The "missing" piece is just everyone implementing OAuth Dynamic Client Registration. Then kernel.org could be its own OAuth provider, and Linus could log into someone's Forgejo with his kernel.org login.
Just like "log in with Google", you should be able to do "log in with OAuth", you type your email or domain (or your browser fills it), and it triggers a redirect flow for login. Then people can use GitHub or Google or Apple or their own provider, just like email. Every email provider could also be an OAuth provider.
The median home price in the US right now is ~$400k[0], so that's a 10% down payment. While 20% is the traditional target, you can get loans with 3% down, so it seems pretty substantial to me. If you saved that $50/week starting at 18, you could be a decently confident home-buyer in your 20s. If you and a spouse each did that, there's your 20% target.
Certainly a fair argument, and in re-reading my comment I realize I forgot to qualify it with "in my city" the prices are unbelievably out of reach, but it was mainly meant to illustrate the point rather than be factually complete.
I don't think ~$400k accurately depicts useful information, but I'd rather be hopeful than cynical, so I think if your only goal is homeownership, then hopefully if one does trade something stupid like gambling for investments, there will still be options somewhere
> Firefox usage share grew to a peak of 32.21% in November 2009, with Firefox 3.5 overtaking Internet Explorer 7, although not all versions of Internet Explorer as a whole;
Firefox was the browser that embraced open standards and was unseating IE. And ActiveX was used for corporate stuff, not general web sites, so the main reason it died was that Microsoft gave up.
Then the lawyers are incompetent morons. There's "no benefit" to telling the student their own grade at all when viewed from that perspective. You could just not give them any feedback. Or you could allow them to consent to it, which is what the law asks.
It is a dodge. Society should not just say "oh those silly lawyers". These people are not being responsible. They are not doing their jobs.
As someone who transitioned from working in startups and technology to a university, it is hard to describe how different the environment is.
It looks very weird and is hard to understand from the outside, and unfortunately all technology vendors are on the outside.
Basically every technology has an impedance mismatch when brought into the university environment. And when you combine them together it keeps getting worse.
That's why you see things in this thread like CS professors who operate their class using pen and paper and maybe a spreadsheet.
I worked with a lawyer who was the on-staff general counsel for a mid size private university who was not an incompetent moron.
One thing I really appreciated that she did was refuse to put e-mail disclaimers in the bottom of e-mails, because she said they had zero legal weight and actually were negative from a legal perspective, since it means people might think they have legal weight (when they don't).
Overzealous e-mail admins would periodically want to do it because it's what everyone else does, not to mention vendors of frankly B.S. software whose only value prop was adding a disclaimer to all the email that went out of Exchange or Google Workspace.
No, the lawyers are not "incompetent morons", and I highly doubt you have the legal training and domain experience to be qualified to make that assertion.
You would be surprised at the number of frivolous lawsuits and seemingly "zero risk" decisions that wind up turning into actual legal risk and legal fees.
The legal world is a lot more complicated than you think. I've been in some of these conversations. Quite frankly, you don't know what you're talking about.
> You would be surprised at the number of frivolous lawsuits and seemingly "zero risk" decisions that wind up turning into actual legal risk and legal fees. [¶] The legal world is a lot more complicated than you think.
The law is a lot like an app: It has to take into account a gazillion edge cases and corner cases — not to mention that people can be ignorant and/or malicious. It really is complicated, as you say above.
Well done on not hurling insults at @ndriscoll, BTW. Personal attacks don't persuade the target, and they can turn off onlookers who might be undecided. (Competent lawyers learn early that judges and jurors don't like personal attacks and can be less inclined to believe the attacker.)
The thing is, I don't need that training to recognize that they are failing to contribute to society. This is why I'm saying that it is indeed a dodge. "It's complicated and you don't understand it" isn't an excuse for making the world worse. And yes, it is fully possible for a someone to make that judgement without a large background in law, because it's taking a holistic look at "what was the purpose of this law, and are they interpreting it in line with that purpose?" The details don't matter; the outcomes do. Their job is to deal with the details to reach the desired outcomes. If society is better off for putting them on a boat and sending them into the middle of the ocean, then they are incompetent.
Refusing to give a student their own data because of a privacy law that's meant to give the student control over their data is them failing. Full stop. There's no room for excuses for government funded entities to act in the exact opposite way that they are supposed to to avoid their fear of government imposed penalties from a deliberate misinterpretation of what the entire thing is about. That's incompetence by everyone involved. It is people going out of their way to make the world a worse place to act important. Absolutely unacceptable.
It's like if teachers aren't teaching the kids to read or add, the details about all the compliance stuff they need to worry about and how the school "can't" remove disruptive kids from a class or whatever is missing the point; the schools can't sacrifice actually doing their job at the alter of compliance, or we should just shut them down since all they do is waste resources. The compliance people should be figuring out how to shield the actual workers/create plausible deniability if the law is supposedly that stupid.
The world is complicated. Laws like FERPA are written with good intentions, but there are a lot of gray areas open to interpretation, and bad actors will take advantage of those gray areas to bring lawsuits for selfish purposes that universities have to spend money to defend themselves and possibly pay expensive penalties over. So lawyers advise how to follow laws in the most risk-free way.
Blaming lawyers or Instructure for "failing to contribute to society" is both incredibly immature and factually wrong. It's not the 1980's where jokes about "kill all the lawyers" get laughs.
I'm going to be blunt: you seem to have a kind of black-and-white, adolescent understanding of the world where it's split up into good actors and bad actors, and good actors should do what's right (regardless of the law) and bad outcomes are the result of bad actors. But that's not how the world works. Everybody involved can be intelligent and trying to do their best, and we get suboptimal outcomes because this stuff is hard. Writing laws that protect student data while maximizing student convenience are probably never going to get it perfectly right in every situation. But insulting the lawyers or the schools or Instructure as "failing to contribute to society" or insulting the law as "supposedly that stupid" is to deeply misunderstand everything.
FERPA does not have a lot of "gray areas open to interpretation". It's a well-understand body of law, case law, and regulations, and things like whether or not you can e-mail a student a grade are settled questions.
It's not a misunderstanding of everything, especially for schools that are government funded. They have a mission, they receive resources from everyone else to do that mission. If they are then worried about penalties for some frivolous side distraction, and choose to not accomplish their mission for fear of that, then why are we funding them to start with?
Frankly it's a perspective that I've only developed as I got older and realized that such excuses are poor, and that the real world has quite a few people in it who don't really care about the outcomes of what they're doing, or even understand why they're there. To me it feels adjacent to the adolescent view I often see on this site/reddit around "why is the company laying people off when they're making lots of money?" It's because those people aren't needed for anything, and those jobs aren't a form of charity. They exist for a purpose. If they no longer have a purpose, why would you keep paying that person?
If people are going to exist as obstructions to the purpose of the institution we're trying to serve, then they are useless. It's like a computer security worker saying the best way to be secure is to unplug everything, and push for policies that no one shall use computers for anything. Completely missing the point.
Finding ways to follow the law in the most risk-free way to the detriment of everyone is exactly missing their purpose in the world, and everyone should rightly call such a person incompetent and useless. It's casual acceptance of this kind of incompetence culture that slowly leads to societal decline. It's the same kind of thing as when Berkeley took down their lectures because of the ADA. How about the same state that ignores federal immigration and drug law say that actually they're going to keep giving away their free educational materials because they want universal education, and giving those lectures away is strictly better than not doing that, and if the feds want it made accessible, they can fund a project to do so?
I really don't know what to tell you. You're literally calling for universities to either break the law or not worry so much about following it, and calling people who do want to be careful about following the law "incompentent and useless".
If you don't see how extreme that is, and how much society would break down if everyone started thinking laws were optional and ought to be ignored when they prevent you from accomplishing your "mission", I just don't know what to tell you.
Quite the contrary: society very obviously runs because people ignore policies and laws constantly. That's why following all laws exactly is considered a protest or subversion strategy: malicious compliance.
Like the entire AI industry could only work by completely ignoring copyright law. Basically no software could be written if developers were concientious enough to check for and avoid patents first. Tradesmen ignore safety policies. Doctors ignore limits on hours. People do work on their homes with no permits.
Part of being an adult is exactly knowing which rules are important and which you ignore.
Individuals can choose which laws to ignore, like when they jaywalk.
Corporations, universities, etc. are very different. They create policies which are documented and which their employees are required to follow. They engage in risk analysis.
"Part of being an adult" has nothing whatsoever to do with the laws and regulations that apply to organizations. You're making a severe category error.
At IBM, vim was specifically banned by legal because of reputational risk because the license asks you to consider donating to children in Africa, and IBM didn't want to be called out for not doing so. Guess which editor pretty much everyone in my org used? We also weren't allowed to move furniture because of some union agreement, but guess how many people cared when furniture mysteriously moved from an empty office room into ours? None.
At the startup, people in our satellite office in Arizona openly mocked the California HR harassment training over lunch. It was also an open secret that one of the managers started dating a report. As far as I know many years later they've both moved on to other jobs and they're still together. Nothing bad happened.
Breaking some policies will absolutely get you fired, but that's mostly around doing things you shouldn't be doing, and even then usually only matters if someone else that has some power might themselves get in trouble/have more work/lose something because of what you did. Others no one will care about. Again, part of growing up is figuring out which policies have a purpose and which came from some busybody.
I also already gave the entire AI industry as an example. We know for a fact that Meta trained on pirated material, and it's pretty obvious that everyone else does too. It's blatant industry wide flouting the law. The realpolitik answer here is everyone knows that enforcing the law here would be the final nail in the coffin for China superceding the West, so it's not going to happen.
It's not "sheer laziness". I can almost guarantee you that Instructure would prefer to e-mail the grade itself, and probably had the code working somewhere before feedback from universities told them to remove it.
There are absolutely cases where sending an e-mail to the wrong person is a violation of FERPA. Can you guarantee that your software will never be configured to accidentally e-mail someone besides the student? That no administrator will ever accidentally set up the wrong e-mail address? Because you're not sure if you can make that guarantee, it's legally safer to restrict it to the actual LMS login.
Yes, I have written software that would email a student information that was in scope for FERPA.
It’s rather simple to restrict sending email to @student.uni.edu and then further force their email to match the username and email address that is synced from the SIS.
How much FERPA compliant software have you written?
That's great for you. I've been in meetings with lawyers around FERPA compliance.
You are right that if you are creating a custom tool you can create that restriction easily.
But if you are creating a learning management system where administrators can configure it a million different ways and the university lawyers want to make sure that administrators don't set it up the wrong way, it makes sense to have that safeguard.
You are looking at the wrong level here. This isn't a software coding issue around technology. This is a policy compliance issue around people. When you create tools you have to consider the possibility of those tools being misused by an employee and mitigate those risks when possible.
I think the lawyers in a straw-man imaginary world where they say a university can't e-mail any FERPA-covered data to a student (which includes such basic things as what times a student's classes are) don't contribute anything to society. But that's because they're just a figment of one person's imagination.
Actual, real lawyers who work for or at real universities often do contribute quite a bit of valuable work. I enjoyed the one I worked with and think she did a great job of putting the brakes on over-regulating or using legal compliance as an excuse for just not doing work.
That's great to hear. As I agreed elsewhere in the thread, their true purpose is exactly to shield other workers from this sort of nonsense FUD and make-work.
Of course I presume it's also not a strawman because it's not in any way some unique thing to lawyers.
This, way too many people think they know the law and build up a wall of thinking based on their erroneous understanding of it. They're often afraid to incur the perceived expense of consulting an actual expert.
The same kind of broken thinking exists across MANY other aspects of life. Turn up the radio in your car to avoid hearing the problem that would be 'easy' to fix now and instead ignore it until it turns into a considerably more expensive repair.
I find it's often the same people that make these kinds of misguided decisions that crow the loudest about "kill all the lawyers". Perhaps because of their fear of being called out for their ignorance.
Agree with the sentiment and this is a good idea regardless of skepticism about layoffs, but I think "we're growing the team" is not a solid answer.
This is a company that's potentially going to be giving you a lot of money. You should want to understand what they're hoping to get out of that investment. e.g. what are their short/mid/long-term goals and how does hiring you fit into that? Ideally it's clear to you that they have a lot of work they want to accomplish that seems reasonably aligned to what the business owners would want, and it sounds like something you want to get yourself into.
A great answer would be like "we've been acquiring a lot of customers lately and have been starting to run into performance issues, but we don't have the capacity to both handle that and also work on the feature requests we're receiving." Or "we're looking to expand into a new market which carries some new baseline requirements (e.g. FedRAMP) and need help building that."
Not really? I've worked with people who were super productive with high quality work, and my reaction was to... gravitate toward working more with them. Some people are status driven. Some are not. Some are apparently pathologically status driven such that they'll compete with a literal child.
In any case refusing to nurture such a child (even in effectively passive ways like letting them quietly do something more advanced with no specific instruction) and not being reprimanded for it would reveal that the actual purpose of their position is daycare worker, which should be a bigger strike to the ego.
That’s what all people say. Everyone who is status driven will not admit or even realize they are status driven. But the fact of the matter is… it is human nature to be status driven. Everyone recognizes status symbols and possesses such a drive within them. It is also clinically tied with serotonin levels and observed in cross species behavior. To say you have no drive for status is an either a lie or delusional. The evidence is so ingrained in science.
Now. That being said, the drive can be suppressed. But suppressing the drive doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist and that you don’t feel it. Also many people feel the drive at different levels of intensity that much is true.
Anecdotally your response to me indicates to me that you have not suppressed status seeking drives completely. The key hints are you’re referring to how you’re drawn to people who do high quality work. That is orthogonal to status seeking. Your status and identity is tied to a certain type of work you do and you take pride in. Have you worked with anyone who was so powerful that their work invalidated, crushed and basically humiliated anything you did. And let’s say this person is not malicious. He’s just so much better than you that your work and identity is inconsequential and eclipsed by his work.
If you said that you wouldn’t feel anything in the face of that then I would say that you truly do not seek status. I would also say you’re not human.
That being said a teacher holds his identity as someone who is better than children. He needs to be better than children in order to transfer his betterment (aka knowledge) to children. His role in society and identity rests on that foundation. If children are better then him and know more than him then that is inadvertently an attack on his identity. His reaction is natural and expected. It’s not that he has anything against the child, it’s self protection mechanisms to protect his identity via deluding himself. Very typical.
You see much of the same stuff with LLMs and programmers. A huge portion of HN was in denial for the longest time about the capabilities of LLMs calling these things stochastic parrots and thinking it’s impossible for the AI to take over. HN was just completely wrong about that and they were also wrong about driverless cars. The reason why they were so wrong is not because they’re making a logical and rational prediction… no they are choosing the prediction that most aligns with protecting their identity and skill set as programmers which is in the process of being replaced by agentic ai.
Again, I think you're entirely off base here. Maybe you are status driven enough that you can't wrap your head around someone who isn't, but I'm really just not interested in it. I want to give my family a comfortable life and spend time with them. That's it.
To color that a little, I've literally told the last 4 managers I've had very explicitly that I'm not at all interested in career advancement. When I was asked to lead my current team, I said "I've done it in the past and can if you want, but check with A and B first to see if they want to". I literally do not care about it. Work is a means to provide, and it does well enough that I don't need to chase it anymore. Actually the marginal pay for the increased responsibility kind of doesn't make it worth it, but like I said I'll do it if they need that. And so my focus is generally thinking about "how do I get one of my team members in a place where they can replace me?"
If we're talking about who's more human, I'd put forward that caring about who's best seems less humanizing than seeking to spend time with people you care about, remembering how lucky you are to have that time, and ignoring outside noise.
Especially when it comes to teaching, if your identity is "better than child" instead of "person who helps children reach their potential" I'm not sure what to say. Sounds like a narcissist.
On LLMs, I found them to be useless but interesting right up until December, at which point I started a hard push for my team to adopt it (and get excited about it). I'm very explicit that my mental framing with them is "how do I get it to do my job". I'm well aware that "programmer" per se is not going to be a job in the future. That much seemed obvious as far back as the original chatgpt release. That's fine, and just means we have to ask ourselves what else needs doing. If we ever get to the point where the answer is "nothing" then I guess we're all doing pretty well.
>Again, I think you're entirely off base here. Maybe you are status driven enough that you can't wrap your head around someone who isn't, but I'm really just not interested in it. I want to give my family a comfortable life and spend time with them. That's it.
Read carefully the part about science. Status seeking is inherit in biology... it's tied to serotonin levels in your blood. When you say you don't seek status it is not only false, it is unscientific. You're a liar or delusional. End of story. I can literally cite science around this.
This tracks not only in humans, but across multiple species including the lobster. Status seeking is in built into biology and society. Saying you don't status seek is like saying you never felt the emotion of sadness or happiness. At your job, in society, the social hierarchies are everywhere and we are ALL wired to recognize and respond to these things and to SEEK it.
Additionally there is extremely high correlation with women and status. Men with the highest status tend to get the most women. And women are attracted to the men with the highest status. It's directly tied to sexual selection and evolution. Like... this isn't even just a measurable thing via serotonin... it's tied to the theory of evolution and anthropological origins of humans. You literally have no argument other than a pathetic attempt to counter science with anecdotal bullshit.
Saying you don't seek status is in itself status seeking. You're claiming to be holier than thou but it's all just bullshit status signaling because it flies in the face of scientific reality. I think you're more of a person who is unable to obtain status in the human social hierarchy... you're probably among the lowest of society so you might've just given up and called yourself a person who never felt the emotion to status seek. Understandable... but again not realistic.
Also when I say you're pathetically on the bottom of the barrel in terms of status. You shouldn't be offended... because you don't seek status... it's not intrinsic to your character.. You should feel nothing when I call you an utter social outcast with no status whatsoever.
>To color that a little, I've literally told the last 4 managers I've had very explicitly that I'm not at all interested in career advancement. When I was asked to lead my current team, I said "I've done it in the past and can if you want, but check with A and B first to see if they want to". I literally do not care about it.
Bro this is another form of status signaling. "Everyone wants me to be their manager but I don't care for it." lol. It might be true but then again it very well might not be since your statement is a bit braggy here. If you could share with me something people and society will find pathetic and shameful about you... that's more solid proof that you don't care about status. Something like, "Everyone hates me, I've tried to be manager all my life but nobody likes me." That's a more true signal of zero status seeking. But I don't see this in you at all.
To put it in perspective, I think I believe you don't actually want to be manager... but that has nothing to do with not caring for status. It's more likely you're balancing "status" with the extra responsibilities that come with higher status. You can't handle the price that needs to be paid to reach that level so you "settle". Again, very common. You maintain a baseline level of status high enough to keep your wife around (she will leave if your status goes low enough as your status is tied to your ability to raise your family) but it doesn't demand to much out of you. If status was given to you without cost... you would take it without hesitation because... again... you seek status, like all humans do.
>Especially when it comes to teaching, if your identity is "better than child" instead of "person who helps children reach their potential" I'm not sure what to say. Sounds like a narcissist.
No. You're just someone who can't face reality. You have to talk about everything in idealist terms. If a teacher thinks all children are smarter, more educated or better than him, what identity does he have left? How is he even qualified to teach children? A teacher or any human does not think of his job as some selfless charity to society where he is at the utter whim of sacrificing himself for the class room. He has identity and gains status from the role as a "teacher" and that is a huge part of it. It's the same with being a doctor... if you think people become doctors solely just to save people and that it has nothing to do with status... you're out of touch with basic reality.
You not only fail to empathize from the teachers perspective but you succeeded in twisting your response into a direct attack on me. Manipulative. But pointless. This is just an internet forum... winning the crowd doesn't mean shit. This is one of the few opportunities you have to say things that are True and real with no affect on your status.
Anyway what I present is CLEARLY not a narcissistic concept. I am clearly not a narcissist and neither are you. It is a basic concept of basic intelligence. Something you're lacking.
>If we're talking about who's more human, I'd put forward that caring about who's best seems less humanizing than seeking to spend time with people you care about, remembering how lucky you are to have that time, and ignoring outside noise.
When I referred to humans I was more trying to illustrate how your claims don't make sense. Humans seek status period. End of story. If you don't seek status, you're not a human... you're an alien... you clearly aren't an alien... so you're clearly wrong. That was the point.
I'm talking from a hard scientific perspective. You're well outside of that right now and you're only thinking from the perspective of your family. But status seeking is still there, but it's more passed to the status of your children which is still inline with natural selection and biology.
You care for the status of your children, do you not? If your children grew up poor and homeless but extremely happy with their life style would you be content? Or do you care about the status of your children and not want them to grow up ending up in the lowest possible strata of status in human society?
You use research as an argument, which is valid in a conversation where nobody has any information about specifics. E.g. in the pre-life, before a soul is about to be incarnated, you can point to that research and say: you are more likely than not to behave this way. Were the soul to reply, “no I am not, I know myself”, you could call them delusional.
But you’re talking to a person who can point at their actual life and say: I have been in that exact situation and I can confirm that I did not behave that way.
That’s a new observation, and afai understand Bayesian statistics, this is the moment where we must update our priors: how likely is someone who has observed themselves in the past not to behave that way, to behave that way?
Your argument is now incomplete.
Maybe someone with real understanding of Bayesian statistics can frame this better, or tell me why I’m wrong XD
Well how is his experience valid? He may be lying or unaware or delusional or lying to himself. All very common human behaviors.
> Your argument is now incomplete
If my argument is scientific and it’s incomplete then are all scientific arguments incomplete? If science is our best way of determining fact from fiction in reality then based off of the aforementioned logic isn’t the best possible way for humans to determine truth incomplete?
Also in Your attempt to prove me wrong have you thought about how MORE incomplete his argument was?
Everyone can be lying. But I’ve been around human beings long enough to know that there are two very different types of self delusion: valiant assumptions about what you will do in a never before seen situation, and observations about what you have done. GP’s was an objective statement:
> I've worked with people who were super productive with high quality work, and my reaction was to... gravitate toward working more with them.
Neither type of statement is perfectly trustable (nothing is) but IME there is a categorical difference. Your paper (and first comment, “don’t be so quick to judge”, which imo was ironically prescient) are about the former type.
Of course if you disagree with me on this fundamental distinction then we have found our contention :) which would be a nice end to this debate. Don’t you think?
Aren’t my statements exactly in line with what “he has done”? Why don’t you read it more carefully. I never denied what he “did”. More like I requested better evidence and I denied his rationalizations behind his life choices. I never claimed he didn’t do what he said.
If he’s drawn to people who do productive work that’s fine. I turned around and asked him for instances where someone’s work humiliated him or completely eclipsed any utility his work offers. Imagine he worked 10 years to invent the slide rule and some genius invents the electronic calculator in one day right after he showed his invention to the world. That’s devastating status damaging stuff. That’s the type of example I asked him for. Not “oh I’m drawn to work with productive people” lol. That kind of comment he made leaves room for him to imply he’s “more productive” than the people he wants to work with. He’s a poser but then that’s not abnormal… tons of people pose and are fake as hell.
Literally look at what he writes. He’s just incapable of admitting any trivial fault. He’s fucking controlled by status above a normal extent for sure. We don’t even have to get into the pedantics of science for this just use your common sense brain.
I have plenty of faults. Depending on your perspective, my entire point is a "fault": I'm lazy and unambitious and decided to top out and coast in my career when I was like 30.
I'm simply happy with that. I can't offer a situation where I've been humiliated because it hasn't happened. I've never seen anyone get humiliated at work. Most work is honestly pretty boring and straightforward. I'm not Leonardo da Vinci here hoping I don't get scooped.
I mean I suppose a week or two ago another engineer proposed some simplification to a problem that I'd prototyped a solution for that basically eliminated 90% of the work I was doing (basically smuggling some information into SNI so that I wouldn't have to build a bunch of code to track it), so I guess that happened? But I just said "oh, yeah, you're right. I can delete like 90% of my MR. Nice."
But then I do that to myself all the time too. I have some first approach, and then like a week later notice some simplification I missed. That's normal? I just join stand-up that day and day "good news I realized this problem is way simpler so I can delete half the work I did."
In fact that's why I like working with smart people. They can help see things you missed when you accidentally get stuck in a rabbit hole. I'm not going to be mad at someone for making my life easier. And as I've said, I go to work to support my family, not to fulfill some existential need. Whatever makes work simpler is good in my book. That's also why I've enjoyed adopting LLMs this year: they make it so I don't have to spend as much mental energy on things that are fundamentally not that interesting to me
>I can't offer a situation where I've been humiliated because it hasn't happened.
Then how do you even know what the emotion of "humiliation" even feels like if you never been humiliated before? Perhaps you felt such emotions in childhood but as an adult you've never been humiliated ever? Or perhaps you're going to tell a story of slight trivial humiliation when you accidentally used the wrong gender pronoun and that's the totality of your understanding of humiliation?
Your story is too perfect. It's fake-ish and as you tell more of it you're starting to see holes in it like your claim that you've never been humiliated before.
>I mean I suppose a week or two ago another engineer proposed some simplification to a problem that I'd prototyped a solution for that basically eliminated 90% of the work I was doing (basically smuggling some information into SNI so that I wouldn't have to build a bunch of code to track it), so I guess that happened? But I just said "oh, yeah, you're right. I can delete like 90% of my MR. Nice."
this is your least tame example yet, but it's still not humiliation. I in actually can't believe you felt perfectly fine and serene when the other engineer schooled your approach. I think if you were more honest with the story you would've admitted to slight to mild feelings of embarrassment and you just ended up humble about it as most humans would.
At this point you're just trying to show off your claimed non-status seeking personality... but your signaling has gone to the point where it's just a little too perfect. You should probably reply and add more realism to that story man, go ahead if you want:
Everything behavioral or psychological science adjacent tends to be "barely science" but sure.
Don't know what to tell you. I'm not the first person to not be interested in "the rat race" (hence the pejorative term for it existing). People like Emerson have probably made the case better than I can. I'm not interested in getting the most women. Actually that sounds gross to me. I instead found the best woman, and fortunately she's also not big on status seeking, and agrees she'd rather have more time with me than me making more money or having a bigger title. My work is a side plot in our lives; my primary title is "Dad".
Unclear how my criticism of a theoretical teacher (or more generally adult) who competes with the children they're supposed to be supporting is a direct attack on you? Self-report? If you're insecure about a literal child's abilities, the solution is to grow your own and show the child that everyone can always be improving, and there are always new things to learn. Or just be happy for their good fortune. Hamstringing them to make up for one's own hangups is clearly narcissist behavior.
It's also not just management. I don't want to climb the IC ladder either. It means more work, more stress, more responsibility, etc. for a relatively small amount of more money. I already make enough money, and I work for money, not status. That money is to pay for things we need like a house. Then once we have what we need, I plan to retire early and spend more time with my family. Maybe find some volunteer work that we could do together. That's it. Work is a side chapter, not my life.
My wife is also on board with this. She was unsure what it would be like when I transitioned to full remote, but then I did and she realized she likes being around me all the time, and wants me to quit once we've paid for the things we need.
I don't think they would be happy homeless so it's somewhat of a silly question. I try to set them up for success and what I think will help them be happy, but that of course includes showing them how to stay grounded. I do hope they'll have modest wants so that it's easy for them to see life as the gift it is.
>Everything behavioral or psychological science adjacent tends to be "barely science" but sure.
Your arguments aren't even science. Barely but sure? What about your own anecdotal statements? That's even less reliable. If the science is all we got, then it's the best we got.
>Don't know what to tell you. I'm not the first person to not be interested in "the rat race" (hence the pejorative term for it existing). People like Emerson have probably made the case better than I can. I'm not interested in getting the most women. Actually that sounds gross to me. I instead found the best woman, and fortunately she's also not big on status seeking, and agrees she'd rather have more time with me than me making more money or having a bigger title. My work is a side plot in our lives; my primary title is "Dad".
We can frame it in terms of the science. You do seek status, but like many you have the inability to pay the cost of reaching higher social status levels, so like many settle for some sort of middle ground. It's extremely common. When you have kids, a huge portion of your "status seeking" shifts to the status of your kids. You work to promote their status in life and you derive a lot of pride from that. In the end it's still status seeking. Whether you seek it for yourself or your genetic future, evolution built you that way.
>Unclear how my criticism of a theoretical teacher (or more generally adult) who competes with the children they're supposed to be supporting is a direct attack on you? Self-report? If you're insecure about a literal child's abilities, the solution is to grow your own and show the child that everyone can always be improving. Or just be happy for their good fortune. Hamstringing them to make up for one's own hangups is clearly narcissist behavior.
It's very clear. You said I sound like a narcissist. That is clearly an attack. It's like if I said your statement sounds like it was said by an idiot. That's also an attack. But it's sort of indirect attacks that skirt around the rules. I didn't say you were an "idiot"... I said your "statement" sounds like it was said by an "idiot". I just cut through the bullshit and went for the intent of the statement.
>If you're insecure about a literal child's abilities, the solution is to grow your own and show the child that everyone can always be improving.
No one is insecure about a child's abilities. They're insecure about their OWN ability to help children. That is the source of the person saying that calculators are "not for games". The person saying that needs an excuse for himself to qualify as a teacher. It happens so fast the person saying that doesn't even realize why.
>It's also not just management. I don't want to climb the IC ladder either. It means more work, more stress, more responsibility, etc. for a relatively small amount of more money.
I've already pointed this out. You're not willing to pay the cost so you settle.
>My wife is also on board with this. She was unsure what it would be like when I transitioned to full remote, but then I did and she realized she likes being around me all the time, and wants me to quit once we've paid for the things we need.
She settled too. Most people in life settle. Top alpha status is hard to get and their are huge costs in getting that status. Everybody wants it, but they just don't want to pay the price.
>I don't think they would be happy homeless so it's somewhat of a silly question. I try to set them up for success and what I think will help them be happy, but that of course includes showing them how to stay grounded. I do hope they'll have modest wants so that it's easy for them to see life as the gift it is.
So they seek status. Because they won't be happy homeless as being homeless is low status.
>I try to set them up for success and what I think will help them be happy
So you think success (aka status seeking) is intrinsically tied to your children's happiness. Stop signalling bro. You're own language and statements reveal yourself.
>I do hope they'll have modest wants so that it's easy for them to see life as the gift it is.
Again this is the evolutionary strategy of "settling". Your passing your own status seeking strategy to your children. And your strategy is based off of "cost" it is not based off of a lack of desire for status. Again, you think optimal cost/benefit ratio is to be a SWE or something. Some people target something lower then that like janitorial engineering. But if status fell on each of your laps for free, you'd take it.
Also it's not just cost/benefit. Status also measures capability. You and your children may be incapable of getting the statuses you want so you settle. When a person is unable to talk about their own weaknesses and lack of ability to get the status they want, then I know they intrinsically seek status. That's why your anecdotal statement of how you turned down a management opportunity even though everyone wanted you to be manager is kind of off. You were humble bragging and bragging is a form of status projecting.
Again, if you truly don't seek status... tell me about something shameful and pathetic about you that if people in general knew about it would lower your status.... can you do that? If not, then that's my point. You, everyone, and that teacher seeks status and the way they talk and what truths they admit to themselves is a result of THAT status seeking. To characterize that teacher as some kind of narcissist or evil person is a complete lack of empathy and misunderstanding of human nature.
Keep in mind, this is the internet, anything you say here doesn't really affect your status in real life. So you're not doing anything in reality to affect your status. But it's still tangible evidence because I believe that status seeking in biology is so strong it will affect your ability to even say something extremely shameful and pathetic on an anonymous forum. Your genetics and behavior were evolved for a time when humans didn't have internet so it doesn't account for this loop hole where you can write and say things publicly that don't affect your status... hence why I'm sure you're gonna maintain your idealistic frame here.
If the best you have is garbage, then you just say that you don't have anything useful. It's like exercise science: there's almost nothing useful there. Don't pretend there is.
If you accept that premise, then you can't frame it in terms of science. You can frame it instead in terms of culture and philosophy, and just say that status obsession is bad. Especially, again, if it turns into literally competing with or feeling threatened by children.
And really, not everything is about status. In fact, if you want something status lowering I guess, we're kind of Billy No-mates, so I don't even have people to compare status with. I've got no Jones' to keep up with! And that's fine.
Again, I've "settled" precisely because I have exactly what I want. It's not the "costs" so much as it is the absence of value. You could argue that I wouldn't pay $100 for a turd because the cost is too high, but the real point is I don't want the turd. You'd have to pay me to take the turd. Like you'd have to pay me to take the higher status job, except they can't pay me enough, and if they did, it would be because I'd be able to save enough to quit shortly thereafter. So really there's just no sustainable world where I keep the higher status position. Because I really, truly, don't want it. It can only distract from what's important to me, and fill my head with things that are not.
Being homeless is an unhappy affair because it's some combination of cold, rainy, snowy, hot, sunny, and stinky, not because it's low status. And because you have nowhere to store e.g. food or clothes, so your situation is precarious. And nowhere to cook, so difficult to eat healthy meals. I highly doubt most homeless people have social status as a top concern.
I'm not sure what I could say that's "shameful" because I'm generally a pretty happy person. In techie circles, I suppose one thing is that my kids are all girls, and I'm going to encourage them to be stay-at-home moms instead of chasing careerism, try to put them into social circles where promiscuity is heavily frowned upon and the primary reason to go to uni is to find a husband (an "Mrs degree"), etc. Very much against the zeitgeist in my work world (and on this site), but I think it's the best way for them to find happiness. So we moved to the South to stay away from West Coast values.
> If the best you have is garbage, then you just say that you don't have anything useful. It's like exercise science: there's almost nothing useful there. Don't pretend there is.
If you think my statements are garbage think about your own statements. You call me out for presenting valid scientific papers by denigrating the whole field of behavioral science which you then refute by pulling out random anecdotes which aren’t even backed by anything.
> If you accept that premise, then you can't frame it in terms of science
I don’t accept that premise. All science has the possibility of being wrong. It is often wrong. But it is the best we have and it has resulted in remarkable things such as going to the moon.
Anecdotes are weaker than science. If behavioral science is trash to you then the your anecdotes are raw shit.
> Again, I've "settled" precisely because I have exactly what I want. It's not the "costs" so much as it is the absence of value.
The foundation of economic theory is based on unlimited human wants and desires. We baked this assumption into theory because it’s so ingrained in human behavior that it’s the foundation of the financial world.
How about I give you an extra ten million dollars with no strings attached? If you say you don’t need it then I see it as more likely you’re just virtue signaling and lying. Bro be real.
> Being homeless is an unhappy affair because it's some combination of cold, rainy, snowy, hot, sunny, and stinky, not because it's low status. And because you have nowhere to store e.g. food or clothes, so your situation is precarious. And nowhere to cook, so difficult to eat healthy meals. I highly doubt most homeless people have social status as a top concern.
Oh let me change that to being homeless in sunny CA with free shelter and food. Most homeless people in SF have completely free access to food anyway. Or how about if your kids worked as a poor waitresses for the rest of their lives but were happy? Obviously that’s what I mean right? No point in getting pedantic about specifics when I’m talking about status.
> I suppose one thing is that my kids are all girls, and I'm going to encourage them to be stay-at-home moms instead of chasing careerism,
That’s a pretty tame one. Not really going to lower your status. You got any sexual kinks? Perverted stuff you like to do in bed that you’d never admit? Do you have any slight interest in men that you’d never admit? Anybody in your family you hate and you think should die?
That’s the level of things I’m looking for. If you truly didn’t care about status you’d be able to admit it.
But if your your perfect ideally on every level I find that harder to believe unfortunately.
We can end the argument here. You won’t be able to prove your stance (event though I’m not even asking you for scientific data) and the science I presented is the highest level of evidence anyone on earth can offer in an argument anyway. It’s not going anywhere so I’m happy to end the argument here but if you want to continue I’m still down.
As a side note, status is even more important to women than men. Your own daughters will date based off of status and they will by nature generally hold status of themselves in higher regard than you. Men are less concerned with status (though still concerned) and are not in actuality concerned with status when selecting a mate as opposed to women where status is part of the main criteria. If you want to empathize with your daughters and women in general than understanding status is part of reality. But of course like you, ironically, being concerned about status, is signal for low status so often people are in denial or they lie about it.
I was calling the science garbage (i.e. denigrating the whole field), not what you wrote. And yeah if the methodology and data are garbage, there's no point in using it. It's like saying chatgpt 2.0 is the best we have, so we should use that. No, we should just say we don't have anything useful. And no, psychology did not get us to the moon. Actual science does not have the problems behavioral and social "sciences" have.
Physics is founded on spherical cows. Doesn't mean it's true. But sure I'll take extra money. I already said I'm working to accumulate more of that. So I can quit. But I wouldn't take $10M if it e.g. meant I had to be CEO of a F500 or something for 10 years. You literally could not pay me to have to do that job for a decade. And if you paid me $5M/year or something, I'd quit after 3 months and be happy.
I wouldn't want them to be homeless in San Francisco either because it's dirty and unsafe, and again I don't think it's a road to happiness. If they really enjoyed waitressing, whatever, but the thing is I think if you're truly happy with life, you'll probably want to form a family and share that happiness. And then something like waitressing is likely a distraction from that, just like software is for me.
I'm pretty sure "actually I don't want my girls to go into STEM and want them to be homemakers" is way more status damaging in the software world (when my first was born a colleague literally asked if I was going to teach her to be a programmer. Uhh, sure) than sexual proclivities of all things lol. But alas, I can't even say I'm into butt stuff.
I don't think I'd characterize being gay as an "imperfection" or something to be ashamed of?
But wanting someone (especially family?) to die is uh pretty hardcore. So no I can't say I've got anything like that for you. I honestly just never need to interact with people I don't like. It's pretty easy to choose your own social circle once you're an adult.
I'm not at all claiming I'm perfect (e.g. I could probably lose ~10 lbs of fat. I could always stand to have more muscle), and I realize it's in vogue to have mental health issues, but there's a reason being normal is... normal. I have to imagine most people don't really have anything to be ashamed of, and most adults grow out of whatever insecurities they may have once had.
Being the Grand OP I suppose I can jump in with some thoughts after reading and skimming the thread.
The teacher (Mr. R) was a math teacher. He lived in his bubble and my guess is he had no children, or no boys. I had excessive mental energy without a proper outlet or direction. I managed to change every Apple 'error' sound to an annoying rendition of his name (Mr.R) would ring out on every computer until it was corrected.
While I may have been smarter and more talented than him - I was not above him in any respect during school. He had more experience and grounding in life - of which he offered me zero.
In hindsight I wish he did the following, which is how I behave today with others; ask hard questions and give them direction to meet their goals.
I do not blame my parents for their inability to see I was in the top 2% of intelligence. I cannot blame the teacher really either. Each of us have potential to be wonderful at something. We need to learn what it is and have the ability to use our talent. I finally learned my talent despite my desire for status. I ignored status, adopted the idea that I need to to develop my talent, and it has now paid off dividends.
Being happy is actually very simple, just not easy. Do the things that make you happy.
>I do not blame my parents for their inability to see I was in the top 2% of intelligence.
Bro. Is this not status seeking? This statement is arrogant. But it could be true.
>I ignored status, adopted the idea that I need to to develop my talent, and it has now paid off dividends.
What sort of dividends? I bet you it's related to higher status.
>Being happy is actually very simple, just not easy. Do the things that make you happy.
In a way you're right. It's paradoxical because of the human drive for status. Gaining high status involves a lot of stress and activities that don't inherently make someone happy. It's a competitive world for a high status position.
Not competing is low stress and involves many behaviors that make you happy. But ironically while one part of you is happy, another part of you is unhappy because you are aware of your low status.
So people usually choose a middle ground. Everyone basically seeks status to some form or degree, it is fundamentally impossible to have this status seeking be absent. The person I'm talking with more likely meant that he... like many people ... compromised on status.
I would assume it is not true and yet I say I am 6'5" you believe me?
We could debate the idea of status, happiness, and motives although we would split ideas into atoms until there is nothing of substance to discuss.
I will answer your question: What sort of dividends - at one point I wanted a specific title, degree, job type until a discussion and decision I had one day that lead me to take a different approach. There are many exercises that determine your true motive. You are offered a job at 4x your income. No one will know your name and your work has no value outside of income. Would you take it? You are offered your dream job, title, schedule, etc at 50% of your current income. Would you take it? Once you find the combination of values in the equation you discover what makes you happy. Me: No stress. Work from home. Using my skills at least 50% of the time. Zero tracking of hours.
> That’s what all people say. Everyone who is status driven will not admit or even realize they are status driven. But the fact of the matter is… it is human nature to be status driven. Everyone recognizes status symbols and possesses such a drive within them. It is also clinically tied with serotonin levels and observed in cross species behavior. To say you have no drive for status is an either a lie or delusional. The evidence is so ingrained in science.
Isn't that just a kafkatrap?
Consider the following exchange where a sane man finds himself in a psychiatric ward:
John: I'm telling you, I'm sane. I don't have any delusions of grandeur and I don't think that I'm Jesus.
Evaluator: I see, your subconscious delusion and erroneous insistence upon sanity are more pervasive than I thought. Your repeated attempts to assert that you're not Jesus is clearly a defense mechanism. I'm afraid I cannot recommend your release.
Something went wrong here.
Or to rephrase: suppose that a person existed who was not status driven. Would you be able to detect such a person if they existed?
Change your example too John saying he doesn’t have experience the emotion of fear. He has never experienced such an emotion in his life.
The thing many people do not understand is how ingrained status seeking is in not just human biology… but biology altogether. Even the lobster has serotonin and is status seeking. It is also in built into our society. Practically every facet of every culture across time has status seeking imprinted into it. Among academia and people who study the biology and behavior it’s unequivocal that people are status seeking.
Basically to help you understand where I’m coming from it’s like this guy is claiming he’s never felt jealous before. “I’ve never cared that someone has more than me or covetted what another man has. It’s just illogical! I’m baffled that other humans act so illogically”.
It’s like that. It’s fake and it’s posing a bit. A lot of HNers like to position themselves as super intelligent people who are incapable of being status seeking or jealous or even feeling scared because it’s “illogical”
Ironically builtin smartphone calculators are really bad, and one of the best ones you can download might be Graph 89 (a TI-89 emulator).
Rant/Aside: Smartphones (or at least Android) are just generally really bad at being... smart, especially out of the box. No dictionary? No thesaurus? To say nothing of built-in encyclopedia (e.g. Wikipedia). Calculator worse than the $1 scientific ones? It's astounding how obvious it is that they're meant to dumb people down and just sell you crap when you look at the complete absence of basic functionality anyone from 50+ years ago might expect them to have.
My linear algebra class used F_2 as our field probably half the time that it was specified. Realistically almost any course probably doesn't need calculators at all (or they could at least be kept for homework). If you're not teaching arithmetic, you keep the arithmetic simple. If you're not teaching algebra, you keep the algebra simple. etc.
Your comment's framing makes no sense to me. My wife pushed for me to go into engineering instead of academia so she could stay home and we could be comfortable. We're married. We have kids. The entire point is we're not independent. That's what married literally means. Unioned. Joined. There is no her and me. There is us.
Why would you need or even want to be independent? Why would you plan to form a family while keeping your options open/having one foot out the door?
Plenty of women (and men) end up in relationships they hate, and if they have no independence they are pretty much fucked. They have no way to escape. Women having options makes a huge difference.
What you are describing is pretty much ideal for a lot of people, but it's not what everybody gets.
How does this happen though? It's not like you wake up one day, look around and see you've started life in the middle, you're married and have kids, and you hate your spouse. Did your spouse have a stroke and undergo some massive personality change or something?
Assuming you want a family, your very top priority when evaluating someone for dating from the very beginning should be whether that person would make a good spouse and help you to form that family. Otherwise what are you even doing? Someone who can't commit is its own red flag for that purpose. If you have kids, that's it. You're in it. You need to be committed.
And having a job doesn't mean you're independent of your spouse anyway. If one of us died or we split, it'd be absolutely devastating to our family regardless of the money (e.g. if life insurance/social security covered everything). I would be hugely screwed trying to raise the kids without her, job notwithstanding.
I think the simple fact of the matter is that most people have absolutely no clue what they’re doing when it comes to relationships, and think their social media hot takes are indicative of what they ought to want.
This is on top of societal pressures. In more liberal parts of the US (and the world) it's accepted that you will take your time finding a partner, or even stay single if you want. In more conservative societies the expectation that you will marry young and start popping out kids is intense.
I think it goes both ways. I moved from a liberal to a conservative area. Maybe there are people shaming those who don't pop out kids, but more so I I've noticed it's that they're not shamed if they want to just let loose to their instincts and get impregnated as an 18-year-old and yield to their natural desires and interests. In a liberal city a 18 year old popping out a kid and is often viewed as a pariah.
I mean people do not naturally grow up wanting to stare at a desk/PC all day deciding to become a scientist or a doctor and study a bunch of shit that his almost no relation to what humans were adapted for for millions of years. Our evolutionary programming was to bang, have kids, and roam the jungle and grab the resources and satisfy our short brutish lives.
Now the fact that something is evolutionarily natural or historically normal doesn't mean it is good or right. But just letting loose on that particular natural instinct tends to be more accepted in conservative societies while in the city or liberal areas teenage (past age of consent) pregnancy is seen maybe more of something they will shame you for. You're supposed to do a pretty unnatural thing of staring at books until you're 22 or 26 and then stare at a computer screen so you can get a good job to pay a gazillion dollars for childcare delivered by minimum wage workers. You're supposed to take your time and maybe about the time your biological clock has run out, you pay $20,000 for IVF and you do a speedrun.
So which is a greater imposition of societal pressure? I won't claim conservative societies don't exhibit more social pressure than liberal ones. But on this point, it's not clear to me the conservative one is doing the greater of the pressuring.
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