I was at Snowflake supporting Instacart as main technical account architect and saw them polish things into place to get to a decent-sounding S-1 and then to go public. It sure was an interesting experience seeing battles between some people just not giving any care to costs and others trying to make money from these little itty bitty consumer transactions. Epic political battles, I tell you.
No unistore has been used there at the time. Or frankly anywhere since then that I've seen.
They had streamed all clickstream/logs/intelligence and ran massive amounts of analytics on it. Results would get used elsewhere in the stack to sell/target/run ads, provide inventory pushes, etc.
They moved quite a bit of it if not most of it to DBX for Variety of Reasons [TM] specifics of which are best discussed over beers.
I was at Snowflake supporting Instacart as main technical account architect and saw them polish things into place to get to a decent-sounding S-1 and then to go public. It sure was an interesting experience seeing battles between some people just not giving any care to costs and others trying to make money from these little itty bitty consumer transactions. Epic political battles, I tell you.
About a decade ago I took my then little children to Seattle Pinball Museum for a day of tremendous fun for everyone. The machines were rated on 1-10 "grin factor" scale They had a machine there that wasn't your typical pinball, it was twice as wide and it shot a stream of balls from the center like a machine gun, in a continuous stream and you controlled the direction above with goals of hitting the targets that would light up. The balls would cascade down and get fed back into continuous loop.
This machine's "grin factor" was marked as 11 (naturally!!) and yeah, it was tremendous fun. It felt like I imagine it feels operating a seriously big machine gun! There was momentum of the heavy steel balls in the feeder so one couldn't swing it around willy nilly, so one had to really put some force into it. It was also really loud, and the feedback from the pusher vibrating through the handles was very visceral. Loved that machine!
Cool, sounds like pachinko game play, which gives that same sort of visceral “I’m doing something, albeit subject to the forces of nature” vibe. I didn’t get pachinko when I lived in Tokyo, it sort of gave off desperate gambling vibes, but once I actually stuck some yen in a machine and those balls started pissing out, I was hooked. Very fun! I won some dishwashing soap. ;)
I have a nephew who is in stop motion animation, since he was in his early teens and now getting close to his 3rd decade, doing movies now. Amount of work he had to do in early times all by himself was absolutely astounding. The people who have passion for it have PASSION in capital letters and then some. I and your entire family are so proud of you Willy, even though I am pretty sure you don't read HN.!!!
One of the popular sarcastic meme posting channels on russian Telegram today posted a picture of an ad "Wanted: lab worker, ready to break a vial right next to just the right person. Benefits: $10M payout; guaranteed care of your descendants; your name mentioned in annals of history". Nice and dark and very accurate.
This spells out a scenario that had just popped into my mind: what if this is an intentional "demonstration" of their bioweapon prowess, which they are using as leverage for backroom negotiations around Ukraine or whatever.
oh no no no, just about everything about Russia these days is explained by Hanlon's Razor. There is absolutely no any conspiracy/planning, I assure you
"sarcastic meme posting channels on russian Telegram"
That phrase.
I think these people and how they are using tech and memes are part of the current problem of this world. A large part of the problem, in my opinion. It's may be just coping, dark humor for most but it is deep psychosis for others and it's giving them ideas and power over the rest of us. I'd strive to be better than falling into such meme sharing sociopathy.
There is an SR-71 on display in Seattle's Boeing Museum of Flight. One of my most favorite memories of it was taking my late Belarussian grandfather to that museum and having one of the docents there, a retired airforce person about my grandfather's age, tour us around, with me translating. I already knew a bunch of BlackBird's lore, but the docent/tour guide was pulling out all the stops to impress my grandpa and was talking about various overflights of USSR, and I my grandfather's smile crinkled up and he said "oh I remember we finally shot that guy [Powell] down, and all the papers were trumpeting about it" and he and the tour guide started laughing and slapping each other on backs!
I miss my grandfather. He was a good one!
Here is 3 cheers for my neighbor 50th birthday party that is COSTUME, and to which we got a PRINTED invitation. It is a "come as your favorite SNL character" party. Stylish people, single handedly bucking this indisputably sad trend. Now what character would you come as?
William Gibson's Neuromancer had this marvelous quote when Case is talking to Dixie, dead construct of former hacker, about Turing police
* "The moment, I mean the nanosecond, that one of those things starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead." *
It would seem someone has read the book? And maybe heeded good advice?
At a business dinner this week with 3 high level eng clients p(doom) in next 10 years was brought up. It was rated by 2 if them them at 1% and 30% respectively, with 3rd guy demurring to put a number but saying its > 0. Completely unprompted, from people whose company is very AI-all-in.
Fascinating seeing you get irate with people who are giving you feedback that your own thoughts are far superior to the regurgitated "cleaned up" version which is absolute garbage indeed.
You have some solid ideas there but they are very poorly organized. I think you would benefit from a class in writing. I had a month-long technical writing workshop back a couple of decades ago that my company sponsored and it helped me tremendously with starting with wall of consciousness, progressing to writing plan, outline and then editing. It had a very positive impact on my career in professional services where clear communication via documents is an essential part of value prop.
> Fascinating seeing you get irate with people who are giving you feedback that your own thoughts are far superior to the regurgitated "cleaned up" version which is absolute garbage indeed.
That is not the part I take issue with at all! In fact many (if not all) of my comments to those people are thanking them.
I think you need to go and double check exactly what I have replied! Feel free to link to anywhere you think I have been irate in response to someone stating their preference! I think you will find my only grievance is where people have called the INPUT thoughtless or zero effort.
I’m finding it fascinating how people are commenting on what they think they have read rather than what they have actually read - both in relation to the post and in my replies.
I do appreciate your advice on following a writing course. I did exactly that to great effect in the early 2000s. Unfortunately it is of little help these days
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