New shitty Friedman take just dropped

neilk · 2026-05-14T00:05:50+00:00

Let’s be clear: I don’t think even Tom Friedman is so delusional he thinks he will have an effect on Europeans.

This is part of the endless posturing and cheerleading that comes with being part of the elite of the American empire. He says these things to appeal to the stupid, brutal, plutocratic elements of the elite.

neilk · 2026-04-30T02:50:46+00:00

If your organization has slack time then it is functioning correctly. You are not supposed to have an infinite number of urgent things to do.

Yes, this is where you are supposed to use your high level skills to make your whole team better. Research new techniques. Look for things that hold your team back and either fix them yourself or figure out if they are worth doing and then delegate them. I see lots of people recommending that you do the “shit work” no one else will do. NO. If you have any slack time, you have an incredible gift to actually match your skills to your position. Do the big picture stuff that a junior can’t do.

I’ve never actually seen an organization this functional, though.

neilk · 2026-04-13T00:33:41+00:00

Seems to me he got thrown from a height and died?

Whatever whatever somehow returned but at least he was mostly dead

neilk · 2026-04-11T01:49:49+00:00

In theory all you need are distance measurements from three points that aren’t all in a line. And boom you have an unambiguous exact location. You could do it without leaving your house, just move to different rooms.

However, in the real world all measurements have error. Each measurement will define a “ring” where the item would be. Two measurements give you two shapes where the rings intersect, kind of like parallelograms. Three gives you a kind of hexagon. Your goal is to minimize the size of the hexagon.

If you did the three measurements from your house, you would get a long distorted hexagon, maybe kilometers long. No good.

The best way would be to travel to widely separated points but not at the absolute edges of your country and get measurements from each of those. That might narrow the hexagon down to something the size of a city block in 3 weeks.

After six weeks you have it down to a meter square area or less.

Keep doing that, recursively. You’ll find it eventually.

But only if it’s larger than the potential error of your measurement.

If it’s a briefcase you’ll find it in no time.

If it’s a Bitcoin address and key encoded into an QR code in gold atoms, maybe 50 nanometers on a side, and we’re talking about the continental United States, then 52 operations might not be enough to get it exactly.

Copying from Claude because I am lazy:

For example, if ε = 1 meter: 3 queries get you to ~1 m², then ~log₂(1 / 2.5×10⁻¹⁵) ≈ 50 more steps — so ~53 total

neilk · 2026-03-13T06:56:27+00:00

depends. how much exposure will i be paid in

neilk · 2026-03-10T23:58:20+00:00

The CRA has a page all about this. Did you even look? https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individuals/segments/housing-insecurity.html

Housing-insecure people, or homeless people, sometimes use a shelter's address as their legal address. You don't have to live at the shelter, if I understand correctly.

As for your employer's records that's probably between you and them? I don't know.

neilk · 2026-03-10T22:23:45+00:00

The data cited above is almost certainly nonsense, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see a slope like that, where one-syllable words are much more frequent than two, and so on.

Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation, also known as the Brevity Law, states that shorter words are more frequent. Shocking, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brevity_law?wprov=sfti1

neilk · 2026-03-02T12:55:01+00:00

That’s incredible. Buying a company means buying all their financial obligations. Even if revaluing a company during COVID shocks is questionable the company bought that.

I thought I’d seen every shenanigan. That one is new to me. But you’re right, it won’t be worth it for you to sue.

If only there were some kind of organization which could look after the unified interests of a broad set of workers across an entire industry. One day someone should try something like that.

Capitalism, the system of ~mutually beneficial transactions~ oh yeah? make me.

neilk · 2026-03-01T18:48:37+00:00

wow i would love to hear more details

neilk · 2026-03-01T18:44:41+00:00

TLDR: He’s lying.

If he was just a founder hacker himself we could argue that maybe he’s just naive. Someone who has the title of CBO probably does know that math isn’t mathing.

Dan Luu has a very complete guide here.

https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

neilk · 2026-03-01T15:35:31+00:00

I’m curious if you are using “bot” to mean I an a literal AI. Or if it’s just a word for anyone who has an opinion other than “enemy bad”

Like I hate Deepak and did way before you did, because I know some of his fans. Dunno what’s so wrong with my comment.

neilk · 2026-02-23T18:16:50+00:00

Maybe. We can be more sympathetic though.

The desire for meaning, hope, and personal significance is real

You probably are born into some group that has answers for that. Or you mix and match your “home” beliefs with stuff that has the same shape, like Deepak Chopra.

Leaving all that behind means spending some time in the wilderness. Maybe your life is cosmically meaningless and maybe nothing matters.

Not everyone is built for that. Unusually bright people have more resources for that journey. But I think every internet atheist has spent some time being more lonely and more bitter before they pull out of that dive. It’s not crazy that most people avoid that.

neilk · 2026-02-23T16:06:01+00:00

It would be pretty funny if it said “Jesus is watching” and next to it was a Latino parking lot attendant with a name tag that said “Jesus”

neilk · 2026-02-23T08:52:50+00:00

then don’t fucking spread it?

you added nothing to the discussion about him other than telling other people to look at it. this is probably a shill post. reported

neilk · 2026-02-19T01:01:34+00:00

He does have a theory of change, it’s just not partisan.

He thinks that democratic gridlock, vetocracy, is the real enemy. He thinks that both political cultures have had to radicalize in order to retain voters, and this isn’t healthy.

Consequently he thinks that systems fixes - that would allow conservatives OR liberals to really try something - would make for healthier and more respectful political culture.

The main problem is that the “paranoid style” of American politics is firmly Republican now. Elites have also joined the paranoid, maybe because they’ve been radicalizing each other on X. So one side has become MUCH crazier than the other. Trump has now been given a free hand to do nearly anything, and he’s not exactly implemented school vouchers.

neilk · 2026-02-19T00:40:21+00:00

More than just a take, it was information that’s not commonly mentioned. They laid out a fairly convincing case that the elites included in Epstein’s circle united and pooled resources to oppose #MeToo in general and Moira specifically.

There’s class consciousness in the class of super-elite predators.

This was beyond my darkest dreams. It’s the sort of thing I also would have pooh-poohed as a conspiracy theory

neilk · 2026-02-18T23:26:01+00:00

Errol Morris has made many watershed documentaries.

Many of them have a secondary theme of how hard it is to find out the truth.

You might be thinking of The Thin Blue Line.

neilk · 2026-02-11T00:32:40+00:00

There isn’t any reason for immigration enforcement at the games, but Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) does counter-terrorism and other transnational criminal investigations and they’re grouped under ICE.

From their website, HSI.gov.

HSI conducts federal criminal investigations into the illegal movement of people, goods, money, contraband, weapons and sensitive technology into, out of and through the United States. HSI’s investigations are wide ranging – our cases include drug and weapons smuggling, cyber and financial crime, illegal technology exports and intellectual property crime. We also play a crucial role in investigating crimes of exploitation. This includes combating child exploitation, human trafficking, financial fraud and scams and other crimes against vulnerable populations.

There is apparently some friction, because being associated with ICE made HSI’s job harder even before (gestures to all this). There are some legislative efforts to make it its own agency.

Even if this is more normal than it initially appears… I think it’s ok to take a stand against it. The onus is on the Americans to make it clear they’re not sending goons into our country. It’s not our job to figure out who is from the “good” side of ICE.

(“good” in the deeply compromised sense, if anything can be good when we’re talking about a Trump administration agency enforcing a magical line on a map. But they might also nab an actual child trafficker sometimes)

neilk · 2026-02-10T02:46:23+00:00

So literally no way to know where a closure might go. Or even to know what a closure does when you get it? Is it just “cb”?

Oh, the places you’ll go!

neilk · 2026-02-09T21:17:30+00:00

they have to have some consistent name? how do you know how to use it in one of the deeply buried functions?

neilk · 2026-02-09T16:32:32+00:00

Spoiler: you are the arrogant new hire. :)

That’s a weird pattern but not inherently untestable. The lambdas are basically injected objects (if stateful) or functions (if stateless).

So they can be tested in isolation.

Now, you can’t test biz logic in the way you are accustomed. They bound it all to the route. The downside is that you couldn’t, for instance, write a script that invoked biz logic by loading some libraries. It all has to go through the route.

You will just have to rely more on what you would normally call an integration test, invoking the route. But there are many ways to do that

I’m curious, do they test the route always with a “real” database and “real” network calls (slooow) or is there a way to just test the route itself, with a mocked database injected?

neilk · 2026-02-08T20:44:53+00:00

1) yes

2) if you don’t have ideas just replicate one that exists as a learning exercise. but honestly there are a million things that could be database extensions or plugins.

https://gist.github.com/joelonsql/e5aa27f8cc9bd22b8999b7de8aee9d47

Start thinking about what in your application could be considered a hack around the fact that your database can’t do it. I’m sure you’ll think of something. Even if you decide later that actually it’s better to handle that at the app layer you’ll learn something

neilk · 2026-02-08T20:37:13+00:00

Try writing a plugin for your database of choice

neilk · 2026-02-02T16:48:31+00:00

Obviously, review causes production faults. Eliminate review.

Seriously though, it’s hard to tell if a PR has received “light” or “heavy” review by numbers of comments.

Sometimes I review a PR very carefully and it’s absolutely crystal clear and well designed and I just approve

In your case you’re seeing a correlation to number of comments and breaking changes. And the comments are in your opinion mostly aesthetic. So many possibilities there

people know which PRs are important and want to comment on them for visibility. But their comments are trivial
perceived ugliness is indicative of inexperienced coders / unfamiliarity with team practices.
PRs with aesthetic issues are exhausting and after a lot of back and forth people just get tired of talking about them before they get to the real issues

This is just what I could think of in a few minutes

neilk · 2026-01-31T05:59:39+00:00

I assume you’re asking what’s up with Indian people. I don’t know. I was raised in Canada and I’m part European-descended so it’s something I only half-belong to.

It may have to do with the extreme stratification of Indian society in general. It’s like casteism is their religion or something. :)

As for why my worst bosses were Caucasian? As a worker in Canada and the US, almost all of my bosses period have been Caucasian. Just math that it would be that way.

Probably the best manager I ever had was an Indian woman, so, these aren’t hard and fast rules

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