yofuckreddit
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User ID: 646
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
You're tracing very well a significant fear I have around the death spiral of vehicular design. Safety -> Ugliness, Boredom, and Complexity -> Lower Engagement and Skill -> Safety....
And the general public will parrot the (very real!) reduction in injuries and deaths but barely consider the trades they've made for environmentalism and freedom. Using 5,000 pound cars to move a 175 pound human is a fucking farce, and all that nice GPS and cell-tower connected hardware is every 3-letter agency's wet dream.
I can't shake an overwhelming feeling of anxiety about the future of freedom of movement. I'm 140k into probably a 250k mile lifespan and don't know where I'll get my next car 10 years from now. The particular model still appreciates instead of getting cheaper, a replacement with more life in it will be expensive. I forsee a brief window where self-driving software for the masses makes more of my driving pleasant before keeping my hands on the wheel becomes outright illegal.
take heart that the market doesn't [generally] understand pricing
I love when folks get a $1,000 maintenance bill for their current car and then decide to buy a $50,000 car instead of pay it. It's fun breaking them down slowly by walking through how insane it is.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
Car enthusiasts will say that it's the manufacturers. It's another median approach to the market, playing things safe and giving people what they'll buy more consistently, even if it won't excite them as much.
I think that's copium.
If you ask any woman what color car they want, it's going to be grey, white, or black. Just like they're all doing with interior walls.
Men tend to be ambivalent at best, or simple followers of female preference. The vast majority of people view a car as an appliance or a status symbol where conformity is part of its value, as opposed to a critical component of their freedom infrastructure and identity. Look at how many identical Louis Vuitton bags you see being abused in an airport.
There's something freeing about that, as @Walterodim pointed out. Cars are fucking expensive and so not caring about them is nice in many ways. But bottom line: I think the reason for lame colors is that people are boring.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
One thing I feel like we discuss rarely here is cars.
I drive a late 90s/early 00s German sedan. When I made less money, I spent a good amount of time wrenching on it. I wanted to have some minimal competence and understanding of the car, and it was a great way to save money.
It still would be a great way to save money - I won't kid myself there - but the stress of preparing for a maintenance job, buying the specialized tools/parts, and working in my extremely cramped garage has lost some magic. I still feel accomplished doing little things but when I'm constantly under pressure to be doing work or parenting, there's less magic in DIY. Bike maintenance provides a similar dopamine hit with far less commitment.
That said, I just picked it up from the mechanic this week after a month-long absence and some significant work being done. I truly do not understand how people put up with newer cars.
This thing is absolutely sublime. It strikes a perfect balance between the precision and feedback from all of its systems while driving and what you'd define as "luxury" and comfort. I splurged on an aftermarket exhaust that fades into the background on the highway and absolutely rips when I'm driving like I stole it late at night on more empty roads.
Not to mention how it looks. Of course, any car you see as a teenager is what you base everything else on, but the slightly angular design language of this period right before everything turned into aero blobs for fuel efficiency and crash standards just really gets me going. I absolutely still look back at it when walking into the office and find myself getting excited when I step back into it after a long day.
Whenever I'm on the road watching hundreds of drones driving dirty shitboxes without using their turn signals or trying to drive efficiently, I fall into such a superiority complex. How could you care so little about something you do so much? For a country supposedly in love with its cars, it would be tough for Americans to give less of a shit about how driving feels and how they perform at it. For all I'm made fun of about the time and money I've invested in an older car, when I spread that out over the time I've used it and the joy I derive from it it seems like an obvious trade.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
you'd consider Bush v Gore to be the big source of unhappiness, but the Democrats seem to have took that one in stride.
It only seems like that now. The wailing and gnashing of teeth felt much like the 2016 election, and for an equally long time.
there wasn't necessarily a strong reason to overturn Roe
Virtually any (consistent) legal scholar will tell you that the original Roe decision was a major stretch. Yes, everyone was surprised it was overturned because public support for abortions is so high, but to say there's no "strong reason" isn't true. We're talking about the court's power being derived from social consensus - part of that, in turn, is derived from consistency and adherence to reasonable legal doctrine. They spent political capital to pay down what was essentially legal technical debt.
I agree with your stance on ethics codes and these free trips etc. For the most part. I don't see a strong enough connection between these conflicts of interest and results, and I've wined and dined enough executives who don't end up paying me for years to know that it takes two to tango when it comes to corruption. I'm not super well-informed here actually, but I also think that the standards for judicial asceticism seem to be a bit different depending on what side of the ideological divide someone falls on.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
Something even 80% as good as PD sounds awesome to me
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
I was secretly looking forward to being celebrated an extra 1 day a year - a doubling, since for white males you really only get your birthday.
But I totally blew mother's day (a vacation during it was said to "count" but that's a polite white lie from my wife) so in exchange I requested nothing be done for it. My kids are too young to give a shit.
For both parent's days I think we'll probably settle into a day off from parenting, a higher probability of great sex, and a nice meal. Her an afternoon shopping and me an 8 hour cycling sufferfest as outings.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
Did a bit more digging:
- Remington was already bankrupt so this payout was the max that insurance could cover.
- Would Remington have actually lost? The ads they put out were stupid, garden variety "man card" shit, and Adam didn't even buy the rifle - his mom did.
- If the insurance company was already emptying their coffers for a settlement, why not gamble on a trial to reduce the total cost? A bigger jury payout would have been blood from a stone.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
Did anyone do a deep dive of the Remington lawsuit? It seemed ludicrous on its face.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
It infuriates me that many men are too fucking stupid to ask others questions. It's a pattern I see too often myself and hear about secondhand all the time.
When it comes to "debating" women, I have a tough time. The smartest and most well informed women I know will still retreat into parroting propaganda and then - when challenged too hard on it - devolve into naked emotional appeals or literally crying.
Men do this too, to be sure, but I have a tougher time keeping a discussion detached and level headed. Over the years this means I'm just not inclined to engage at all, I'd rather nod and smile.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
I've thought about this occasionally. I'm a member of the "haves" in this scenario, and as more men opt out of the sexual market or become women, in theory that would be great for my prospective harem.
The problem is that I'm monogamously married and am able to raise children with sufficient male attention. The "Alphas" taking advantage of the evolving sexual market (and sometimes breeding) right now are anti-social, absent fathers, creating more candidates for the underclass that will eventually victimize my children. Maybe directly, maybe through voting.
I'd need the social ability to have a harem and rely on a group of beta males to produce enough wealth to support the family (and give me enough bandwidth to effectively father). We're a bit far away from that.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
And yeah, that approach you don't see as often (though I can't say I'm like, super plugged in to Black culture and news, so it might show up there)
If you follow a hyper-black social media page you'll see plenty of highly upvoted calls for ownership of problems and despair at intraracial violence.
But then depending on the day you'll also see glee at black-on-white violence or calls to "free X" regardless of who they victimized.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
The progressive explanation #1 is not police, it's guns.
It's masterful stroke of 2-birds and 1-stone positions that leftists wield. I think when you boil down my disagreements this is what's left in the pot.
- It's yet another dismissal of the moral precept of agency, already constantly under attack
- It's trivially false (gun control laws or ownership rates aren't even correlated with BoB murders)
- And of course as this whole series illuminates, attacking the right to own firearms is such a blatantly obvious predecessor to unimaginable horrors
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
I think that's a bit too charitable. There have to be thousands (10s of 1000s?) of muslims who would love to nuke the US, and I've heard quite a few bubbas talk about glassing the desert.
You can probably get a large coordinated group of people EITHER smart enough to steal a nuke OR hateful enough to want to use it, not both.
Just you wait - if George Clooney and his 10 closest friends set their mind do it, even a multi-ton missile can disappear.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
I graduated from a state school in the 2010s.
Two things:
First, depending on if you were at the beginning or end of the 2010s, there will be a vast difference. The money pouring into luxury (by any stretch of the definition) is staggering. By the time I left my alma mater we had completed 2 brand new dorms that competed directly with off-campus apartments, and a new fitness center with golf simulators, rock walls, and the best equipment money could buy. When I visited 10 years later, even more new dorms, stone buildings, and high-end food options were available - with the dive bars replaced by chains and uber-high-end apartments. The story is the same at many other formerly sleepy state schools.
Second - it still varies. The first school I went to for 2 years had far more rudimentary accommodations and we typically ate at the dining hall and that was it. Our dorm bathrooms were communal, there was one tiny kitchen to rent per 400 person complex, and "Luxury" was renting a ratty ranch house that still smelled like Natty Lite but had enough space, or a postage stamp of flimsy new-construction apartments. There was one nice dorm that you could get into, in theory, but that was about it. The dive bars were still losing ground to chains but....
And as I talk about this I'll revise a little. Three things, then!
I wish I had gotten student loans and spent a little more. I can't imagine what it would have been like to be able to take women out to eat, go on weekend trips since I could afford gas, and work out at that gym instead of slaving away at some fast food joint. It would have been un-fucking-believably fun. It also appears that there would have been virtually no consequences for it - either the government would have paid for everything, or I would still have been able to afford the ~$50k in loans at the end of it pretty easily.
This may seem tongue in cheek but to put it another way, I have enough money now I would kill to go back in time and give 20 year old me a ton of cash, even with a penalty. I think there's a lesson there about living beyond your means a bit when you're at the apex of your youthful vigor, even if getting taxpayers to pay this shit instead of people's future selves is disgusting.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
Lol ding ding ding! ~100 people so we are under the radar. Glassdoor doesn't have it on there yet.
But we've interviewed probably 2,000? I think it's still worth developing something, and even if someone knows the answer you can still qualify folks.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
my undergraduate alma mater Auburn University
Well shit, man. War fuckin' Eagle!
coughs
Uh, just kidding, I went to Stanford everyone.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
I'm not an expert in this space by any means - I divested of crypto precisely because of the additional controls that landed on "easy" platforms, since someone not watching and taxing my transactions was a major part of the appeal.
I think it would depend a lot on where you live. I'd create a plan with multiple types of goods and the laws around selling your own personal property (imagine my eyes rolling here).
At the end of it, you may find the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and that's a valid answer. There's a reason why the people who are best at tax minimization strategies are generally dealing with 7+ figures. If it's a huge PITA to keep your own money, you may end up just choosing to cede it through taxes. After all, that's what these systems of punishment and enforcement are designed to do....
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
- The scenario is interesting because it's a real problem we had to solve at the company early on. We haven't had to change it at all for around 5 years because it's such a high-quality signal (and interviewees rate it highly). We did have to modify the approach though - we finished iterating on it after around 1.5 years and probably 30 interviews.
- Once the question has been provided a day beforehand, being unable to come up with an adequate solution during the interview is a deal breaker. The good news is twofold: The answer has a correctness gradient, and the whole question is designed to be iterated on as a discusssion. Did you put together a maximally elegant and simple solution? Ok, now make it enterprise-grade. Did you bring your resume-driven development tendencies to the table? Now simplify.
Our entire interview suite uses those approaches, including our small take-home project, so we can easily cross-reference someone's performance with their salary requirements and stated YOE. The tech interview team explicitly defines the tiers of answer performance, and we all collaborate on them.
There have been some calls to introduce a new question to more closely represent the state of the art in modern development. After ~7 total years anything gets long in the tooth, and I'd be lying if I said I'm not a bit concerned about the performance of LLMs in the space. With excellent prompting, they can succeed in our interview if not blow us away. There's no substitute for seeing if someone can verbally describe how they'd solve or problem or change a solution.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
First: Congrats, it's awesome to hear about someone recovering a cold wallet like this. I still love telling the story of my friend who frittered away 100 BTC from around 2011 before its biggest jump.
Second, how sure are you that you want to report all of this to the tax administration? If the amount was less than six figures, I would try to purchase goods in BTC slowly over the years.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
I'm trying to fill a position at work right now. A sys admin role. I want to ask that gas mileage question during technical interviews but I'm afraid the people who will get it right will be so insulted that they can't believe I'm asking this, while the people who get it wrong will feel very unfairly brutally discriminated against because I could pop such an irrelevant-to-their-job question on them.
We use a question like this in our interviewing process. There's much more to it (this is just one component; they then have to design a software system around it), but it requires some basic multiplication.
For the first 2 years, we'd pop it on them live. The results were extremely poor. 90% of people had to pull out a calculator, and many of them would add or remove a 0 if they didn't. I hate to say it, but we had to provide the whole question beforehand to even get through the thing in an hour. I was originally horrified.
Then again, I don't think that solving this sort of complex problem with a timer over your head is empathetic or reasonable. In reality, when I come across a system constraint I have to engineer around, I at least have hours (if not days). My gut feeling was that many people failed because of the pressure and nerve aspect as opposed to the ability to solve the problem in a reasonable timeframe.
In any case, that's a long rant to say: "Feel Empowered to include basic shit like this and use it as a qualifier, but I suggest making it part of a larger question provided to the candidate the day before the interview."
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
Sure. The idea that 0 people weren't convinced to cancel their trump vote because of this trial cannot statistically true at the scale of an American election.
But do you really see a meaningful overall shift that way instead of the opposite? Trump has been impeached, sued, and disparaged with screeching histrionic screeds from every single major media platform in the world for almost 8 years at this point.
And yet a sham conviction like this is supposed to be more progress towards crushing him instead of the reverse??
That's even more of a stretch than what you're casting doubt on. Overconfident? Yes. But this was a counter productive move on the establishment's part. I'll be voting for R over L for president this year because of it. Maybe.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
I'm glad you mentioned the eggs. My neighbor had me watch his chickens and I thought "ugh, these taste like the feed bag I was using for them instead of mellow butter, and they're harder to crack and wash shit off of"
For those of you of a certain age, I hope that you were blessed enough to have the necessary computer hardware to enjoy the videogame Homeworld when it was released in 1999.
The premise is as follows: your species (the Kushan) inhabit a dying desert world. An expedition to the incredibly harsh desert uncovers the wreckage of a starship… You know what, just watch the opening cinematic - again if it's been a few years.
The original game included not just a beefy manual but essentially an entire lore preamble novella that was excellent. A labor of love from those who love SciFi. The single-player campaign had an unbelievably compelling story, atmospheric music and other sound design, and a cool wrinkle where your fleet persists from mission to mission, making choices and mistakes have consequences. It was also difficult. I'm ashamed to admit that 10-year-old me was unable to make it to the final mission before my cousin took his disc back home, though this wasn't helped by some challenges around pacing and the inadequate hardware of my parent's PC.
While I revere the single-player campaign, the multiplayer component had an extremely devout following. The game's engine rendered and calculated each mass driver's shots, from the tiny stream of rounds from a fighter to the massive 4-pixel slugs being slung from lumbering heavy cruisers. Ship AI was bizarrely strong, with fleet formations and tactic parameters leading to wildly different results, and a lot of emergent gameplay from weak rear armor, the use of the Z-Axis for positioning, and, of course, streaming a dozen fighters into kamikaze attacks on motherships as their fuel and armor deteriorated.
The sequel, Homeworld 2, was visually stunning but probably only OK. My main concern was around the story being stupid-i-fied. The hyperspace cores of the first game were made into lightly mythical machines produced by an ancient race. The dilution of what was at first fairly hard sci-fi was unpleasant, but the addition of a much better UX and advances in the depth of combat were salves on the wound.
The game went through IP hell before being purchased and re-issued by Gearbox. If you haven't purchased and experienced the Remaster, they are totally worth it. Anyway, I've tarried long enough (without even mentioning the reportedly excellent Cataclysm, which I haven't played!).
Homeworld 3 was released a few weeks ago. It's not a stretch to day I've been waiting almost 21 years for the game. I committed the cardinal sin of purchasing the collector's edition during a pre-order campaign through some now-defunct crowdfunding site.
And holy fuck, what a disappointment.
There are a lot of complaints about regressions in gameplay and AI. Frankly I'm unconcerned with those - I think the Dev team is going to improve them, and the community is weirdly diverse in its opinions on what makes good gameplay. A famous mod that easily quintupled the complexity of the game was still considered not complex enough, and meanwhile the rest of us are struggling to micro some of the basic unit types in a fast-paced game. I personally think it will end up being excellent after a few patches which is the nature of modern videogame development.
The story, however, is unforgivably bad. Without spoilers, what I can say is that the writers took a galactic-spanning setting, with trillions of people across light-years, and somehow shoe-horned in some idiotic human interest story. They then double down on the mysticism of Homeworld 2 and the hyperspace cores. The cutscenes are no longer beautifully painted vignettes and top-tier voice acting. Instead, they're crappy Unreal Engine renders where the audio and video aren't even synced properly. There are only 3 real characters, who act like children, and the whole premise is just profoundly weak.
It's not a stretch to say that I could have written something superior, especially in the age of the LLM, in just a couple of hours. It's a violation of the series' ethos and appeal, made even more baffling since many of the original staff for the first two games are at the new developer. And before you ask - it's not even particularly woke, though the big bad justifies their behavior with some level of "I was abused", and opinions differ as to what happened. It's just Stupid.
Perhaps a group of fans will create something better with the release of mod tools. I wouldn't mind hammering at it with a mix of AI tools to give myself some catharsis. I'm still enjoying playing the game, actually, and I'm looking forward to playing MP with some friends.
In any case - rant over. For those who were previous fans, you know a little about what you're getting into.
It's not a great analogy. I understand valuing reliability and low cost of ownership at different levels. Ironically I kinda enjoy driving Priuses - Hybrid powertrains are fun.
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