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"lunzi" and "huidu" are both nice concise terms, would be nice to have an terse english equivalent. I am curious if knowing this sort of term is actually helpful for the average engineer working at an org like bytedance, or if things are siloed to the point that the eng orgs are basically separate with limited Chinese-English collaboration outside of certain management teams.

PS: If you're interested in learning more Chinese tech terms, I've put together an Anki deck of 330+ cards with example sentences.

Anki deck: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1351796314

Preview of cards + list of sources: https://computerlab.io/2023/06/08/chinese-software-engineeri...


The thing with languages is that we'd create those words if we actually needed them. There's no reason to have individual words for a lot of those terms and even the linked site mentions that some of the sources of the Chinese terms are from English.

English is already bastardised enough imo, we don't need an individual word for every technical term from every industry, that would just be ludicrous.


"lunzi"'s meaning is close to it's literal translation: wheel, as in Python Wheels and "reinventing wheels".


To be pedantic, Python wheels refer to cheese wheels, not as literal as you’d think.


> "lunzi" and "huidu" are both nice concise terms, would be nice to have an terse english equivalent

"Huidu" looks like Microsoft's RC (release candidate).

"lunzi" looks like UI/UX.


Huidu seems just like how one would use AB testing in English. You roll out a change, see if it works. If not, roll it back. Otherwise, roll it out to the rest of the users.


I might say "preview" for huidu


huidu would be "canary deployment", I think


Staged rollout?


Sotheby's | Software/Data Engineers and Leads | Remote | Full Time

Sotheby's is the world's leading auction house for art, luxury and beyond. We're constantly building new sales channels (like our retail marketplace platform) and products (like our art-backed financing offering) with modern software development practices and technologies.

We're looking for engineers and leads across a variety of teams, including the Platform team I'm a member of. If you're excited about scaling high-value realtime systems and creating great onboarding experiences, please check out the following job listings! https://boards.greenhouse.io/sothebys/jobs/4011775004 https://boards.greenhouse.io/sothebys

We use and teach: Terraform, AWS, Kubernetes, Bazel, Go, TypeScript, GraphQL, Python

Work-life balance is solid and remote-first.

Please email me at patrick (dot) steadman @ sothebys (dot) com if you have questions or are interested!


tfswitch might help with particular issue of terraform versioning:

https://tfswitch.warrensbox.com/

Even then some versions of terraform providers are not compatible with M1 macs. Docker would help with that probably, but so can: https://github.com/kreuzwerker/m1-terraform-provider-helper

Perhaps these sort of issues support the benefits of per-module docker images?


Sotheby's | Software/Data Engineer | New York or Remote | Full Time

Sotheby's is the world's leading auction house for art, luxury and beyond. We're constantly building new sales channels (like our retail marketplace platform) and products (like our art-backed financing offering) with some pretty interested technologies.

We're looking for engineers across a variety of teams, including the Platform team I'm a member of. If you're excited about developer experience, scaling high-value realtime systems, and SRE, you might be a good fit for joining this team! https://boards.greenhouse.io/sothebys/jobs/4004826004

Our stack: Terraform, AWS, Kubernetes, Bazel, TypeScript, GraphQL, Go, Python

Work-life balance is solid and remote + roughly quarterly in-person meetings has been working well for my team. We're also hiring engineers for a new team based in Shanghai.

For a list of all open positions check out: https://boards.greenhouse.io/sothebys or email me at patrick (dot) steadman @ sothebys (dot) com if you have questions!


> I don't think she actually did any female protagonists at all.

Of course there's Therese, the well-developed protagonist of The Price of Salt (aka Carol), a lesbian romance. This work and its movie adaptation are the reason she's a gay icon - both are popular and well-loved.

Highsmith published The Price of Salt under a pseudonym after her success with "Strangers on a Train", which is driven by the masculine characters you mention. From what I can tell, The Price of Salt is more directly based on her personal life, or rather her fantasies, and part of the reason she used a pseudonym is that her agent warned her that writing a lesbian novel would be career suicide. Wikipedia has more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_of_Salt "Highsmith described the character of Therese as having come "from my own bones"."


I find the fact that it got popular because of it being one of the only lesbian novels with a somewhat happy ending really interesting. From Wikipedia:

> Because of the happy (or at least, non-tragic) ending which defied the lesbian pulp formula, and because of the unconventional characters who defied stereotypes about female homosexuals, The Price of Salt was popular among lesbians in the 1950s and continued to be with later generations. It was regarded for many years as the only lesbian novel with a happy ending.

Before reading the article I actually only knew Patricia Highsmith from The Price of Salt as it's really popular, even more so after the movie adaptation.


Interesting, never realized that book even existed.


The concept of "so-so automation" [1] seems relevant: innovation that allows a business or organization to eliminate human employees, but doesn't result in overall productivity gains or cost savings for society that could then be redistributed to the laid-off employees.

I think so-so automation often is used places where there's a lot of zero-sum conflict between workers and management, or where the work itself causes a lot of negative human externalities. (This can be a good thing: it's probably okay to settle for a "worse result" from an automated system if it eliminates a lot of physical or psychological harm to people...some content moderation issues probably fall under this case, but not this one.)

[1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lure-so-so-tec...


I’d call it “plausible automation”.

It enabled things like Facebook to displace message boards for the most part. Look at Facebook or Reddit, they are barely able to police obvious noxious behavior in English, and military juntas in Myanmar are able to organize on the platforms.


As a non-native English speaker I read "so-so automation" like "sus-automation" and found it oddly appropriate.


The Parity wallet bug from 2017 is the classic example so far, where someone who was just messing around with the smart contract 'accidentally' locked up $280m in assets[1]. I've linked to the GitHub thread below...this person didn't get anything from the exploit, and it wasn't for street cred (they deleted their account).

https://github.com/openethereum/parity-ethereum/issues/6995#...

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/08/accidental-bug-may-have-froz...


I’m interested in hearing more about this approach, are there any papers on it? I see two different ideas here: the use of hypnosis to create unconscious “hooks” into conscious thought. This could be useful if for whatever reason certain features of conscious are not easy to detect (another comment mentioned that it’s harder to get clear signals from the frontal cortex). Then there is the idea of using muscle twitched / GVS as an information channel. It seems hard to get a high bandwidth from this (compared to invasive or EEG-like approaches).


Cheers, and thanks for asking. :)

> are there any papers on it?

None that I know of, but I have never looked. Hypnosis in general has a hard time being accepted by conventional science (going back to Mesmer and Ben Franklin.)

> the use of hypnosis to create unconscious “hooks” into conscious thought.

Yes, this was literally one of the first things I learned when I started studying and using hypnosis: a binary Boolean signal from my unconscious to my conscious minds (idiosyncratically we (my conscious and unconscious minds) settled on twitch of the right arm shoulder for yes, left for no. Technically it's a trinary signal, with no twitch indicating a "reformulate the query" or "does not compute" response.)

Really, the thing to do is improve communication and report between the unconscious and conscious minds, operating with deliberate cooperation (rather than the ad hoc programming you get from life.) E.g. when I play chess I do not think about the moves, I look at the board and "just know" which move to make. I can actually decide whether to beat someone or lose, and by what degree! (As you can imagine, it makes chess dull.)

> This could be useful if for whatever reason certain features of conscious are not easy to detect (another comment mentioned that it’s harder to get clear signals from the frontal cortex).

Yes, translating and amplifying signals is trivial, your brain does it all the time. However the entire point of having a "conscious mind" is tied up in being easy to detect. The ego is a communication device.

> Then there is the idea of using muscle twitched / GVS as an information channel. It seems hard to get a high bandwidth from this (compared to invasive or EEG-like approaches).

I actually have no clear idea of the bandwidth limits from the unconscious mind to some specific sensor system. Keep in mind that touch typing is already a form of this: the unconscious mind moves the fingers and a stream of text goes into the computer. Achieving that sort of bandwidth should be no problem: set up a binary signal on each finger and an "ACK" on the thumb and you can transmit bytes in parallel, eh? Build something like this "squeezebox" keyboard[1] or a dataglove[2] and use chords from greater bandwidth.

We also have the face, a high-bandwidth output channel, and I have no doubt that a camera (or two) with a simple neural net could be used to train the system to recognize facial tics and expressions. You would have to be a little sophisticated in how you set up the feedback loops: you want to settle on motions that are easy for the face to make and for the NN to recognize. That's kind of a neat thought experiment. (No pun intended.)

I don't doubt that you could get higher bandwidth from implants, I just don't think it's worth the surgery (for able-bodied folk. For people with paralysis it makes more sense.) Not EEG though (I know a neuroscientist who has experience with high density EEG and from what I gather it's just not that great. Like trying to find whales by analyzing surface waves.)

[1] https://peterlyons.com/problog/2021/04/squeezebox-keyboard/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataglove


Feeling basically neutral towards your employer (or nation) is probably how having reasonably aligned incentives feels at scale. If you were an hourly minimum wage worker for a large corporation, there's a good chance you'd spend a good part of your workday in a blind, passive-aggressive rage.


I often wonder if the release of Zelle around 2017 (near instant, fee-free transactions between personal and business bank accounts between certain US banks) was motivated by a perceived crypto threat.


I mean, that’s been pretty standard in every country I’ve dealt with outside the USA for a long long time.

If anything, I’d say that’s more a reflection of the poor state of the USA banking sector than its currency.


vs the rise of Venmo and Square Cash?


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