I agree. Many organizations want to have their cake and eat it too. They are basically ad-driven and looking for eyeballs. "If it bleeds it leads"
I don't know that I ever really have much faith in the whole "church and state" divide between advertising and editorial but to the extent that was ever true, it doesn't reflect the current direction of many papers. They are leaning in to "native advertising".
I apologize for getting political, but my pet theory is that "the news" is largely to blame for our current political situation because reporting on boring candidates with boring opinions generates less page views than reporting on our current president.
At the same time I'm supposed to put these people on a pedestal and donate to them so that they can save democracy on my behalf.
So is there a function they could be doing that would be important for our democracy? I think so. Are they doing it? I think the jury is still out.
Sorry, I know this seems cynical or "edgy". I just don't believe that a non-cynical view the journalism industry reflects reality.
Fun fact: -v typically stands for verbose except when using any "grep-like" utilities such as pgrep, pkill, etc.
[edit] forgot to mention that for grep-like utilities -v negates the match.
This led to an unfortunate incident in which I attempted to get verbose output from pkill and instead killed every single process on the machine except for my target. To make it worse I had no console access so I had to email another team to reboot and explain what I did.
My take: we need to stop incentivizing "innovation" where everything needs to be rewritten every couple months just so someone can "disrupt" something.
You know what it really is? It's a bunch of product people, all of who want to be Steve Jobs II, looking at the handful of innovative products Apple made over the last couple of decades and trying to achieve something similar results every single quarter.
The problem? We've raised a whole generation of people who think that's not how you make products people love. We've have a whole generation of people who focus 100% on the ideation phase and 0% on the nurturing and responding thoughtfully to user feedback.
This fits into a larger theory I have that basically disruptive startups are the weeds of the ecosystem, but they aren't old growth trees. Call me old fashioned but I'm looking forward to the day "disruptive" companies based on "growth hacking" are replaced by some giant redwood trees that will stand the test of time as they (slowly) soar into the sky.
I do think there's some truth to the idea that our failures in mental health care have some pretty high costs on our society in other places. If we did a better job with mental health/drug addiction, maybe there would be a few less needles and piles of feces for commuters to content with.
I really hate the entire culture around Gofundme. I feel like a number of people use it in a way I find horrifying.
My grandfather passed away a few years ago and my much younger relative in college in Hawaii decided to make a gofundme page to raise money for the plane ticket to his funeral. I could have paid for his ticket no problem, but I got the feeling the gofundme wasn't really about the money. It somehow was just "what you do" for a bit of attention.
Call me old fashioned but I don't really like the way it looks when my family members are begging all over facebook for something the family could easily take care of. It also feels weirdly exploitive of people who are bad with money management. His parents are solid middle class, but I personally know one of the people donating $100 to his gofundme was a fifty-something year old waitresses with a heart of gold and no sense of budgeting.
Dropped out of college. I had an intro programming class once.
In terms of education, I'd probably say my highest achievements are just knocking out all the undergrad math for engineering and taking a few grad level classes. I really loved math and Linear Algebra and ODE specifically.
Job-wise I went from: Student web dev -> Mediumish Ecommerce -> a couple startups doing some fun distributed computing -> Ad-tech -> platform level proxy/loadbalancing/edge compute for a big company.
Title at most jobs was either software engineer maybe senior. Held a couple director jobs that were glorified team leads. Currently, have a Principal title.
> You have millions of people who have called the U.S. their home for generations, and now you have a large group of people flowing into your communities and imposing their cultural values onto you via government.
I assume you must be talking about native americans and the large influx of white people who won't assimilate to their local Ute or Navajo or whatever culture. Because literally any other interpretation I have of this comment is less charitable because it would imply you have a staggering level of hypocrisy.
I was directly recruited, for 2 remote jobs at once. The first one was because I hung out in an IRC channel for an open source project. The CTO of that company just offered me a job.
At the same time a recruiter from a fortune 500 just directly reached out to me and it was a great fit. I ended up going with the big established company because:
1. Better offer
2. Long term product area I was more interested in.
This was about 4 years ago and it turns out that although I'm no household name in the community, I am one of the relatively few people who's been doing Go in production since pre-go1.0.
Company 1 was in New York, Company 2 was multi-national but main engineering offices are in the Bay Area.
Also a huge fan. When I got my first full time engineering job at $50k I thought that was amazing. It literally allowed me to leapfrog my entire family and secured what I thought of as a middle class existence.
Then I got a salary adjustment to $70k because my new manager knew (although I didn't) that they'd lose me quickly.
And then I picked up the phone and talked to a recruiter and all the sudden I had a counteroffer for six figures. Can you believe that!? Never in my life thought I'd amount to anything especially after dropping out of college. A 6 figure job made me feel like I had made it.
Stayed close to that number for several years. Then I went remote for a big company with a high base and great RSUs. Now I'm a one percenter. My mom was a drug addicted waitress with an 8th grade education. I will own my beautiful home free and clear in my 30s. I have the means to travel the world limited only by my time. I will be able to retire in my 30s.
It's all so amazing, but I also took nearly a decade to wander into that final band of compensation that many are introduced to right out of the gate at top companies. Open information like this site is very valuable to people like me who come from a non-traditional background and live in a flyover state.
I like the fact that there's a little competition.
Personally, I tried btrfs as a root filesystem for a couple years. It definitely had weird gotchas like running out of inode space pretty frequently when making use of snapshots. A few years back I also ran into a problem with a bunch of zero length files (race between writing metadata and content?)
I switched this year and I found zfs to much more user friendly and reliable, although setting up zfs on a root on ubuntu is still a manual process.
If we were to use a car analogy: go has been in production for the last few years and there's a ton on the road, but the average car on the road wasn't built in the last few years.
I don't know that I ever really have much faith in the whole "church and state" divide between advertising and editorial but to the extent that was ever true, it doesn't reflect the current direction of many papers. They are leaning in to "native advertising".
I apologize for getting political, but my pet theory is that "the news" is largely to blame for our current political situation because reporting on boring candidates with boring opinions generates less page views than reporting on our current president.
At the same time I'm supposed to put these people on a pedestal and donate to them so that they can save democracy on my behalf.
So is there a function they could be doing that would be important for our democracy? I think so. Are they doing it? I think the jury is still out.
Sorry, I know this seems cynical or "edgy". I just don't believe that a non-cynical view the journalism industry reflects reality.