Hi, I'm a good senior backend developer with data science experience but [at least hope/think that I] am an excellent team lead and director.
My magic skills are a) creating high-performance development, research, and data science teams and organizations and b) squeezing water out of rocks.
Much of my career has involved doing just this. I like working with high performers and, on occasions when I've had to work with low performing teams, can usually turn them around. For reference, I've sometimes served in SCRUM master and PO positions. Devs generally like this since I tend to understand teammates' struggles and the work itself.
I'm just starting to look for new opportunities and would like to be approached in a relaxed way.
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Location: Utrecht/Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Remote: Yes, hybrid or in-person are also OK
Willing to relocate: No, but willing to travel frequently to Boston, MA, USA and throughout Europe.
It’s surprising to me that no one has mentioned llamaparse. My team has been using it for a while and is quite satisfied. If other people think that other services are better then I’d be interested in hearing why.
I’m curious about this api. I’d looked at it before but it didn’t seem like it could handle arbitrary input that didn’t fit one of the predefined schemas. I also wasn’t sure how much training data it needed. What has your experience been like?
There is a financial concept known as universal ownership. The gist of it is that most investors are more affected by the overall returns of the market than by the returns of individual stocks. As a result, rational investors should sometimes vote against their individual holdings’ short term interests in favor of the long-term interest of the economy. Limiting antibiotics for livestock is one of these. Not feeding cows chicken would seem to be another obvious one.
Unfortunately, many financial institutions have been slow to pick this up and may soon have an opportunity to learn about the consequences.
I work in the, "green movement." Since this movement is almost entirely volunteer driven, it is not typically well positioned to coordinate actions or balance tradeoffs. For example, the people working on banning plastic bags are typically concerned about bags stuck in trees and rivers or preventing soil permeability, not carbon emissions.
If one were to ask plastic straw or bag ban volunteers to go work on something else, they just... wouldn't. This would be different with employees but with volunteers there are rarely significant tradeoffs to consider.
A search engine would show that there this movement is not ignoring private jets. [1]
Lastly, perhaps this is not true of the parent commenter, but a last thing I'll note is that many people seem to believe that the, "green movement," is somehow powerful or well financed. This could not be farther from the truth.
The money most environmental orgs brings in from donations is dwarfed by what those same donors pay for gasoline, red meat, and other environmentally harmful products. Some percentage of these purchases is then funneled to fighting the causes that they just donated to. (Dear child commenters, I'm not shaming you for eating meat or buying gas. I also live in a society...)
That’s the, "green movement." We're out-gunned, under-financed, and, due to those constraints, almost impossible to coordinate. I personally am currently struggling to figure out how to afford per-seat pricing of password managers for my team of 5-10 hr/week volunteers. THAT is the level of shoestring budget that this movement is on.
Perhaps it’s counter-intuitive, but if you’d like to see a more coordinated environmental movement capable of weighing tradeoffs and focusing on big issues over plastic straw bans, I’d suggest donating, not just once, but repeatedly. Otherwise, the fundamental dynamics of volunteer based orgs just won’t change.
This is anecdotal but in my experience in large parts of Europe, this already practically exists.
From what I understand, in Germany at least, companies can demand that employees sign a non compete. However, once an employee departs the company, if the non compete agreement prevents the former employee from finding suitable work, the company must pay your salary until it can either prove that the non compete agreement is not the issue or until it releases the former employees from the agreement. Given those conditions, companies very rarely enforce their noncompete agreements and they’re functionally toothless.
I don't think what you describe is functionally equivalent. I suspect the main benefit of non-competes is not that you can move around from bigcorp A to bigcorp B (although that's also useful for spreading know-how and utilizing talent efficiently), but rather that ex-employees of bigcorp A form new startups without fear. Would you either fund, found or join a startup if you knew that the threat of a non-compete hangs over you or a founder?
Climate protests, action, and legislation on Hacker News seem to act as a special attractor for particular types of repetitive comments, describing the legislation passed/action taken as impossible or creating no change[1], or the people behing them as or the people behind them behind them actions as ingenuine, misguided, or as performance artists[2].
_I've added two links but a search can provide many more._
I would like to respond to some of these frequent critiques explain a bit about why such actions and legislation continue happening.
1) "Only X% Percent of Emissions… No _real_ effect"
A frequent talking point of such critiques has to do with the extremely small percentage CO2-equivalent reduction that might result from the given action. (An example of this is present in a sibling comment which implies that fighting climate change is futile, since even the United States and China combined only account for 43% of glocal emissions. I haven't verified the numbers.)
Given the vast mass of CO2 that human actions put into the climate, it is unreasonable to expect single piece of legislation or action can to solve this problem. Only the very largest pieces of legislation or actions can even be expected to make a noticable dent.
To claim that actions or legislation are innefective because they are relatively minor compared to the size of the problem can be reduced to asserting that large problems cannot be solved, since solving them involves mutliple steps. This is false.
2) "Misguided hypocritical performance artist clowns"
These types of critiques are applied mostly to activists but occasionally to legislators as well. Actions that make the news seem especially created _to_ make the news, so it seems reasonable to consider them performances of some sort or another.
It is also worth considering _why_ these are such performances. My impression is that activists are actively seeking to create media attention for an issue that has typically not received the media coverage it is due.
(For example, according to the IPCC, the most populated areas of the country where I currently live will be underwater in the next century, but the near certainty of this never makes the news except for rare occasions when it floods or when activists block the airport.)
If this is the case, blocking private jets is a convenient rhetorical springboard for garnering media attention rather than the main idea behind action. The point was to "earn" media coverage of the climate crisis, not to block planes. Given that this action was briefly on the frontpage of hacker news and my local news, it seems to have worked.
Well-intentioned and direct criticism of the headline, whether that is blocking private jets or people gluing themselves to paintings, feeds algorithms, helps the activists' end goals, and misses the point.
(Scott Alexander touched on this in 2014. [3])
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Many dismissive comments on HN come from individuals whom seem to have opinions at odds with the scientific consensus. Others would prefer to see activism or legislation that makes a larger impact, is more effective, and is less disruptive.
If you are in the later category, please consider asking yourself what actions you have personally taken make a meaningful difference for the climate crisis. Please also ask yourself whether your actions can scale to other people, and what it would take to scale them (media coverage, network effects, etc.)
_I personally consider voting, lobbying, and dietary changes to be effective but don't believe that they scale very well._
Activism and legislation are both complicated fields existing within larger climatic and political systems.
If you have not recently attempted to take such actions, found them effective, and attempted to scale them enough to generate some network effects (via media coverage or otherwise), I would personally doubt your ability to provide more useful analysis than the people doing work in this field.
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The people behind such actions and legislation are trying to create positive change. Sometimes they fail. Other times, they succeed. It's clear to me that many commentators do not understand how or why this is the case.
In my opinion, "Why?" questions may be helpful. "What!" type reactions are less so.
It's much more likely that the change these activists want to create will make the world a worse place to live than without it.
The generous interpretation is that fighting against greenhouse gases is as honourable as fighting against CFC. But you listen to these activists for two seconds and their real goal is to "dismantle capitalism" and that gets no sympathy from me.
> But you listen to these activists for two seconds and their real goal is to "dismantle capitalism
That's their goal because the fundamental aspect of capitalism - i.e. the idea that profit maximization for its own sake is the top priority, above all else - is largely what has led to the currently-escalating climate crisis. It's kind of hard to be a climate activist and not be critical of the very ideology responsible for climate destruction.
Sex worker is used as a term to describe someone working in the sex industry. This includes pornography actors, onlyfans models, prostitutes, and many other things. I believe that people working in the industry prefer this, as it emphasizes that what they do is in fact work.
I am an EU resident (Netherlands) and have wanted to make a DIY air filter for myself for several years. Unfortunately, I simply can’t find any flat box fans on the market. Would someone else in the EU be willing to point me in the right direction?
I'm not Dutch so I used Google translate and searched for "vierkante ventilator" (no ideas if it is correct but it worked). Look at image results for a quick overview. I also got interested and found this one:
I hope that advocates of purchasing power parity comparisons are prepared to factor in implicitly consumed but not easily purchasable goods. Otherwise, they would miss out on many of the things that truly matter in life.
For example, in the EU, my middle class neighbors’ children safely bike and ride the train to and from their excellent publicly funded schools, after school activities, and friends’ houses requiring little to no adult supervision while in transit.* What do private schooling, chauffeurs, and security personnel cost in the US, anyway?
*Of course, COVID does interfere somewhat with this, but this is true worldwide.
My magic skills are a) creating high-performance development, research, and data science teams and organizations and b) squeezing water out of rocks.
Much of my career has involved doing just this. I like working with high performers and, on occasions when I've had to work with low performing teams, can usually turn them around. For reference, I've sometimes served in SCRUM master and PO positions. Devs generally like this since I tend to understand teammates' struggles and the work itself.
I'm just starting to look for new opportunities and would like to be approached in a relaxed way.
-----
Location: Utrecht/Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Remote: Yes, hybrid or in-person are also OK
Willing to relocate: No, but willing to travel frequently to Boston, MA, USA and throughout Europe.
Technologies: Python, Django, Clojure, Streamlit, SQL, Llamaparse, SKLearn
Resume/CV: https://albertrcarter.com/pages/resume/
Email: AL@ALBERTRCARTER.COM