I had not heard of Captain Schratz until now, but what I did find of him [0] makes me think that he may have had it out for Rickover:
> During [the 1960s], Schratz believed, he lost his opportunity for major command because he published a facetious story in 1963 about Vice Admiral H. G. Rickover's burial plans.
Furthermore, he either is unaware of, or elides parts of stories that would refute his implications:
> Having achieved brilliant success with the pressurized water coolant system in the Nautilus installation, innovation in other types of plants was stifled. The USS Seawolf plant, developed in tandem with Nautilus, utilized liquid sodium as coolant, promising much smaller and more compact reactors. Because of limitations in metallurgy, the system was unsuccessful. The program was scrapped, and its obvious superiorities were never again reexamined, even after twenty years of further progress in nuclear technology.
The S2G reactor used in the Seawolf (SSN-575, not SSN-21) was, to quote Rickover, “expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.” First of all, you're running liquid sodium as a coolant; famously, sodium and water are not friends. Second of all, this choice now puts a hard limit on the time you have at sea to be shutdown for emergent repairs, maintenance, etc., because if the plant temperature drops below (or even near, realistically) the melting point of sodium (admittedly fairly low, at ~98 C), you're now stuck.
So I think it's less that the "obvious superiorities" were left alone due to fear of Rickover's wrath, and more because no one wants a cantankerous and potentially explosive reactor in the middle of the boat they're operating.
Similarly:
> When nuclear power was adapted to surface use for large combatants such as aircraft carriers and missile cruisers, new systems apparently were not examined. For instance, a smaller and more efficient combination of nuclear power for normal cruising plus an overdrive of conventional gas turbine plants for high speed use had been proposed but was not investigated further.
The Enterprise (CVN-65), the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was fast. Really fast. During initial sea trials, she outran her escort [1], which had a listed top speed of 34 knots. And she can maintain that effectively indefinitely. I see no reason why other proposals _should_ be investigated.
But it's this line that really paints the picture:
> The cult of personality and the dominance of the Rickover program tended increasingly to isolate the nuclear Navy officers from the real Navy.
"the real Navy." And there we have it. A bitter officer, angry that he was passed over at even a chance for nuclear command, lashing out at the fact that the organization's newest shiny toys got all the attention.
It was and I'm sure remains a common complaint while I was in that nukes stay in their own world, that they don't participate in general work like stores loads (which is bullshit; I definitely did my share of them), etc. Our retort was always "I'll trade my $5/day propay for your schedule," and no one ever took us up on it (propay is the method by which the Navy gives additional pay for certain jobs; all nuclear trained personnel get $150/month extra, with qualified supervisors getting $450/month extra – also, there are non-nuclear personnel who receive more, like the Assistant Navigator).
During my time at Electric Boat while my boat was being built, I was frequently in shift work. Navy nuclear shift work is ostensibly 8 hours, with 3 shifts, but by the time you factor in pre-shift training, pre-shift brief, shift handover, post-shift cleanup, and any other administrative actions deemed necessary, it's about 12 hours. 12 hours a day (or night, more accurately – I was on the midshift), 7 days a week, for months. Zero days off. The non-nuclear personnel, in contrast, were not in shift work, and since all of their equipment didn't exist yet, their job mostly consisted of showing up to the building we had assigned, puttering around for a few hours, and calling it a day. And yet, their leadership would harangue us during the brief time we spent passing each other for petty details like boots not being shined, uniform being wrinkled, etc. So yes, nukes generally develop a hatred of non-nukes, while the non-nukes often regard nukes as being elitists.
> Nuclear enlisted men never stand nonengineering watches, rarely if ever help load stores and weapons, never have mess-cook duty. As a result, second-class petty officers from the "front end" pull mess-cook duty, serving nuclear-trained third class from the engineering department.
Not only do we not stand non-engineering watches, if we try to qualify for them, we're told no, because "it would demoralize the other watchstanders," quoth a non-nuke Chief to my buddy when he went for the final checkouts on a non-nuke watch station. Apparently demonstrating that someone's job is actually incredibly easy, and they're just not that great at it is mean.
We absolutely load stores; see previous comment. We absolutely do not load weapons, but then again, nor does anyone else who isn't in the weapons department. This is an absurd strawman. Finally, while I'm sure it depends on the command, on my boat, nukes had to crank (mess duty). Joke's on the crew, though; we viewed it as a vacation. You mean all I have to do is wash dishes and listen to music, or serve food a few times a day? Sign me up! Also, at least on submarines, rank doesn't really matter. Generally, E1-E6 can all talk shit to each other, and if you're good at your job, you can talk shit to O1-O3 and get away with it, maybe at most getting a reprimand from the Engineering Officer (who is an O4). In fact, even the nukes would be delighted when we got a JSI (Junior Staff Instructor; some students who graduate the final part of training are extended an offer to stay for 2 years as a sort of initial shore duty, and as part of this, they frequently manage to hit E-6 by the time they're at their first command) who was too big for their britches. I distinctly remember a fully qualified E-2 A-Ganger (auxiliary mechanic, non-nuclear) yelling at our brand new non-qualified E-6 to stop reading a book and qualify something so he'd be useful. The guy tried pulling the "you can't talk to me like that..." card, which was immediately shot down by everyone around him, including the nukes. Your ability, which is formalized in your qualifications, is the only thing that matters.
I'm not denying that Rickover was abrasive, nor that he had little to no regard for the chain of command, Naval tradition, etc. Nor am I saying he didn't have his ethical problems – he absolutely did, especially near the end of his career. However, IMO he had good reason for his beliefs, he created a legacy that still stands, and he advanced the USN into the 21st century.
What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap.
Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousands of flags. The whole code is ridden with mysterious macros that one cannot decipher without picking a notebook and expanding relevant pats of the macros by hand. It can take a day to two days to really understand what a macro does.
Sometimes one needs to understand the values and the effects of 20 different flag to predict how the code would behave in different situations. Sometimes 100s too! I am not exaggerating.
The only reason why this product is still surviving and still works is due to literally millions of tests!
Here is how the life of an Oracle Database developer is:
- Start working on a new bug.
- Spend two weeks trying to understand the 20 different flags that interact in mysterious ways to cause this bag.
- Add one more flag to handle the new special scenario. Add a few more lines of code that checks this flag and works around the problematic situation and avoids the bug.
- Submit the changes to a test farm consisting of about 100 to 200 servers that would compile the code, build a new Oracle DB, and run the millions of tests in a distributed fashion.
- Go home. Come the next day and work on something else. The tests can take 20 hours to 30 hours to complete.
- Go home. Come the next day and check your farm test results. On a good day, there would be about 100 failing tests. On a bad day, there would be about 1000 failing tests. Pick some of these tests randomly and try to understand what went wrong with your assumptions. Maybe there are some 10 more flags to consider to truly understand the nature of the bug.
- Add a few more flags in an attempt to fix the issue. Submit the changes again for testing. Wait another 20 to 30 hours.
- Rinse and repeat for another two weeks until you get the mysterious incantation of the combination of flags right.
- Finally one fine day you would succeed with 0 tests failing.
- Add a hundred more tests for your new change to ensure that the next developer who has the misfortune of touching this new piece of code never ends up breaking your fix.
- Submit the work for one final round of testing. Then submit it for review. The review itself may take another 2 weeks to 2 months. So now move on to the next bug to work on.
- After 2 weeks to 2 months, when everything is complete, the code would be finally merged into the main branch.
The above is a non-exaggerated description of the life of a programmer in Oracle fixing a bug. Now imagine what horror it is going to be to develop a new feature. It takes 6 months to a year (sometimes two years!) to develop a single small feature (say something like adding a new mode of authentication like support for AD authentication).
The fact that this product even works is nothing short of a miracle!
I don't work for Oracle anymore. Will never work for Oracle again!
Ha, that's nothin'. The ancient Egyptians used a 365 day calendar (with no leap years) so it drifted by .25 days every year. So after 730 years it's essentially backwards (summer solstice is when winter solstice used to be etc.). After that, it starts coming back into alignment again but takes another 730 years to get there. They used their calendar for so long that it nearly had time to roll over like this twice!
When you lay down to sleep, as your consciousness loses sync between limbic system and visual cortex, the Outer Dark hisses into your temporal gyrus: vast and precise architectures of obscenity, a choir of horrified mothers giving birth to dreadful machines. It is then that you know: every measure of human atrocity pales in comparison to the stupendous cruelty of the cosmos and its capacity for sin and murder.
That's where a lot of people usually hear about Jira, but it's going to depend on your org.
1. Create fake url endpoint. And go to that endpoint in the adversary's website, when your server gets request, flag the ip. Do this nonstop with a script.
2. Create fake html elements and put unique strings inside. And you can search that string in search engines for finding similar fake sites on different domains.
3. Create fake html element and put all request details in encrypted format. Visit adversary's website and look for that element and flag that ip OR flag the headers.
4. Buy proxy databases, and when any user requests your webpage, check if its a proxy.
5. Instead of banning them, return fake content (fake titles and fake images etc) if proxy is detected OR the ip is flagged.
6. Don't ban the flagged ip's. She/He's gonna find another one. Make them angry and their user's angry so they give up on you.
7. Maybe write some bad words to the user on random places in the HTML when you detect flagged ip's :D So the user's will leave the site and this will reduce the SEO point of the adversary. Will be downranked.
8. Enable image hotlinking protection. Increase the cost of proxying for them.
9. Use @document CSS to hide the stuff when the URL is different.
10. Send abuse mail request to the hosting site.
11. Send abuse mail request to the domain provider.
12. Look for the flagged IPs and try to find the proxy provider. If you find, send mail to them too.
Edit: More ideas sparkled in my mind when I was in toilet:
1. Create fake big css files (10MB etc). And repeatedly download that from the adversary's website. This should cost them too much money on proxies.
2. When you detect proxy, return too big fake HTML files (10GB) etc. That could crash their server if they load the HTML into the memory when parsing.
It's really weird isn't it, how at some point Musk became the new focus of Two Minutes of Hate[1]?
Sure, there are plenty of valid and harsh criticisms to make about Musk. I'm sure he'd even agree with a lot of them. But the level of obsession people have with hating him is clearly irrational. There's more anti-Musk sentiment than anti-Putin sentiment!
It's as if people were left feeling empty by Trump's disappearance and then latched onto Musk as the new target for their manic vitriol.
It may be that once these people have become accustomed to hating a public figure in this way that they have trouble letting go of the addiction.
It seems a lot like what happened in ancient Athens when one public figure after another would become the target of a citizen mob and then be banished[2] or executed[3]. It also seemed like an addiction in their case.
Usually the mob would quickly come to regret their decision, which is likely what would happen if Musk went away. Many of these same people would come to realize the value of having Musk around, despite his flaws, to advance space exploration, pro-environment technology, brain injury technology, etc.
This relates to the ebay penalty. I think one of SEland's founders actually left to take a job at Google as an evangelist. You can probably search for "ebay seo penalty" and find more references. Other notable penalties that were well documented include RapGenius and GV backed Thumbtack and Nest, which quickly had their penalties reversed if I recall correctly.
https://seobook.com/blog is the only place I follow any more, since it is more critical of the digital marketing ecosystem. There are so many snake oil salespeople and clueless marketers, so this is a refreshing commentary.
This mini-thread accidentally explains why the West don't, won't, and can't care about Azerbaijan/Armenia violence: it's fucking incomprehensible. Tribes killing each other for generations, for complicated reasons that no one without a relevant PhD will understand. It seems intractable, so we throw up our hands and focus elsewhere, somewhere with a simpler narrative.
Everyone gets uptight about the word "uncivilized," but this kind of generational tribal conflict _is_ a failure of civilization. I don't know what causes civilization (it sure ain't skin tone), but without clear villain/victim narratives, and heroes to root for (brave Ukrainians fighting for their own liberation), no one will care. And that's tragic, too, but it's not a commentary on the underlying tragedy of human suffering and death, that people in every nation hurt the same.
I made a roadside pilgrimage to the Woody Creek Tavern on a motorcycle trip across the US just a few years ago. Not a Thompson scholar if such a thing could exist, but certainly a fan. My impression was he realized that if you had a puppet, you could get away with saying anything you wanted, and Raoul was his puppet. Journalism was constrained by the bourgois consensus of sources and fact checking, and fiction was limited like an official court jester by the pretense that it wasn't true, especially when it was. Gonzo was the hybrid freak that used puppets and misdirection to tell you the truth like you had never heard it before. "Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death."
I miss two people in the world today, Christopher Hitchens, and Hunter S. Thompson.
I don't think we would be on Mars. The hard part isn't getting there, it's creating a sustainable semi-independent habitat that will get you there and keep you alive there between resupply runs.
This is not a "Oh, we'll just deal with that when we need to" problem. It's absolutely critical for long-term missions. And there's been shockingly little research done on it.
The ISS is trivial in comparison because you can send up stuff and take stuff down almost instantly with relative ease. Mars is seven months away. So your mission has to be self-sustaining for at least that long. And it's going to need a steady stream of resupply runs - with a seventh month lead time if have an accident or start running out of stuff.
And all of that - for what? Mars is not a pleasant or easy environment. Aside from unpleasant, difficult, and hostile living space it has no obvious resources.
"Because we can" is a good enough reason for an initial exploration, but it's not a sustainable project without a long-term goal.
Humans are in fact, really good at playing god over long periods of time.
You can look at any metric of human wellbeing over the past 1000 years and the results are dramatic.
Take child mortality for example. In the 18th century, the average family suffered the deaths of 3-4 of their children before they reached adulthood.
Then, from 1800 to 1950, global childhood mortality dropped from 43% to 22%.
Accelerating further, from 1950 to 2015, global child mortality dropped again by nearly 5X to just 4.5%. And it's still going down. [1]
The reasons for this are numerous. Reductions in famine through agriculture, beating disease with medicine, reducing War through economic interdependency, expanding education and access to information through digital technology, etc. While we make mistakes in the short term , in the long term, we tend to get stuff right.
The problem is, we're also really good at getting distracted by bad news stories while missing the big picture. And we LOVE the idea of humans being the cause of the end of the world for some reason. It's the basis of most of our religions.
Of course, the arc of progress is paved with setbacks. But before getting pessimistic and cynical because you read some bad news stories, it pays to zoom out a little.
If you live in a country with a highly functional banking system and no kleptocracy, Bitcoin is probably a bit puzzling unless you have family in Cuba. But it's not puzzling at all for those of us who live somewhere in the middle of the broad spectrum between Switzerland and Somalia, because most places have a little kleptocracy. Argentina is far from being "a failed state," but if you want to send US$500 abroad via non-Bitcoin means it's basically impossible, and the only broadly available savings vehicle is real estate ("ahorrar en ladrillos"), which of course grossly inflates real-estate prices, with a substantial part of the capital city occupied by empty apartments someone bought "as an investment". Historically Argentines have saved by buying dollars but that's limited to US$200 a month now, and then only if you have a non-under-the-table job (about a third of total employment is under the table):
You can see that in September 02019 when this measure was imposed the price of a dollar was AR$63.50; now it's AR$147. So whatever savings you had in pesos in 02019 have lost 57% of their value to peso devaluation.
In 02001 a lot of Argentines had saved dollars in their dollar-denominated bank accounts. This did not preserve their savings through the financial crisis that year; the cash-strapped government limited withdrawals to a trickle, then converted dollar deposits to pesos at a one-to-one rate, then released the exchange-rate peg, at which point peso went overnight from being worth US$1 to being worth US$0.25 before settling at about US$0.31 for the next few years.
You suggest, "alternatives to banks like credit unions where customers—as owners—hold more power," but Credicoop depositors suffered the same two-thirds confiscation of savings as depositors in for-profit banks. And they pay the same 3% tax on bank transactions including checks. That's more than a fast Bitcoin transaction fee of US$15 for transactions over US$500.
But we're not a failed state. There are no gangs of bandits roving the streets in Argentine cities (though there are some pretty bad slums where you'll get robbed if you wander in without knowing anybody). Courts, free public hospitals, and roads continue to function, though there are more potholes than a year ago. Argentine infant mortality is 10 per 1000 live births, down from almost 20 in the late 01990s and the same as the late 01980s in the US; life expectancy at birth is 77 years, worse than Switzerland's 84, but the same as China and Hungary, and better than Saudi or Mexico. (Somalia is 54.)
Most of the world is worse off than Argentina, although not necessarily in such a statistically transparent fashion. About one fourth of the people in the world are unbanked, 51% here in Argentina; even advanced countries like Russia, Hungary, and Uruguay have roughly a quarter of the population unbanked:
And if your family lives in a country like Iran or Venezuela subject to US sanctions, and you live in the US? Good luck sending them an ACH, instant or otherwise! It's well known that Bitcoin is very popular in Venezuela, which kind of is a failed state, so one of the Venezuelan governments is trying to tax Bitcoin remittances at 15%.
Bitcoin handles a few billion dollars per year in such remittances. This might seem like a trivial amount of money to someone in a rich country, but in poor countries, it's enough to keep several million people alive.
Even in the US, it's common for the police to confiscate large amounts of paper currency just because they can ("civil forfeiture"); US bank accounts are probably fine for US$100K but probably somewhat risky for US$10M if the bank thinks you don't seem like the kind of person who ought to have it. US$10M in US$100 bills fits in a box you can wheel around on a dolly, but Bitcoin is a lot more practical. (And of course US$10M in dollar bills loses about US$200k per year to inflation.)
So, Bitcoin doesn't have to be a cypherpunk utopia to be a big improvement on the status quo ante. For those of you living in stable countries where your worries are things like "instant and extremely low-fee ACHs" and "decentralized utopia", this may be very confusing, but try to remember that most of the world lives in places with much more pressing concerns, concerns that Bitcoin helps a lot with. And you may live there too, soon — the loyal subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm in 01913 certainly didn't expect that in 15 years they'd be in the middle of a hyperinflation episode that remains legendary a century later.
It's actually a reallllly bizarre case. What seems to have happened is:
First, Texaco and Gulf oil started to develop the Lagro Agrio fields in 1964. In 1972 they started production. In 1974, the Ecuadorian government obtained a 25% share of the venture; Gulf sold their share in 1976 to Ecuador, giving them a majority ownership, although Texaco did the actual drilling. In 1992, Texaco's concession ended, and the entire project was left in the hands of Ecuador and their state-owned oil company. They are continuing drilling to this day. This much seems to be established fact.
What's also uncontested is that starting in the 80s, Texaco did some cleanup. Texaco and their successors claim they did a great job, or at any rate, they did the legally mandated amount. Certainly the Ecuadorian government certified that Texaco had met its obligations in 1998. And certainly evidence has turned up showing a lot of damage and incomplete remediation since then. The environment down there is pretty fsked. There is significant debate over who exactly cleaned up what, but the broad outlines (Texaco did some cleanup, the government said it was good enough, and it's still pretty shitty) seems clear.
What's also fairly clear is that in 1993 (after Texaco stopped drilling, but before the cleanup was officially done), they got sued by local residents. The court cases dragged on for a long time, eventually yielding an enormous verdict in 2011. (US$9.5 billion.) How fair that verdict is remains disputed, but it clearly happened.
(Note, incidentally, that in 2001, so well after the cleanup was done, but well before the verdict was reached, Chevron bought Texaco, assuming their assets and liabilities. It doesn't seem disputed that Chevron is fully responsible for whatever Texaco did or did not do, but it does help explain why some stories and historical documents talk about Texaco, but new stories invariably reference Chevron.)
Now things get a bit weird. In a fascinating turn of events, it seems that the lawyers representing the local residents (specifically, Steven Donziger) have been engaging in fraud and bribery. Turns out they had a sympathetic documentary crew following them around, and apparently were bragging about doing illegal things in front of the crew, assuming they would keep it under wraps. Somehow Chevron found out about it, subpoenaed the film crew, got the raw footage, and got some US courts (and the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague) to declare the entire Ecuadorian judgement to be a scam. And there's some pretty suspicious film evidence, plus Chevron got some witnesses to testify that the plaintiff attorneys bribed them. The story is wild; blackmailed judges, bribes, corruption, ghost written reports, just an absurd perversion of justice, and Donziger has been disbarred.
However, uh, obviously there's a lot of money at stake, and it's also been alleged that Chevron bribed the witnesses to say that the plaintiffs bribed them. Some think they evidence is not as one sided as it looks; it's been suggested that Donziger was railroaded. The whole thing is just a huge mess. As near as I can tell:
1. The Ecuadorean government did say that Texaco was off the hook, but they could have been mistaken (or pressured/bribed to say that). Whether this means they deserve a do over, I can't say.
2. Ecuador is responsible for a lot of the cleanup (joint venture, majority owned by Ecuador, remember?), and it seems clear that a lot of the cleanup, probably including at least some of Ecuador's, has not been done. And it does look like they may have seen a chance to stick Chevron with a bill for the cleanup they opted not to do, which does seem unfair.
3. Being sovereign means you get to do unfair things though. If Ecuadorean law says they can ignore the release and stick Chevron with a bill for the entire cleanup, I guess it says they can do that.
4. Being sovereign doesn't mean you can enforce those unfair things though. Texaco already packed up and left. Whatever is fair or legal, the time to get money out of them was THEN, when they had assets and people in the country. Now they're sending a bill to a company that moved out over 20 years ago. Other than generosity, they're not likely to see a penno of that money back unless they can convince another court to enforce it.
5. Annnnd they haven't managed that. Rightly or wrongly, courts outside of Ecuador have all decided Chevron was in the right. And given that Ecuador and Chevron both do something like $100b/year in revenue/GDP, they're both large, powerful players. Hard to feel enormously sympathetic to either, especially since both seem to be playing at least a bit dirty.
6. But of course, no matter what, this is still a tragedy. The two competing theories seem to be that A) Texaco skipped out on cleaning up their share of the mess, leaving the local people in the lurch B) Texaco cleaned up their share, but Ecuador skipped out on cleaning up their own share, leaving the local people in the lurch. Nobody seems to disagree that they got screwed over; it's just a fight about who is responsible. And even if their lawyer did commit fraud and bribery, that doesn't negate their right to not live in a toxic dump. If they end up losing their fight because of that, that just adds someone else who victimised them to the list.
Weird, weird story.
Sources: Eh, google it? Wikipedia has a good roundup, but a TON has been written about the case. There's just SO much. And most of it conflicting or disputed. I don't know of any one roundup that really covers it.
This is why I always gravitate towards software projects that are centered around making money (within ethical bounds, of course). The closer to the bottom line my code is, the larger the sales and support team is around my code, and the more customers there are (real paying customers, not internal employees who like to be called customers) using my code, the better.
It may sound overly hard-nosed and cynical to some people, but I find it's just the opposite. The drive to make more money is the only thing that trumps every other petty motivation people follow at work. It trumps favoritism, empire building, and intra-office rivalries. It trumps good ol' boys networks and tech bro networks. Money brings people into the same room who would never normally be in a room together, and they do it willingly. It forces people in power to listen to small fries. While money corrupts on an individual level, it purifies on an institutional level. Its universally accepted value allows a variety of individual motives to flourish.
This seems to change once a company goes public and hits a certain size, as the flow of money becomes less and less tied to actual sales and consumer behavior and more and more based on financial engineering and stock price.
I have never read/heard that saying but reading it this evening made me smile. Thank you for sharing. Reminds me of my own favorite: "you are a ghost driving a meat covered skeleton made of stardust travelling on a rock through outer space.
Covid doesn't seem to be different that the flu in this regard. Any disease that has a fever component will leave some with long lasting problems. Any disease that infects the lungs will do the same. There has been nothing indicating that covid is unique in this regard.
For example, here's a paper going over heart inflamation and the flu, going over data gathered in the last 100 years [0].
> During the Sheffield, England influenza epidemic from 1972 to 1973, the cases of 50 consecutive patients who were initially diagnosed as mild cases and were treated on an outpatient basis were followed. Transient electrocardiogram (ECG) changes were seen in 18 patients, and long-lasting changes were seen in 5 patients.
I wrote something similar for Quora some years ago. Since Quora links seem to be a faux pas on HN, I'll paste it here in its entirety:
-----
What is it like to work on the development team for a porn site?
I was the Chief Technology Officer of Kink.com 2006-2007.
I will say in advance that every company is different and my experience will not necessarily resemble the experience you will have at another company (or even Kink today). There's more variation among companies than among industries. Still, here are my observations:
* There's a lot of really awful technology in the porn business. It's the content that sells, not the technology. You'll be amazed by how many thriving businesses are "my first PHP project".[1] When I arrived at Kink, the core infrastructure was essentially a system that processed credit cards and inserted a username/password into an apache dbm file. No CRM, not even any idea if bob123 on one site is the same person as bob123 on another site. Most porn sites start like this, so expect to deal with a lot of legacy code.
* Third-party tools and services generally suck. The really great payment systems like Stripe and WePay won't touch adult content, so you're left with third-tier processors who can barely keep their sites online. A disproportionate amount of your concentration will focus on reliable (and redundant) billing, because your provider may suddenly decide to exit the industry with almost no warning. Some variation of this same problem exists for most of the cloud services you commonly take for granted - CDNs, email delivery, support desk, etc. It has gotten somewhat better over the last seven years, but you will often feel hobbled compared to developing "normal" software.[2]
* It is hard to hire good people - yeah, even harder than it is for normal development jobs. This surprised me. I have a large and talented social circle to draw from, but a couple key individuals rebuffed my intense lobbying. These are progressive, sex-positive Bay Area folk who would have loved to come work with me, but couldn't accept the inevitable explanation to their mother-in-law what they did for a living. Some of my team hid their employer from their extended families.
* The salary is good, but there is no other long-term upside. Adult companies don't go public, and the few that broke this rule have been fiascos. You won't get stock options, and even if you did you couldn't sell them. Unless you're a founder and getting a direct share of the profit, negotiate hard for cash.
* If you're in a production house like Kink, technology is not at the top of the totem pole. My department was 10 people out of a 100-person company and remember, it's the content bringing in the customers. Combined with the pay differential between production staff vs technology staff, it can produce ugly politics. At one point the head of production got a list of all the salaries in the company and exploded at me. I had to patiently explain to her that we pay six-figure salaries because that's what you have to pay to get technology employees, and we still had unfilled job openings. I'm sure there are politics at department head level at all big companies, but the cultural gap between unrelated fields didn't help.[3]
* Speaking of a 100-person production shop, a significant part of your responsibility is to support internal users. It's not nearly as glamorous or fun as building customer-facing software, especially when you start with a rotting pile of hastily-developed internal tools. But this is just as important for keeping the porn flowing as managing the data center. On the other hand, internal users would have your entire team perpetually building software for them and the paying customers wouldn't get any new features. Marketing has an agenda too. It's a balancing act very different from life in a startup where all you do every day is add features to your product.
That probably sounds more grim than it was. There were some fantastic things:
* Building software that millions of users around the world actually use. Gigabits of traffic, zillions of hits per day. It wasn't Google traffic, but it was a hell of a lot more interesting than business apps or yet another game that EA was going to cancel on me. If you work in the porn biz, you will almost certainly get enough real users to feel like someone cares.
* Working with fun, creative people. The set builders and directors were making art cars and art flicks in their spare time. Kink was a very hair-down kind of place - it was actually fun to go into the office. To me it felt like a big family - sometimes warm, sometimes squabbling, always chaotic.
* Office parties... oh, the office parties. Friday after work was happy hour for employees and friends of employees in the Bar Set, which conveniently was also a fully stocked bar. Guest listing was coveted and most nights ended in the massive Hot Tub Set on the roof of the building. I met a lot of great people at these parties, including my wife. I'm not saying this will happen at every porn company (it doesn't even happen at Kink anymore), but it's hard to imagine it happening at nonporn companies.
* I loved the moment when you meet people at cocktail parties and they inevitably ask you what you do for a living. "Pornographer."
In case you are wondering:
* Yes, porn gets boring. The novelty of looking at your coworkers naked wears off fast.
* Most pornstars are pretty much just like everyone else out of costume. For some it is a hobby/thrill and a convenient source of extra spending money (maybe $1-2k for a day). Most have what I would call a healthy attitude about pornography and BDSM, but there are a handful of damaged ones.
* If you're considering working in porn, the main question I would ask is: Would you be embarrassed to put it on your resume? Some people are very self conscious, worried what future employers might think. IMHO those concerns are overblown. If you can "own it", don't be afraid of the industry. That said... there are definitely some awful companies in the industry (as there are everywhere) so do your due diligence.
[1] This is not criticism. The hard problems in porn are 1) marketing content and 2) producing content. If you solve those two problems, you have a thriving business no matter what your technology stack looks like. #1 is way more complicated than you imagine.
[2] In 2006 there was one CDN which would handle porn - Limelight Networks - and they were getting sued by Akamai over patents. It cost $30/Mbit (95th percentile) at volume. Now you have your pick of dozens, at rates a small fraction of that. This chart is what allowed the explosion of tube sites: http://drpeering.net/AskDrPeering/blog/articles/Ask_DrPeerin...
[3] It's also possible that Type A personalities naturally rise to the top of a BDSM company.
I call Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
The problem was that German politicians were extremely desperate for at least one large-scale German "new tech business" success story, and Wirecard seemed to be the only candidate that on the face of it appeared to fit the bill. That blinded them to the obvious and made them see an anglo-saxon conspiracy to keep German tech down behind every reasonable story about Wirecard.
In my opinion, it shows the dangers when national protectionism and picking winners intrudes in the supposedly neutral business of regulating critical businesses.
Capital gains is 20% federal plus state (13% in California). Germany’s capital gains rate is 30.5%, lower than California and New York. Regardless, there is just not enough capital gains income for that to matter. For example, Biden’s plan to tax capital gains as ordinary income for taxpayers making over $1 million per year is expected to bring in less than $50 billion a year in revenues. Eliminating the capital gains preference entirely would raise only $130 billion annually.
As to the “very wealthy”—Tim Cook’s tax rate on his $135 million bonus a few years ago was 52%. The people you’re talking about aren’t even ordinary wealthy people: CEOs, movie stars, and the like. What you’re talking about the Warren Buffets of the world that make money through investments. But there’s just not very many of those people. The IMF estimates the global cost of individual tax avoidance at $200 billion per year: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/09/tackling-.... Say half that is attributable to the US. That’s about the same as the cost of the deductions for mortgage interest and local property taxes.
Federal, state, and local governments tax more than $5 trillion annually. One party is proposing new spending amounting to several trillion more annually. In the face of those numbers, talking about $50 billion or $100 billion issues with respect to the taxation of the very wealthy is indeed empty rhetoric. You hear a lot of talk about billionaires this and billionaires that. The total income of all billionaires in the US is $130 billion, or about 1% of all income. It just doesn’t matter very much what the tax rate is on people who comprise only 1% of the tax base. Spending 90% of your time talking about tax issues that could fund at most 10% of your proposed new spending is empty rhetoric. Meanwhile, German levels of taxation on the middle class, and a German-style VAT would raise trillions annually. Guess why nobody talks about that.
Here's a hot take from a polyglot who does a fair bit of professional work in Go:
Go is a low-blub language whose advocates are proud of the fact that they never made it past 200-level CS courses. It's the computing equivalent of the blue-collar anti-intellectualism that is rampant in politics these days.
Yes, Go the language is simple - it pushes complexity off to your programs instead! Instead of functional expressions, Go programs are pages and pages of iterative loops and variable manipulation. Without generics, you can't use even the most basic functional constructs like map and reduce. The most boring mainstream languages like Java and Javascript are adopting functional paradigms, whereas Go is actively hostile to functional programming.
Nothing is more tiresome than the continuous prattle about exceptions. "How can you possibly write code that is robust in the presence of errors when you don’t know which statements could throw an exception?" Easily. That's the great thing about exceptions, you don't need to know about them to write robust code.
In general business processing, an exception thrown across a transaction boundary rolls back the transaction. In most cases that's pretty much all you need to know. In the case where you need to explicitly rollback a state change (extraordinarily rare in business processing), you add a try/catch/throw, and you don't even need to look at the exception!
The fact is, 99% of programs need only one exception handler. In webapps, it's the http processor that returns a 500 error. In GUI apps, it's the main execution loop that shows an error dialog.
Go's error handling not only requires endless tedious "if err != nil return err", but each one of those statements destroys stack information. Folks like to berate Java for long stacktraces, but those stack frames are valuable for debugging. By comparison, Go's errors are an opaque bit of text. Third-party libraries can help by wrapping errors in other errors (hand-building stacktraces), but this won't help you when using third-party libraries that don't use these wrappers.
I'll say something positive about Go, and why I still use it: It's a better C. For low-level-ish code that needs performance and fast startup time (CLIs, simple GAE services that scale to 0 and need immediate startup), Go fits the bill. Having concurrency built into the language is nice, although most other common languages have equivalent facilities in their libraries.
But as a language to take over the world: Not a chance.
A genie grants you one wish; <poof> Facebook has been replaced with a decentralized social network based on open protocols.
To your horror, your friends _still_ install insipid quiz apps and grant them permission to all of "your" data. And now there is nothing to stop it and no one to blame.
From a systems perspective, the fact that the medium is currently named Facebook is irrelevant. The primary actors in the Cambridge Analytica Scandal are your friends. You can remove Facebook and the same narrative remains - you shared data with your friends, and they shared it with someone you don't like.
I talked to the Data scientists at Cambridge Analytica before and after the scandal, including in-depth on the technical details. Couple of things that they told me that change a bit the interpretation you can have of the scandal:
- There was a moat between the operations/sales team (Alex Nix, Brittany Kaiser, etc.), the people you see on most documentaries and the technical team (Alex Taylor, etc.): Sales would say anything to convince buyers (campaigns) and had no idea how the technology works. You can take any sentences uttered by them and quote it to the data scientists, their reaction would be… bow, shake their head, “Yeah, not, that’s… not it.” Probably the worst case of over-selling I’ve heard of.
- The company kept Kogan’s data in archives (breaching their agreement with Facebook) but overall, data scientists considered it useless because it was ageing, not helpful for models. They never used it in production.
- Instead (and you can see that at the 1:00:00 mark in _The Big Hack_) they used election data (participation, name, demographic, address), which magazine people are subscribed to (name, address and the title) and credit information, notably what car they are paying back (name, address, make and model of the car). How are magazines and car helpful? Well, in their words: “guess who the driver of a Ford-150, reader of _Guns & Ammos_ vote for?” Both are a well-documented source of political insight, so much that there’s an open-source model for parsing Google Street View, classifying the car parked and making precinct-level predictions.
- Kogan data could not be used on Facebook (it was blacklisted) but they didn’t know that.
Yes. Different jobs paid different amounts, and people were paid for overtime. (With a bunch of malarkey about what exactly qualifies as overtime.) Some jobs had a harder time attracting workers, because of relatively poor conditions + poor pay, compared to others.
Most prices for essential goods (Basic food, housing) was set by the government to be very low. Many well-paid people had money, that they couldn't really spend in the official system.
> Was everyone given ration cards?
Yes. There were a large number of consumer goods (meat, vodka, butter) that were rationed. Other goods, of which there were no real shortages of (In the post-war period), were bought at regular stores. If you weren't a drinker, you would often trade your vodka ration to someone who was.
For yet other goods, of which there were shortages of (Fresh vegetables, for instance), the government encouraged private production of them. Some Russians had plots of personal land.
You could have a plot of personal land in one of two ways. You could either be a collectivized farmer, and, after you met your annual slave-like obligations to the collective, you could work on farming your small personal plots. Alternatively, you could be a well-off city resident, owning a datcha (A small summer home, often with a small plot of land.)
You could then grow produce on your personal plot of land, and sell it at farmer's markets. Due to shortages, and artificially low prices in the official system, food at farmer's markets cost many times what it would cost at a grocery.
> Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores?
Official government prices for food were very cheap, and if you weren't picky, there was no shortage of cheap calories that you could buy. So, people weren't starving to death, but if you wanted more then your 500g of sausage, and 90g of butter/month, you needed to spend money in the private markets.
Party members in good standing had access to party-only stores, which sold more limited items.
> I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?
No. You see, the Soviet Union never actually reached communism - for its entire history, it claimed to be in a transitional period, from capitalism to communism. Once communism would be reached, there would be plenty for all, and money would, obviously, be irrelevant! (Or not. The powers that be weren't super-clear as to how exactly that would work, and none of the citizens really gave a shit, because it was clear to everyone with a room-temperature-or-higher IQ that communism would not ever be reached in their lifetimes, and that it's better for your mental and physical health to not ask too many questions about it.)
But, in the meantime, as people were working their way towards communism, money was still necessary as an incentive for good work. State-ran businesses did financial accounting, they would purchase raw goods from other state-ran businesses, would sell their products through state-ran stores. For consumer goods, there would be multiple competing brands, with different quality, and pricing.
The difference between the USSR and the USA, in this sense, is where the profits would go, and how much of the accounting was 'real'. The government would often place economic orders that it wouldn't need to pay for (If the army needs to move a 50 soldiers from Moscow to Vladivostok, it doesn't pay the transportation department the price of 50 train tickets.) It would also do financial malarkey with the profits of state enterprises (To subsidize things like staple foods, housing, education, medical care, etc, which were provided to the citizenry at below-cost prices.)
PS: Bonus point:
You may ask: Well, what did people who had extra money/vodka/etc do with it?
There were a few things you could spend it on - there were some non-essential consumer goods that had vastly inflated sticker prices. Luxury goods (Which you might buy second-hand from a party member, who bought theirs from an official, party-only store), and domestic appliances were one example. Cars, were another - they would cost multiple years of wages - and also came with a multi-year, sometimes decade-long waiting period.
Bribes were a third one - with a large bribe, you could often shave a few years off your waiting period for a car.
The black market was a fourth one - a lot of people in the Soviet Union stole from their workplaces. And I do mean a lot. There weren't department stores, you couldn't go into a Lowe's, and buy a bunch of new roof shingles for your datcha. Yet, everyone who cared about the roof of their datcha had new roof shingles. How was this possible?
The answer is, of course, elementary. What you would do, is get in touch with an alcoholic who works at the roof shingle factory, he will arrange for a pallet of shingles to fall off the back of the delivery truck, and you will arrange for him to get fifty rubles, and four bottles of vodka. He will be drunk for two days, the truck driver will buy a radio for his girlfriend, his workplace will do some accounting bullshit to try to avoid blame, the government construction site that expects these shingles will have to delay work for a week, and the Regional Minister of Construction Supplies will give a radio speech about how if we only worked really hard, to produce enough roof shingles, in a few decades, we will finally attain communism, and we might have department stores, where private citizens could go to, and purchase shingles for their datchas.
It's all insane, of course, but I've yet to live in a country which wasn't.
Caves of Qud[1] is an amazing continuation of the NetHack/DF tradition in a modern game: incredible depth and attention to detail not only in it's mechanics and rules, but also in it's coherent worldbuilding and dialogue. It's also got a really great interface and cool, ZX Spectrum like graphics. The setting is a lot like Gamma World, or if you don't know what that is, post-apocalyptic Dune but with more pulp sci-fi (and chrome).
Caves of Qud is still in active development, and available on Steam. If you do get it, make sure to go into the menus and enable the experimental UI if you want to see how awesome a Roguelike interface could be if it used graphics.
Also, if you're like me disable Permadeath in the debug menu, the first village you start at is the only non-procedurally-generated village in the game, so if I you don't want to retraverse it over and over, you need savegames.
> During [the 1960s], Schratz believed, he lost his opportunity for major command because he published a facetious story in 1963 about Vice Admiral H. G. Rickover's burial plans.
Furthermore, he either is unaware of, or elides parts of stories that would refute his implications:
> Having achieved brilliant success with the pressurized water coolant system in the Nautilus installation, innovation in other types of plants was stifled. The USS Seawolf plant, developed in tandem with Nautilus, utilized liquid sodium as coolant, promising much smaller and more compact reactors. Because of limitations in metallurgy, the system was unsuccessful. The program was scrapped, and its obvious superiorities were never again reexamined, even after twenty years of further progress in nuclear technology.
The S2G reactor used in the Seawolf (SSN-575, not SSN-21) was, to quote Rickover, “expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.” First of all, you're running liquid sodium as a coolant; famously, sodium and water are not friends. Second of all, this choice now puts a hard limit on the time you have at sea to be shutdown for emergent repairs, maintenance, etc., because if the plant temperature drops below (or even near, realistically) the melting point of sodium (admittedly fairly low, at ~98 C), you're now stuck.
So I think it's less that the "obvious superiorities" were left alone due to fear of Rickover's wrath, and more because no one wants a cantankerous and potentially explosive reactor in the middle of the boat they're operating.
Similarly:
> When nuclear power was adapted to surface use for large combatants such as aircraft carriers and missile cruisers, new systems apparently were not examined. For instance, a smaller and more efficient combination of nuclear power for normal cruising plus an overdrive of conventional gas turbine plants for high speed use had been proposed but was not investigated further.
The Enterprise (CVN-65), the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was fast. Really fast. During initial sea trials, she outran her escort [1], which had a listed top speed of 34 knots. And she can maintain that effectively indefinitely. I see no reason why other proposals _should_ be investigated.
But it's this line that really paints the picture:
> The cult of personality and the dominance of the Rickover program tended increasingly to isolate the nuclear Navy officers from the real Navy.
"the real Navy." And there we have it. A bitter officer, angry that he was passed over at even a chance for nuclear command, lashing out at the fact that the organization's newest shiny toys got all the attention.
It was and I'm sure remains a common complaint while I was in that nukes stay in their own world, that they don't participate in general work like stores loads (which is bullshit; I definitely did my share of them), etc. Our retort was always "I'll trade my $5/day propay for your schedule," and no one ever took us up on it (propay is the method by which the Navy gives additional pay for certain jobs; all nuclear trained personnel get $150/month extra, with qualified supervisors getting $450/month extra – also, there are non-nuclear personnel who receive more, like the Assistant Navigator).
During my time at Electric Boat while my boat was being built, I was frequently in shift work. Navy nuclear shift work is ostensibly 8 hours, with 3 shifts, but by the time you factor in pre-shift training, pre-shift brief, shift handover, post-shift cleanup, and any other administrative actions deemed necessary, it's about 12 hours. 12 hours a day (or night, more accurately – I was on the midshift), 7 days a week, for months. Zero days off. The non-nuclear personnel, in contrast, were not in shift work, and since all of their equipment didn't exist yet, their job mostly consisted of showing up to the building we had assigned, puttering around for a few hours, and calling it a day. And yet, their leadership would harangue us during the brief time we spent passing each other for petty details like boots not being shined, uniform being wrinkled, etc. So yes, nukes generally develop a hatred of non-nukes, while the non-nukes often regard nukes as being elitists.
> Nuclear enlisted men never stand nonengineering watches, rarely if ever help load stores and weapons, never have mess-cook duty. As a result, second-class petty officers from the "front end" pull mess-cook duty, serving nuclear-trained third class from the engineering department.
Not only do we not stand non-engineering watches, if we try to qualify for them, we're told no, because "it would demoralize the other watchstanders," quoth a non-nuke Chief to my buddy when he went for the final checkouts on a non-nuke watch station. Apparently demonstrating that someone's job is actually incredibly easy, and they're just not that great at it is mean.
We absolutely load stores; see previous comment. We absolutely do not load weapons, but then again, nor does anyone else who isn't in the weapons department. This is an absurd strawman. Finally, while I'm sure it depends on the command, on my boat, nukes had to crank (mess duty). Joke's on the crew, though; we viewed it as a vacation. You mean all I have to do is wash dishes and listen to music, or serve food a few times a day? Sign me up! Also, at least on submarines, rank doesn't really matter. Generally, E1-E6 can all talk shit to each other, and if you're good at your job, you can talk shit to O1-O3 and get away with it, maybe at most getting a reprimand from the Engineering Officer (who is an O4). In fact, even the nukes would be delighted when we got a JSI (Junior Staff Instructor; some students who graduate the final part of training are extended an offer to stay for 2 years as a sort of initial shore duty, and as part of this, they frequently manage to hit E-6 by the time they're at their first command) who was too big for their britches. I distinctly remember a fully qualified E-2 A-Ganger (auxiliary mechanic, non-nuclear) yelling at our brand new non-qualified E-6 to stop reading a book and qualify something so he'd be useful. The guy tried pulling the "you can't talk to me like that..." card, which was immediately shot down by everyone around him, including the nukes. Your ability, which is formalized in your qualifications, is the only thing that matters.
I'm not denying that Rickover was abrasive, nor that he had little to no regard for the chain of command, Naval tradition, etc. Nor am I saying he didn't have his ethical problems – he absolutely did, especially near the end of his career. However, IMO he had good reason for his beliefs, he created a legacy that still stands, and he advanced the USN into the 21st century.
[0]: https://www.usni.org/press/oral-histories/schratz-paul
[1]: https://usnhistory.navylive.dodlive.mil/Recent/Article-View/...