At Disneyland, there are separate park entrance lanes that don't use facial recognition software. I like that I can opt-out passively there.
At TSA checkpoints at the airport, you have to actively ask to opt-out.
I'm always worried that actively opting-out puts you on a government list and there could be later, much larger ramifications, so I passively opt-in to blend in with the masses.
Yup. Most people are going to say "I have nothing to hide" and go with the flow. The ones who don't are signalling that perhaps they do have something to hide.
Yes I do have something to hide. my face. I don't want you to own it in a data base of yours that you have a bad track record of knowing how to secure.
unless of course, you are willing to take ownership and accountability of my data and promise me minimum of $100k in compensation for data breaches and leaks indefinitely from your storage of my face. You can figure out how to pay for insurance to pay for this.
/oh you're not interested in even talking about this? Sounds like you have something to hide. (this fun conversation would not be well perceived when you that you ask for accountability for their actions and propose a solution. making a contract for this surely can't be super hard, but getting them to sign it and be accountable to it would be blocked hard)
I don't see the point of opting out at an airport, of all places. They already know (or should know) the real names of everyone who's flying. Fully agree that facial recognition at an amusement park, or any private business, is egregious.
I'm glad you're doing this. I am aware of _Incorruptible_ from seeing posts on LinkedIn, but from your description here, I now realize I'm going to love this book! I wasn't going to make time to check it out, but I will now!
Where does Apple fall on the Incorruptible spectrum? Is it covered in the book?
Apple is not covered in the book (except via a few Steve Jobs anecdotes). I'm just not plugged in enough to their internal culture to be able to comment intelligently.
Tell me what's different about this page vs what you've seen on LinkedIn? maybe I can learn how to promote the book better!
Honestly, I think on LinkedIn, I'm usually in doom-scrolling mode, whereas on HN, I'm more likely to read a post in-depth. I think it was smart to come here to reach out on multiple modalities!
>I suspect it's not seen as a problem by providers because more lines generated means more tokens used and hence more billing put out on customers.
I have also grown skeptical of token usage in order to run up my bill! But since I feel like it takes me MORE effort to write LESS lines of code myself, I'd expect a quick and dirty AI-generated solution to be MORE lines of code and cost LESS to generate than a concise/elegant solution in LESS lines of code.
The latest frontier models will write code better than you and more elegant, with less lines of code, in 100th of the time, with full test coverage. Hand coding is like writing out assembly/machine code rather than using a compiler.
This hasn’t been my experience. State of the art models available to the public still do all sorts of bandaids and bad hacks. Putting code where it doesn’t belong. Stapling types onto variable (in TypeScript) when abstractions/types already exist to use. I use it to generate code, but still have to review every line and have corrections/steering basically every time.
Insisting on writing code by hand when LLMs are available is not software engineering in 2026. Engineers find the most cost-effective solution for the problem at hand that meets the requirements.
Connections is one of the greatest shows in television. The pilot episode is amazing, highlighting the problem with dependence on technology that we don't understand.
"Never have so many people understood so little about so much."
As a software engineering manager, I always look to staff up a project at the beginning as much as possible, looking for doing as much in parallel up-front as we can. If some things take longer than expected, then I already have a team of engineers with all the context since the project kicked off that can help each other with any longer running tasks. An engineer that has completed a smaller chunk of work can help out with the items on the critical path, for example.
>I always look to staff up a project at the beginning as much as possible, looking for doing as much in parallel up-front as we can.
Ah, maybe this is what you think he would take issue with? Fair enough. Perhaps I should have said:
>I always look to staff up as much as is economically and organizationally optimal, to exploit all genuine parallelism opportunities, being careful not to overstaff.
You mileage may vary but in my (unfortunate) experience, stuffing up by any other reason than grassroots "we need more hands" raised by engineers themselves typically backfires. Teams that are constrained by people resources often find creative ways to work smarter. Teams that have an abundance of labor, often end up working unnecessarily harder, duplicating work, reinventing the wheel, not solving the right problems, etc. See also intensive vs extensive development.
Kind of crazy this is so successful, considering it's hosted in a country where it's the norm for (so many, but not all) people to leave their bags of popcorn and cups of soda at their seats when they leave the movie theatre or ball game, under the assumption, "someone else will take care of it."
But that's all based on societal norms. It's kind of understood (whether it's right or not) to leave popcorn etc under your seat at a theatre or a stadium. At Burning Man, it's obviously not acceptable.
People act like the pervasiveness of insider trading in Congress is an indisputable fact, when there have been only a few trades with suspicious timing, which is similar to what you would expect statistically from 535 wealthier people trading with no insider information. The only case where I feel like insider trading is likely was Richard Burr's sales before COVID.
Beating the market isn't evidence of insider trading. Everyone invested deeply in tech beat the market, which is what Paul Pelosi did. If he did trade with insider information, he did it in a way that was subtle enough to look sufficiently like normal trading. This is nothing like the smoking gun of a 4x spike on oil futures 1 hour before a major announcement or a hyperspecific bet on Polymarket.
There have been multiple times where the final vote count was the difference of a handful of votes.
No one is guilting anyone to vote and some will say that neither party represents what they want and that sucks. But ultimately there has to be one side that even if you don't overall like them you would still rather they get elected.
So vote for who you think might be best. And if they have policies you don't agree then contact your representative and say "I voted for you but do not want xyz policy". The more who speak up the better.
If I'm going to vote for the wrong candidate, and it's close then isn't even more important that I don't vote?
>But ultimately there has to be one side that even if you don't overall like them you would still rather they get elected
I'm not able to respond to this within the confines of the rules here. I apologize is that's not satisfying, but it has the virtue of being the truth.
I'm not American. And surprise: regardless of your reasons you get judged by the government you put in power, since foreign policy is how the rest of us experience your choices.
And your choices are evidently you're completely okay with the current situation as well.
If you want to judge all of the people living in the USA that is of course your prerogative. Or all people in Russia for the crimes of the Russian government, or all people in China for the crimes of the CCP.
I'm not going to be concerned with the opinions of people who generalize to that degree.
Maybe. I'm not actually that invested in people voting. But that doesn't negate the hypocrisy of complaining when you're, through inaction, endorsing the status quo.
Consider this; if you vote, you have no right to complain. People like to twist that around. I know, they say, they say: “well if you don’t vote you have no right to complain”. But where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent people, and they get into office and screw everything up, well you are responsible for what they have done, YOU caused the problem, you voted them in, you have no right to complain. I on the other hand, who did not vote, WHO DID NOT VOTE. Who in fact did not even leave the house on election-day, am in no way responsible for what these people have done, and have every RIGHT to complain as loud as I want, about the mess YOU created, that I had nothing to do with.
Ok, then I could vote for myself next time. Seems like a waste of time for the counters, the registration officers, and all the other volunteers involved.
Its valid to say a lot of things. But it doesn't escape you from having to own those choices.
You are what you'll accept, and you looked at the choices given and said "I'm okay with either one".
Because the consequences of whatever mutual dissatisfaction you had still means one of them gained power and implemented their agenda anyway. And you were okay with that.
You don't get to not make a decision and then pretend you aren't culpable for your inaction.
the other person was talking about not making a decision, so you've transposed an idea not mentioned at all onto my comment
good luck out there
what to remember: the goal of the parties are to win friends and influence people, it's a weird meme that you aren't doing that and neither is the other party. time to re-evaluate the communication style yeah? proselytizing isn't working
The idea that nobody in American politics is trying to win friends nor influence people is indeed a very weird meme! As you say, that implies there's a big lane of persuasion that isn't being filled for some reason, even though everyone who's heard of Dale Carnegie knows it ought to be.
Have you considered the possibility that the meme might be false? That would explain neatly why it's so weird.
At TSA checkpoints at the airport, you have to actively ask to opt-out.
I'm always worried that actively opting-out puts you on a government list and there could be later, much larger ramifications, so I passively opt-in to blend in with the masses.
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