It's wild how Microsoft has been able to vertically integrate gaming. They now own the distribution (Xbox Cloud Gaming, Xbox Game Pass), the games (Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft + what they owned before), the OS (Windows, Xbox), the hardware (Xbox, many PCs), and the back end compute (Azure). The only thing they're missing, the network bandwidth, is mostly a commodity anyway. - curiousllama (HackerNews)
Ok, I know this is probably not the best idea but I was following this:
How to manage multiple GitHub accounts on a single machine with SSH keys
But yes, this works!
Current situation:
So let me get this straight... Up until now, Amazon/AWS hasn't donated anything to cURL. And noone hated them for it.
Suddenly when someone - probably some manager with a limit of \$5000 on donations - pushes through a donation of \$5000, everyone hates them? Are you serious? If I was a cURL developer this would absolutely make my day.
When you develop OSS (Open Source Software), you aren't doing it for the money, you don't even know whether anyone is going to be using your software. And sure, you could limit the license so that big corps have to pay, but because that'd become a legal nightmare for them quickly, they (and probably by extension everyone else as well) will just skip your software and use or make something else.
So you make it copyleft or fully open, and then thank for donations no matter their size. A shitton of OSS devs don't get any donations.
Philosophical followup:
Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics
The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics says that you can have a particle spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time – until you look at it, at which point it definitely becomes one or the other. The theory claims that observing reality fundamentally changes it.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.
CppCon 2018: Matt Godbolt “The Bits Between the Bits: How We Get to main()”
{% include youtube.html id="dOfucXtyEsU" %}
I was reminded of this video because of my fintech interviews (who love C++). Matt Godbolt is very famous in the C++ community, of course, because of his website godbolt.org. And it's talk like this that shows why some people think C++ programmers are wizards, or insane, to work with such a language.
I got through the online assessment and first round interview with a NY fintech company. Here is the reflection I have on the two parts. A learning experience that's for sure.
Eugene Wei's "And You Will Know Us by the Company We Keep"
In my three pieces on TikTok, I wrote about how that app's architecture is fundamentally different from that of most Western social media. TikTok doesn't need you to follow any accounts to construct a relevant feed for you. Instead, it does two things.
First, it tries to understand what interests you by observing how you react to everything it shows you. It tries to learn your taste, and it does a damn good job of it. TikTok is an interest graph built as an interest graph.
Secondly, TikTok runs every candidate video through a two-stage screening process. First, it runs videos through one of the most terrifying, vicious quality filters known to man: a panel of a few hundred largely Gen Z users. Okay, yes, that's not quite right. Anyone can be on this test audience for a video. It just happens, however, that TikTok's user base skews younger, so most of the people on that panel will be Gen Z. Also, it's a known fact that a pack of Gen Z users muttering "OK Boomer" is the most terrifying pack hunter in the animal kingdom after hyenas and murder hornets. If those test viewers don't show any interest, the video is yeeted into the dustbin of TikTok, never to be seen again except if someone seeks it out directly on someone's profile.
Secondly, it then uses its algorithm to decide whether that video would interest each user based on their taste profile. Even if you don't follow the creator of a video, if TikTok's algorithm thinks you'll enjoy it, you'll see it in your For You Page.
Recently, Instagram announced it would start showing its users posts from accounts they don't follow. In many ways, this is as close to a concession as we'll see from Instagram to the superiority of TikTok's architecture for pure entertainment. ...
It's not that apps can't be more fun when social, or that people don't share some overlapping interests with people they know. We all care both our interests and the people in our lives. When they overlap, even better. It's just that after more than a decade of living with our current social apps, we have ample case studies illustrating the downsides of assuming they are perfectly correlated. ...
A classic example, though I don't know if this still persists, is how Pinterest skewed heavily towards female users at launch, losing lots of potential male users in the process. This was a function of building their feed off of each user's social graph. Men would see a flood of pins from the females in their network as women were some of the strongest earlier adopters of pinning. This created a reflexive loop in which Pinterest was perceived as a female-centric social app, which chased off some male users, thus becoming self-fulfilling stereotype. An alternate content selection heuristic for the feed could have corrected for this skew.
But again, this is a problem unique to Western social media design. In conflating the social graph and the interest graph, we've introduced a content matching problem that needn't exist. I don't get upset that my friends don't follow me on TikTok or Reddit or what I think of as purer interest and/or entertainment networks. It's very clear in those products that each person should follow their own interests.
Quote is out of order.
I bombed an interview on Friday. Here is the reflection on it.
I had a coworker who left, sad. But the good news is that means his now defunct account (on Teams) can be used so I can transfer links/reading I did on the work computer to outside.
I think these are all tech stuff.
Will write these up later on their owns posts. So thanks Taesan!
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/06/01/megaraid/
https://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-solvers.html
http://norvig.com/21-days.html
https://www.biteinteractive.com/picturing-git-conceptions-and-misconceptions/
https://mangadex.dev/mangadex-v5-infrastructure-overview/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28440742
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28443625
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446761
Jim Cowart's excellent 7 JavaScript quirks