Do you work at a large company?

Yes, previously at a ~$200b+ market cap and now at a ~$100b market cap company. Only difference is incentives--equity definitely works to motivate!

FWIW the acquisition was only 25ish percent above market value. In the public markets Nuance was worth something like $15 billion.

If the industry demands weird or suboptimal practices or has strange evaluation criteria then the people making the most will be the people who are best at the game.

I think the popularity of untyped languages is one example of that. Clearly worse, you're removing an entire class of embedded test and nuking your ability to refactor safely, but huge chunks of the industry don't see that as a bad thing. I'm a worse programmer because I've spent so much time in Python.

Why not just:

    function foobar(version: number): string {
      if      (version >= 3) { return 'result_3'; }
      else if (version >= 2) { return 'result_2'; }
      else if (version >= 1) { return 'result_1'; }
      else {
        throw new Error(`Cannot interpret version '${version}'`);
      }
    }

?

I don't see what advantage the switch provides here.

Is this really true? In my (limited) experience, the best coders are the ones who understand the technology, understand the hardware, and understand good program structure. "Communication" and "teamwork" are totally unimportant and they're usually organic side effects of understanding the domain. I've done open-source stuff with a total asshole and it wasn't pleasant but the end product was good because he was good, and I learned way faster than with most people.

But I've not been exposed to that kind of corporate environment. Is it really that important? It reeks of corporate buzzwords to me.

That assumes the selection process is effective, but FAANGs are all monopolies so there's very weak selection pressure for them to distinguish candidates correctly. They don't get punished for their mistakes.

I'd argue the people at FAANGs are the people who are best at hitting the requirements of a FAANG. That's still a competition and they'll brain drain from smaller companies, but it creates arbitrage on unrecognised ability and other opportunities may exploit that (e.g. starting your own venture relies much more on genuine ability than where you stand on a FAANG progression matrix).

I was contributing to an open-source FAANG project recently and the oversights they'd made in the codebase were surprising to me. There were very basic errors and mistakes and the people managing the codebase didn't understand what some of the functions were even supposed to do. The API wasn't consistent. Tests were testing behaviour that was outright wrong (and, somehow, passing). Feature prioritization was way off. There were half-hearted implementations of some features that were bad enough that they weren't useful. They weren't talking to other departments working on the same basic area (who are also open-source, and hold the state of the art), so there were important features that weren't ported. The project was small, too (but not unimportant).

I don't have high market value, but I was fixing some of these bugs in minutes. The guys managing that project are obviously a lot better than me overall, but I think it betrays a flaw in the institutional structure. Those weaknesses in the codebase would be cheap to fix, the problem is the FAANG standards are such that they are able to go unrecognised.

> [...] FAANGs are all monopolies so there's very weak selection pressure for them to distinguish candidates correctly. They don't get punished for their mistakes.

But they do. You see that happening every time a big company fails. It just takes a while longer because of the inertia the company has built (for example by having made more good than bad hiring decisions in the past).

I understand that good people fly under the radar all the time. Also I understand that there are startups that certainly have a higher skill level than Google does (anything else would be shocking, considering Googles immense work force).

Not all hiring decisions are good. Maybe most aren't. There's just no reason to believe that Google would be any worse at it than Random Small Company, considering that more money and expertise certainly helps when trying to hire the best talent.

Firefox already has this. Click reader view, it also gives you a time estimate.

yep, 11-14 minutes for TFA.

It would be nice if Firefox provided an API that only exposed the static HTML of sites you're visiting. I don't care if an extension wants that data, it's nowhere near as sensitive.

I guess this doesn't solve injection, but there must be other ways to solve "display some additional data."

Great idea, after all it's impossible to render sensitive data server side :)

I said it's less sensitive.

Does it matter?

Btw here is your API:

    document.body.innerHTML

And which permission do I take to access that?

As a bookmarklet, none :) That's the best you can get.

> They don't perceive The Man as sadistic, they perceive him as disinterested.

This doesn't fit with the whole oppression thing where essentially everything is done to hurt $class, $minority, or $cause.

The social thing seems accurate. There are far right networks, but their violent extremists appear to be mostly loners, which seems to be extremely rare on the far left. The gender distribution is a good point as well. Would the far right act the same if half their members were women?

The left-wing narrative is usually "[group A] is hurt by [issue and thus group B]", whereas the far-right is, "[group C] will hurt you, if you let them." I think it's a deliberate difference. The far right would never say Jews were accidentally conspiring against Americans, it wouldn't help them. But it helps the far left to say their issues are inadvertent, that [villain] can't help his bias, or that he doesn't have to do it deliberately.

Left-wing narratives are often decoupled from intention (e.g. systemic and unconscious bias) because it makes them easier to propogate, whereas right-wing narratives are the opposite - intention is ascribed whether or not it's there, also because it helps the narrative propagate. They're selling to different human tendencies, I think.

Watch the far-right protest. Their eyes usually convey fear or animalistic aggression, even when they're dominant. Far-left groups carry very different emotions, even violent ones like Antifa.

I'm not sure, class warfare isn't a thing that's accidentally happening according to those that subscribe to the theory, it's intentional. Not as a genocidal "let's annihilate the lower class" war, but to perpetually oppress, enslave and exploit them.

The Great Purge didn't consider its targets as accidentally doing harm, they were portrayed as a "fifth column" that sought to destroy the Soviet Union. That external enemy is what creates group cohesion and strengthens the resolve of members. "They're just people like you and me, but the circumstances make their behavior harmful to those people over there" isn't what you mobilize with, so we get White Supremacy behind everything or Patriarchy conspiracies that read like The Protocols.

I get what you're saying but Marxists don't bomb the homes of billionaires, or shoot them. There's no actual warfare, genuine violence is directed at the right, not the rich. They do make a show of constructing a set of gallows in front of Jeff Bezos' house but they don't actually do anything to him, and that's a big difference. I think it's because they don't have the fight-or-flight terror that drives far right-wingers to push the gas pedal of their car into crowds of protestors. They might, in a different system. But I think then the ideology would be different.

In the 70s there were genuine left-wing terrorists like the Weathermen, which might be a good comparison, but the vibe I get is that they liked violence first, and fell into a movement that gave them a justification to perform it. They didn't seem scared to me. The far left rarely seems genuinely scared, but the far right seems very scared.

The difference to me is that nowadays, left-wing threat narratives tend to exist to justify behaviour they already want to engage in, whereas right-wing threat narratives exist much more to be scary. Toward the center things are similar but the differences are quite stark at the fringes.

I don't mean this as a technical argument or anything. I could be wrong, I'm just trying to describe my instinct.

> The Great Purge

Was a genocide by people who attained power, not the fringes of society acting out for weird psychological reasons. I wouldn't really compare the motivations. Dictators are dictators, right or left, and the support they get is much more transactional. I'm also skeptical that Lenin was genuinely motivated by Marxism. I think Marxism was an excuse he could use to gain power.