes this awkwardness
> You don’t have to be insolvent to file for bankruptcy, and it is good to file early, but not prematurely. You want to file for bankruptcy while you still have plenty of money to pay claims, but not too much money.
"Make it as easy as possible for them to say yes"
Don't dump 14 paragraphs in front of someone expecting them to get onto the same level that you've been after many hours of studying a problem. If you're confident in your approach (and you should be, if you want an easy yes!), then be succinct, briefly describe the problem and why your solution is correct. Optionally link to a document that has more information if a reader wants to go deeper. Make sure you've already gained "approval" from your other team mates or product owners.
"We're going to solve X by doing Y. Team are all onboard. Proposal document is at [link] if you want the detail. Going to begin on Tuesday unless there's any more feedback we need to address."
Managers etc don't have time to get into the detail of every little thing, and appreciate when you've done the work, including gaining support from the wider team, so if they need to approve, they can just approve.