Yes. What too few people realized was that the rollout of DEI was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win political points with the groups that were politically ascendant. These programs were never a victory for the principles or the people, they were marketing.
So it should come as no shock whatsoever that now that another political group is politically ascendant the marketing that is valuable has changed, so there go the marketing programs that were designed for the old power structure.
Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds. Progressives have forgotten in the last 10-15 years that the progress which we've won took generations not because our predecessors were weak and slow but because it inherently takes generations to effect lasting change. It's a slow, painful process, and if you think you accomplished it in a decade you're almost certainly wrong.
I am Wasq'u (a tribe in the PNW), I am connected to my tribe, and I am one of a handful of remaining speakers of the language. I am really tired of being caught in the maw of people fighting about my identity, what I am owed, and to some extent what place my identity has in society.
To the pro-DEI crowd: I have some hard truths for you. Actual change requires commitment and focus over an extremely long period of time. That means you have to choose probably 1 cause among the many worthy causes, and then invest in it instead of the others. You can't do everything. The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete. I am not saying that land acknowledgements and sports teams changing their names from racial slurs are negative developments, but these things are not even in my list of top 100 things to get done.
We all want to help, but to have an impact you must have courage to say no to the vast majority of social issues you could care about, and then commit deeply to the ones you decide to work on. Do not be a tourist. I don't expect everyone to get involved in Indian affairs, but I do expect you to be honest with me about whether you really care. Don't play house or go through motions to make yourself feel better.
When you do commit to some issue, understand that the biggest contributions you can make are virtually always not be marketable or popular—if they are, you take that as a sign that you need to evaluate whether they really are impactful. Have the courage to make an assessment about what will actually have an impact on the things you care about, and then follow through with them.
To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together instead of fighting on ideological lines. The way out for many minority communities in America is substantial economic development. In my own communities, I have seen economic development that has given people the ability to own their own destiny. It has changed the conversation from a zero sum game to one where shared interests makes compromise possible. If you want to succeed you need to understand that your fate is shared with those around you. In-fighting between us is going to make us less competitive on the world stage, which hurts all of us.
I wrote about my experience working as a software developer and being black in the industry and I was lucky to have it published on BBC [1].
What immediately followed, every large company reached out to have me work as a consultant for their diversity program. I found it fascinating that they had a team of DEI experts in place already. Like what makes one an expert?
In addition to my job, I spent nights developing programs trying to help these companies. Some folks right here on HN shared their successful experiences and I presented it to several companies. I was met with resistance every step of the way.
Over the course of a year and hundreds of candidates I presented, I've managed to place just one developer in a company.
However, most these companies were happy to change their social media profile to a solid black image or black lives matters. They sent memos, they organized lunches, even sold merch and donated. But hiring, that was too much to ask. A lot of graduates told me they never even got to do a technical interview.
Those DEI programs like to produce a show. Something visible that gives the impression that important work is being done. Like Microsoft reading who owned the land where the campus was built [2] in the beginning of every program. It eerily reminds me of "the loyalty oath crusade" in Catch-22.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669188
[2]: https://youtu.be/87JXB0t6de4?si=wtnQtBOE-fs4V7gR
I'm a PoC, and stuff like this reads extremely bizarre to me. On the one hand, you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape," and that you were already committed to diversity on your teams. That's all well and good, but then, why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place. This kind of announcement seems extremely self defeating and unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
At a local bar they had a game machine, and if you got a high score on any of the games, your tab for the evening was free.
One of the games was a "spot the differences" between two pictures with an ever decreasing timer for each round. Using this trick I was able to easily surpass the high score, and garner a crowd watching me perform this mind numbing feat.
Probably my peak fame right there.
SQL NULLs aren't weird, they're just based off of Kleene's TRUE-FALSE-UNKNOWN logic!
If you want you can read NULL as UNKNOWN and suddenly a whole bunch of operations involving them become a lot more intuitive:
1. TRUE OR UNKNOWN = TRUE, because you know you have at least one TRUE already.
2. TRUE AND UNKNOWN = UNKNOWN, because you don't know whether you have two TRUEs or not. It's just out there.
3. UNKNOWN XOR UNKNOWN = UNKNOWN, because it could darn near be anything: TRUE XOR TRUE, TRUE XOR FALSE, FALSE XOR FALSE, FALSE XOR TRUE... Internalizing this is where SQL's use of NULL / UNKNOWN really becomes intuitive.
4. (TRUE AND FALSE) XOR (TRUE OR UNKNOWN) = (FALSE) XOR (TRUE) per #1 = TRUE. See, it's consistent, you just need to keep in mind that if you have a lot of known UNKNOWNs they're quite parasitic and your final outcome is likely to be, itself, an UNKNOWN. Just like in real life!
Upvoting too.
> Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
Wow. Literally blackmailing a student to do illegal work (at least would be categorized like that in my country). A student that already paid money for class and potentially a degree the univ is trying to block, mind blowing. OP, 1000% lawyer up.
Just piling on here because upvotes are not visible. The one thing you can guarantee is that your good faith is not reciprocated by the university. Get a lawyer.
To make it easier: it sounds like you're still registered. University of Washington offers Student Legal Services ( https://depts.washington.edu/slsuw/ ). Set up a referral with one of them and talk to them. Even if they're employees of the university and don't want to work with you to sue the university itself they may be able to give you good advice about how to proceed.
> I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
All evidence so far indicates they will not make it right, but instead they may make it even worse. Your faith is wildly misplaced. Seriously, talk to a lawyer.
Keep in mind, just because you seek advice from a lawyer doesn't mean you need to take legal action against the school. Talking to a lawyer is not an escalation; the school doesn't even need to know you consulted one. A lawyer will advise whether you should take legal action and any more amicable alternatives available before they do anything on your behalf.
I was at Salesforce for 4 years, and during those years the company made a massive deal about:
2020: the first AI craze, introducing “Einstein” as their name for their analytics platform, and officially changing the corporate vision to being the “No. 1 AI CRM company”.
2021: Now it’s all about “Customer 360”, i.e. account-based marketing, i.e. what basically everyone else does without such a memeable name. You wouldn’t believe the number of slide decks I had to sit through with all our little product logos orbiting this stock art character straight out of Women Laughing While Eating Salad.
2022: Never mind, now we’re betting the company on a real-time unified database called Genie, which was neither real-time nor unified (and eventually not called Genie either). Got sued for that one.
2024: AGENTS. AGENTS EVERYWHERE. WE ARE AN AGENT COMPANY NOW.
So, let’s see how this holds up in the face of the next hot thing.
We lost our house to the Eaton fire this morning. It’s difficult to describe the vastness of the destruction in our community. Everything within a couple square miles of us burned.
Current SFDC software engineer - this is just cover for a widespread engineering hiring freeze since the layoffs in January 2023. There's a ton of pressure to control costs after the near shareholder revolt that caused the layoffs.
The public nature of the announcement is certainly marketing for our AI offerings as well, but at this point I think most engineers are just worried there will be additional layoffs, in the event management cannibalizes product for short term stock gains again.
You may want to consult with a lawyer. This is starting to sound like extortion.
Update: I immediately took down my class project site after receiving yesterday’s ultimatum. I still don’t think the simple demo site violated the letter or spirit of the registration rules, but I took it down because I always want to operate in good faith.
They followed up today to thank me for doing it, but also indicated that they were putting a hold on my account anyway. As a result, I am not going to be able to register for my final quarter and have been de facto expelled at the end of this quarter.
Unless, that is, I agree to work on a comparable solution for the university focused on solving the underlying problem I was building HuskySwap for. They would presumably own the IP and were clear that I wouldn’t be compensated. But it was implied that they would then remove the hold, allowing me to graduate.
I really love UW and have had a wonderful time here. But this is so demoralizing.
Update #2:
I appreciate you guys for all of your advice.
This platform was never intended to be monetized, and I am not planning to get a lawyer involved as I have faith that UW leadership will make it right in the end.
I'm not planning to pursue this project at this point. If they came up to me at first with the offer to work with them it might be different, but the way they handled it makes me just want to walk away.
Me writing over 14 years ago: https://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/facebooks-dkim-rsa-key-should-b... This was doable 14 years ago for 512-bit keys.
I agree that consistency is important — but what about when the existing codebase is already inconsistent? Even worse, what if the existing codebase is both inconsistent and the "right way to do things" is undocumented? That's much closer to what I've experienced when joining companies with lots of existing code.
In this scenario, I've found that the only productive way forward is to do the best job you can, in your own isolated code, and share loudly and frequently why you're doing things your new different way. Write your code to be re-used and shared. Write docs for it. Explain why it's the correct approach. Ask for feedback from the wider engineering org (although don't block on it if they're not directly involved with your work.) You'll quickly find out if other engineers agree that your approach is better. If it's actually better, others will start following your lead. If it's not, you'll be able to adjust.
Of course, when working in the existing code, try to be as locally consistent as possible with the surrounding code, even if it's terrible. I like to think of this as "getting in and out" as quickly as possible.
If you encounter particularly sticky/unhelpful/reticent team members, it can help to remind them that (a) the existing code is worse than what you're writing, (b) there is no documented pattern that you're breaking, (c) your work is an experiment and you will later revise it. Often asking them to simply document the convention that you are supposedly breaking is enough to get them to go away, since they won't bother to spend the effort.
The ideological bits are:
* Dana White added to the board.
* "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content." - like people being in Texas makes them more objective?!
The actual mechanisms of running a social media network at scale are tricky and I think most of us would be fine with some experimentation. But it looks pretty political in the broader context, so maybe it's just a way of saying that certain kinds of 'content' like attacking trans people is going to be ok now.
I can't quite FB entirely, but Threads looks like a much less interesting option with Blue Sky being available and gaining in popularity.
I'd like to hear an informed take from anybody who thinks that Facebook's fact-checkers were a better product feature than Community Notes.
All of the articles I'm seeing about this online are ideological, but this feels like the kind of decision that should have been in the works for multiple quarters now, given how effective Notes have been, and how comically ineffective and off-putting fact-checkers have been. The user experience of fact-checkers (forget about people pushing bogus facts, I just mean for ordinary people who primarily consume content rather than producing it) is roughly that of a PSA ad spot series saying "this platform is full of junk, be on your guard".
I'm looking at my Jetson Nano in the corner which is fulfilling its post-retirement role as a paper weight because Nvidia abandoned it in 4 years.
Nvidia Jetson Nano, A SBC for "AI" debuted with already aging custom Ubuntu 18.04 and when 18.04 went EOL, Nvidia abandoned it completely without any further updates to its proprietary jet-pack or drivers and without them all of Machine Learning stack like CUDA, Pytorch etc. became useless.
I'll never buy a SBC from Nvidia unless all the SW support is up-streamed to Linux kernel.
One interesting bit of context is that the author of this post is a legit world-class software engineer already (though probably too modest to admit it). Former staff engineer at Google and co-founder / CTO of Tailscale. He doesn't need LLMs. That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me personally.
His post reminds me of an old idea I had of a language where all you wrote was function signatures and high-level control flow, and maybe some conformance tests around them. The language was designed around filling in the implementations for you. 20 years ago that would have been from a live online database, with implementations vying for popularity on the basis of speed or correctness. Nowadays LLMs would generate most of it on the fly, presumably.
Most ideas are unoriginal, so I wouldn't be surprised if this has been tried already.
The real hidden gem here is the hilarious 40 minute mermaid-themed true crime podcast parody that you'll only hear a portion of if you progress quickly. As far as I can tell, it's fully custom-made for this game? Can't find any references to the characters online.
https://stimulation-clicker.neal.fun/ sounds/true-crime.mp3 - it's hosted on Cloudflare, but even so I don't want to cost OP significant bandwidth, so join the two strings above for the direct link.
"Aww, he was all cat 'n tonic when he first saw her." An absolute classic. I would do anything to know more about how this came to exist.
Wow, that was amazing. This is honestly a better piece of contemporary art (in terms of making you think about modern life and what is happening to our environment, the impact on ourselves, our kids, etc.) than most of what you might see at a fancy art gallery or a contemporary art museum in NYC.
I finished the game without cheating. I felt like a frog being slowly boiled (and it really does feel like you're boiling at the end). It's quite the journey...
I love how everything here isn't even farfetched. It's just standard YouTube and TikTok content. The red notification bubbles were also a nice touch, I felt myself really drawn to those, and if I think back, I guess that's the earliest example I can recall of where these patterns all started: Facebook's little red notification bubble
I was a resident of downtown Ottawa during this period. It was bad. We had a young kid and didn't feel even safe walking her to a park, because the route crossed over convoy lines and there were all sorts of stories of harassment and assaults. We didn't even experience the worst of it; lots of people dealt with truck horns blaring 24/7, but at least our street at least was kept clear as an emergency route.
We put up with the occupation for about two weeks, but we saw a steady escalation and decided to leave town. We stayed with family for two weeks until the convoy was cleared.
I'm very proud of the residents who were brave enough to put up a resistance (the so-called "Battle of Billings Bridge"), and I'm appalled by the response by the local police and the province. I absolutely believe the federal government made the correct choice, and this was proven out in the public hearing after the fact on the use of the Emergency Act.
This seems like a huge abuse of the copyright system to me. It sounds to me like ChainPatrol doesn't actually have any IP to protect, but they are instead deputizing YouTube's copyright system to fight what they deem to be crypto scams. Absolutely wild if true.
The year is 2030. After the AI bot wars, FaceBook and Google have been crippled. They let AI automation control their content and it was deleted after OpenAI GPT10 discovered vulnerabilities in automated copyright strikes.
Taco Bell won the franchise war and is the only restaurant remaining.
I think it’s worth noting that the weekend before this, local residents of Ottawa had basically “stormed” one of the trucker convoy camps to unblock a road. There were genuine concerns that the residents of Ottawa were ready to take matters into their own hands, and it would be a bloodbath. Not to mention the blockade in Alberta where they were found with guns and a pipe bomb, with their communications indicating they were planning to murder the RCMP officers on site!
Declaring the Emergency acts was overwhelmingly popular in Canada and remains one of the most popular things Trudeau ever did. The moves to restrict access to banking affected less than 20 people (and I think they were generally funnelling money from international propaganda groups or committing similar financial crimes).
Patio11 has some good coverage of Trudeau's handling of the trucker protest against the government's handling of COVID-19 [1].
Whatever you think of the truckers' position or protest tactics, any punishment for their actions ought to go through the laws and court system. Trudeau instead essentially told the banking system "You can't do business with those people, they're terrorists." Patio11's words of what happened next:
"The assistant deputy finance minister...said...'The intent was not to get at the families', and when a democratic government starts a sentence that way something deeply #*&$#ed up has happened."
I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
(You'll have to Ctrl+F trucker as this blog doesn't seem to have for headings, as is customary on e.g. Wikipedia.)
> Word processors like MacWrite absolutely transformed the ways that everyone used computers.
MacWrite was released 5 years after WordPerfect, which itself is predated by WordStar. I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things.
Apple refines what others have attempted before, that's what they're good at. Part of the reason people are disappointed with Apple these days is because of this fantasy image of Apple as an inventor.
Now having worked in a few smaller teams since my time at FB, I realize how marvellous it is to not have to worry about OKRs, performance reviews and all that malarkey. It was so draining to run yourself as a mini PR/brand within one's team (/one's department) and market oneself (one's team) to your manager (/your company).
So much mental bandwidth was spent.
I also, from a systems-thinking POV, just fundamentally reject the value in OKRs as a meaningful proxy for the value you (/your team) are producing unless you are an entirely mechanistic function. By mechanistic I mean you have a clear discrete Input
Output expectation. Every single time an element of human activity is reduced to a metric, you lose something, and if you do it enough times, you've effectively produced a metric that is completely distinct from the thing you intended on measuring in the first place. For example: let's say you're in the suicide prevention team at FB, and your OKR is 'number of suicides averted'. Well, that sounds good, but unbeknownst to you, perverse incentives have kicked in and invisibly imbued your metric-chasing experiments a dark undertone. A new risk model might start flagging more content as potentially suicidal to boost numbers, leading to over-intervention that could traumatize users or waste resources. Or perhaps the surface we use to measure success, a UX or user activity metric, might actually be uncorrelated with crisis aversion or... and this is where it hits: the thing that's instrumental in crises is social media itself. The metric becomes a game, and it games _you_. Your team thinks you're doing X, but you're really doing Y. Because you're disattached from the real problem and comforted by incredibly lossy proxies.
> I know a good salesman when I see one. I was, briefly, the No. 1 telemarketer in the United States.
Oh neat, how?
> Unlike many of my less successful colleagues, I quickly learned to take yes for an answer; though we were legally required to read a long list of mandatory disclosures to all our sales, I noticed that this often broke the spell and gave people an opening to back out or “wait and ask the wife about it.” As soon as I heard a yes, I said, “Great choice!” and transferred them to confirmation. My manager occasionally came by and reminded me that it was technically illegal to skip my disclosures, but he made commission off my commission, and his tone made it clear that I could do as I pleased as long as I kept putting up numbers.
[…]
> I was one of the first to go, technically for not making my required disclosures—about cancellation fees, international rates, all that fine print nobody ever bothered to recite—on a sale.
So, he and his boss did crime together for a while and then eventually their scam stopped working and he got fired.
#1: An inmate who preaches "criminal wisdom" of questionable quality, like "want to know how to disable a burglar alarm with aluminum foil?"
#2: A telemarketing old lady with a "warm voice and metronomic cadence".
#3: An NYC beggar who "walks up to a table, falls to his knees, interlaces his hands as if in prayer, and begs, at the top of his lungs, Please please please, money, please I need a dollar!"
Another cherry-picked example of an LLM doing something amazing, written about with a heavy dose of anthropomorphism.
It's easy to get LLMs to do seemingly amazing things. It's incredibly hard to build something where it does this amazing thing consistently and accurately for all reasonable inputs.
> Analyzing authentication system files:
> - Core token validation logic
> - Session management
> - Related middleware
This hard coded string is doing some very heavy lifting. This isn't anything special until this string is also generated accurately and consistently for any reasonable PR.
OP if you are reading, the first thing you should do is get a variety of codebases with a variety of real world PRs and set up some evals. This isn't special until evals show it producing consistent results.
In the early 1990s a paddler named Eric Jackson was fast enough to make the U.S. Olympic team in whitewater slalom kayak. But he lacked funds to go.
So he dressed up in his full paddling outfit and brought his boat (4m long in those days) and paddle to a street corner in downtown DC. He set up a “meet an Olympian” sign and charged people cash to have their picture taken with him. Much hustle, very entrepreneurial of him, and he made a decent amount of money.
But he got into huge trouble with the U.S. Olympic establishment, and was almost dropped from that team. They said they were scandalized that he would dare to try to make personal money from his Olympic team status. It became clear to some that they were also mad he dared to demonstrate how poor many Olympic athletes actually were—by essentially begging on a street corner in a part of town full of prominent people.