Although I love most of her fantasy works, I found 'The Dispossessed' to be too difficult for me. However, that's probably because her interests were broader than mine.
Thanks, but watching an eighteen-hour seminar on a book so that I can enjoy that book doesn't seem worth it to me. (Note that "to me"; I'm quite open to being a literary lightweight. My experience of AP English in high school was that it inoculated me against the great works of literature.)
As a person actively organizing with anarchists and who has had a lot of long, fraught relationships leading to my late 40s, I found the Dispossessed to be relatable is ways I wouldn't have if I'd read it earlier in life.
I don't know if it's a difficult book, but I can see how it might land differently for me in different situations.
What percentage of the population would you like to see made up of immigrants? Would you make immigration harder if the immigrant populating was above 1%?
If it got too high, would you start deporting people or forcing native people to have more children?
You want the number to be small enough where the cultural and social impact of immigrants is controlled. We don't want America to become more like India or Bangladesh or places like that, so we need to keep immigration low enough where the native culture overwhelms that of the immigrants.
According to a 2021 Cato survey--which is a pro-immigration outfit--the median response to "how many immigrants should be allowed each year" was 500,000: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/aside_3x/pu.... If we enforced that number long term, we'd probably end up with a foreign-born population under 5%, as we had in 1970. That seems like an appropriate number to foster cultural homogeneity and a high level of social cohesion.
The repeating pattern has 2 digits, and is a multiple of 9. 9 times 11 is 99, so that multiplication gives a "repeating pattern of a multiple of 99" — equivalently, a multiple of a repeating pattern of 99. And I assume you're familiar with the concept of .99999... equaling 1.
> Payments are handled by Solana smart contracts, with a React frontend (TanStack Start).
This is disappointing.
Solana has a highly centralized validator set that will keep shrinking over time as the cost to run one out paces the rise in the SOL price.
This leads to it being very centralized.
Solana is also missing core cryptographic primitives like state receipts, meaning I can be easily tricked by a dishonest validator about whether my transaction happened.
Without a mempool, sending transactions is a nightmare during high network usage and my transaction can dissappear forever, or be executed multiple times.
Solana isn't even significantly cheaper than the alternatives anymore.
Yeah that's true and the plan is to expand to multiple chains once the platform has users and we are happy with the stability of the system.
Our current system will allow us to expand to Ethereum easily which will open up a much larger network. We just wanted to keep things simple for our initial product and you have to admit that Solana is a good chain to build on.
I'm not assuming, the whole narrative goes like "software development is a solved problem and a sunken cost" Ok if the cost is low why not then? It makes sense to improve your product and strenghten your market position
This comment is off-base enough that I've created a throwaway, as I post openly as a Microsoftie on my main, to prevent anyone else from getting the wrong idea.
Microsoft reintroduced stack ranking over the last year or so. It's widely documented.
The individual in question was definitely under pressure. I worked rather closely with them, and this is well documented in the source article as well.
I don't think any of the things I said above (or were insinuated about Microsoft culture by other posters) are in any way insulting to Prateek, regardless of what his individual situation or performance is. If anything, calling attention to it and attempting to address it is a powerful way to show respect to my eyes. The incentive systems at play, the pressures and stressors, will result in these outcomes unless anyone forces a change. End of story.
> Microsoft reintroduced stack ranking over the last year or so
Microsoft has forced differentiation, not stack ranking. They aren't the same and differentiation is much better for employees.
> The individual in question was definitely under pressure. I worked rather closely with them, and this is well documented in the source article as well
I'm sure you're feeling a lot of options due to your proximity, and I'm sorry for what you're going through.
The article says he was under pressure, but it didn't say the source of that pressure. Perhaps it was due to a series of "lower than expected" reviews, or the constant worry about losing their job and their visa. It didn't say that the pressure was caused by internal policies.
I've known many people who put pressure on themselves and burnt out because of it, despite no one expected them to do so. I suffered through that in my own career and nearly quit software engineering because of it.
If you have real details about the situation and that it was internal Microsoft policy or the pressure put in them by their manager which may not have aligned with Microsoft policy, that woukd be very useful information to share with the public.
Microsoft operates like many big companies vs a single company, and some teams go beyond standard Microsoft policy and have unrealistic expectations of their employees. Those departments and managers should be called out and shamed.
> Microsoft has forced differentiation, not stack ranking. They aren't the same and differentiation is much better for employees.
In practice it is exactly the same. EMs are instructed that they must have someone at for instance 80 (below-meets-expectations), or occasionally at 60 (PIP). This has resulted in layoffs. The pseudonyms we're told to use are infantilizing when we can see the results.
> I'm sure you're feeling a lot of options due to your proximity
I'd ask you not make assumptions about my feelings in this, vs taking the statements I'm making at face value.
Not that it's unique to his division, I can assure you I worked organizationally close enough to know that, regardless of other sources of stress, there is(was) relevant work pressure up through the VP level encouraging late hours and long days that goes well beyond healthy, often acknowledged outright as the way to stand out in leadership AMAs. The evidence of this is documented in the article, and your dissembling is somewhat astonishing.
> If you have real details about the situation and that it was internal Microsoft policy or the pressure put in them by their manager which may not have aligned with Microsoft policy, that woukd be very useful information to share with the public.
I'm sharing it, you're just disregarding it. There is a system in place that through basic game theory ensures a prisoner's dilemma without compromise, with the escalation being longer hours and more work. While any given leadership may encourage it more or less, to not see how that pans out naturally when employment is on the line, especially as proven out by multiple recent rounds of 'performance' driven layoffs, seems purposefully obtuse. One doesn't know when the heart attack is coming, but one does know when the PIP is coming; we can't be surprised at the choices people will make.
I didn’t take his comment that way of which GP replied to me. I took it as sarcasm. In that, GP was saying it like “Yea but they found time to make these policies…”
In reality, the outcome doesn't appear to be the result of "pure chaos and randomness" if you ground your tools. Test cases and instructions do a fantastic job of keeping them focused and moving down the right path.
If I see an LLM consistently producing something I don't like, I'll either add the correct behavior to the prompt, or create a tool that will tell it if it messed up or not, and prompt it to call the tool after each major change.
I do wish my copy of 'The Dispossessed' was signed. That book is a masterpiece!
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