The more I read these kinds of things, the more I agree with

> The only way to truly opt out of big-company organizational politics is to avoid working at big companies altogether.

I've done plenty of really fun, engaging and interesting work in smaller companies. If you're able to be involved in open source work, what you do can still be something that many people appreciate, beyond the customers of your company,

> The only way to truly opt out of big-company organizational politics is to avoid working at big companies altogether.

This is perhaps what I find somewhat odd about Sean's writing. It sometimes reads to me like a scathing critique of the dysfunctional bureaucratic dynamics of big tech companies, but that isn't really his conclusion!

The key point is at the end of the OP. The dysfunction and bureaucracy are annoying, even to the people who make a career out of it, there's no level of enlightenment where it stops being so. It's just an inevitable consequence of doing some kinds of things and making some kinds of decisions. If you're faced with an important decision affecting 10,000 employees or a million users, there's no perfectly good way to make it, only a least bad way.

The actual story of how cod from Norway came to be a thing in the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Querini

Among other things, with everything going on in the US today, the CEOs of Apple and Amazon were apparently at the WH for a screening of the Melania film.

Amazon funded it. They paid $30 million or so for rights to the documentary for Amazon Prime. I doubt viewers will care about it, but I look at it as a bribe from Amazon to the administration. They give Melania and by extension Trump this money, and they will get better regulatory help and more government contracts.

I didn't even know this existed, let alone that it was made by Amazon. This makes their Chris Pratt garbage look like cinema.

Tires yes, but EVs tend to have regenerative braking which will reduce brake particulates significantly.

The study is about NOx levels which have nothing to do with tires or brakes.

Ok, but tire pollution is still a problem:

https://grist.org/transportation/electric-vehicles-are-a-cli...

https://caltrout.org/news/did-you-know-your-cars-tires-could...

True. But there are 2 ways to read this:

1: Yes, let's stick with ICE cars and die of preventable illnesses because EVs are only a massive improvement, rather than absolute perfection

2: Hey let's take this massive improvement and enjoy enormously cleaner air

I meet way too many people from group 1 unfortunately.

That's exactly what I wrote: "it's a step up".

I mean, it kind of is. But I'd say the framing is about general air pollution, and they happen to use NOx levels as proxy indicator. So from that perspective, I think it is important to note that there are other types of pollution that go up with electric cars.

Recent research suggests the issue is much less concerning than previously estimated.

https://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/news/illusion-truth-surrounds-inacc...

Kansas was the end of the line because no more.... 'thermals' to ride higher? If that's the correct term.

What's the difference between doing this in the summer vs the winter? I think I would be freaked out (probably an understatement) in an unpowered vehicle way up in the air if it were dark.

They're flying in mountain wave. Basically, the wind flows over the mountains and you get ripples downstream. You can ride the upward parts of those ripples. They eventually ran out of mountains.

Winter tends to have more favorable conditions for creating these ripples. It needs more than wind, you also need the right temperature profile in the atmosphere.

Darkness is a big problem. Normally you just have to wait for sunrise to fly, and land before sunset. These guys used night vision goggles to avoid that limitation.

or pilot(s) were just tired

Are the troops going to be deployed to oppress and maybe even kill Americans in one of our cities, or our allies? Who knows!

I for one am tired of 'interesting times'.

They're already shooting mothers in the face and using flashbangs on 6 months old so, yes, it seems quite likely.

Ciao is an interesting one.

Kind of like you might say 'your humble servant' in English, the Venetians would say "sciavo vostro". Literally "your slave" - schiavo vostro in modern Italian. Which then morphed into "ciao".

At least in Alsace we sometime use "service" as a "you're welcome" equivalent instead of the more widespread "de rien", or "avec plaisir" you will ear in France.

I hear 'servus' used frequently in southern Germany, it seems like a greeting. Interesting.

Brasilian Portuguese adopted that as their main greeting though spelled “tchau”.

In Bavaria and Austria they say "servus" which literally means slave/servant in Latin.

Yes, when they are not Grüß Gotting.

My brain tried to insert an ö to make that Göttingen.

We're working on re-legalizing neighborhood businesses here in Bend, Oregon:

https://www.centraloregonlandwatch.org/neighborhood-commerci...

The city council just had a work session and was quite supportive of the idea.

CircleCI and Flickr are both pretty big systems. There are tons of businesses that will never operate at that scale.

I don't disagree with that call out. However, we've been through these discussions many times over the years. The solid queue of yesteryear was delayed_job which was originally created by Shopify's CEO.

https://github.com/tobi/delayed_job

Shopify however grew (as many others) and we saw a host of blog posts and talks about moving away from DB queues to Redis, RabbitMQ, Kafka etc. We saw posts about moving from Resque to SideKiq etc. All this to day storing a task queue in the db has always been the naive approach. Engineers absolutely shouldn't be shocked that approach isn't viable at higher workloads.

I hope that some heads of universities, CEO's and people running important journalism outfits are looking at this and feeling a deep sense of shame.