eykanal

6 ms·

1.
by eykanal 1mo ago
If this is interesting to folks, there's an entire book on this sort of phenomenon, "Seeing like a State" ( https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_S... ). It talks about why l
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by eykanal 3mo ago
If you're interested in this type of stuff I strongly recommend "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer. He describes the social psychology of mass movements, looking largely at religion and nationalism. He wrote it in 1951, but f
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by eykanal 3mo ago
As someone who is on a pretty strict news diet, this is exactly the wrong reaction. As it turns out, it's pretty easy to be informed about important thing without visiting any news websites. * You can have direct email feeds about the
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by eykanal 3mo ago
No one implements compliance goals for fun. If they didn't think they were going to have to comply, they wouldn't do it. If they thought the law would be overturned they wouldn't do it. Same if they thought they would success
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by eykanal 3mo ago
I assume you're asking this in good faith, so I'll answer in good faith. Laws vary from country to country, state to state, and they vary tremendously. Laws are also changing all the time. There's literally no way to predict
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by eykanal 3mo ago
Google eng mgr here. I've worked on a few projects related to compliance with various government policies. This isn't "assign a two-pizza team to it, will be done in a quarter"; these types of compliance efforts can mean
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by eykanal 4mo ago
It's kind of fascinating how well Amazon can repeat this. Google has attempted this literally dozens of times with various sub-businesses and failed almost every time. Amazon has a real skill in doing this well that many other large te
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by eykanal 4mo ago
<sarcasm> Time to investigate Apple again for monopolistic practices in their ebooks store! </sarcasm> More seriously, it's somewhat mind-boggling that Amazon is allowed to keep it's "everything store" b
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by eykanal 5mo ago
Googler here! Opinions are my own. Google has ~194,000 employees, up nearly 10,000 from last year [1]. A company this size is constantly losing / firing employees, and simultaneously hiring new ones. A company this size is also constan
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by eykanal 5mo ago
Google was one of the earlier companies to do mass layoffs, back in 2023: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/google-to-lay-off-12000-peop...
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by eykanal 5mo ago
Alternative take: The fact that twitter / facebook / whatever allow arbitrary, unverified posting enables large-scale misinformation that led to, among other things, Russia's manipulation the US electorate and ultimate impact
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by eykanal 5mo ago
Is there an explainer on this? I'm not familiar with the geopolitics or oil cartels well enough to understand the implications here.
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by eykanal 5mo ago
This is being downvoted, but is raising a serious point. - Nearly 90% of Americans eat red meat [1]. - Environmental activity against meat has led a lot of people (26% of Americans) to believe that there is a push to ban red meat. This issu
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by eykanal 5mo ago
There's a great essay hiding in that page, but oh my goodness that is a frustrating format and layout.
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by eykanal 6mo ago
The purchasing power of $3.05 in 1914 would require $100 in today's time. A bag of "stuff" worth $100 today could have been purchased for $3.05 in 1914. Technically, it does mean that $3.05 from 1914 is worth $100 today, but
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by eykanal 6mo ago
This is an excellent overview. * His points about collaboration are excellent. So many research students think that their brains are their best asset. There are many smart people. There are much fewer smart people who can communicate and co
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by eykanal 6mo ago
I'm pretty surprised at the amount of hate here. All the "just build it ourselves!" and "Google wants your data", and almost no top-level comments even discussing the difficulty of dealing with malware and social en
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by eykanal 6mo ago
Fully agree, and glad you posted this. Atari has no responsibility to the open source community, and indeed has every reason to push back against this effort. That they're willing to discuss things at all, and that they agree to help s
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by eykanal 7mo ago
For those (like me) who don't know the authors, apparently they are well-published authors in the field of climate science whose work is very highly cited: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&
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by eykanal 7mo ago
I'm struck by the utilitarian mindset of this essay. What Paul so disparagingly refers to as "brand" can also be referred to as "art". People _want_ art, and will indeed pay good money for it. Said differently, peop
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by eykanal 7mo ago
This comment seems to confuse _straightforward_ with _easy_. On the merits, this proposal is well argued and has good points, and his solution—essentially extend the Biden approach with more strict requirements—makes sense. Everything you m
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by eykanal 7mo ago
Er, this was reported by waymo themselves nearly two years ago: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
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by eykanal 7mo ago
So playing "skeptic in a vacuum" for a minute—i.e., pretending that I don't know anything about this administration, and not having done any research beyond reading the linked article—this seems like a pretty good thing. Insu
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by eykanal 7mo ago
As said elsewhere, success in hardware does not translate to success in software. Privacy is definitely good but it's not at all an example of the success mentioned in the parent comment. It's deep in the company culture.
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by eykanal 7mo ago
> ...Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version. While this was true about ten years ago, it's been a while since we've seen this model of software development
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by eykanal 8mo ago
Agree with the above. As someone who has never heard of this before, the description of "a portable programmable device for music, graphics, code and writing" reads to me as "a computer". I'm kind of unsure why I wo
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by eykanal 9mo ago
This is some real antimemetics stuff here :) ( https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub if you're not familiar)
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by eykanal 9mo ago
Now seems like a good time to remind folks of the Stanford dead fish fMRI study: https://law.stanford.edu/2009/09/18/what-a-dead-salmon-remin... fMRI has always had folks highlighting how shaky the science is
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by eykanal 9mo ago
:facepalm: thank you
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by eykanal 9mo ago
Now seems like a good time to remind folks of the Stanford dead fish fMRI study: https://law.stanford.edu/2009/09/18/what-a-dead-salmon-remin... fMRI has always had folks highlighting how shaky the science is

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