Without commenting on what OP meant I would say memes definitely used to be more quirky and funny and lighthearted in general. Heck, originally calling them memes was because they stuck around and passed between people despite often being nonsensical. They tend to be more opinionated nowadays, and popular ones are usually topical, political, snarky, or all of the above. Not a random mistranslation of an old video game.
I don't know why this comment was downvoted into oblivion as you hit the nail on the head. If there is one thing I can think of that separates memeing 20 years ago from memeing today its that todays memes are far more expressive -- as if they are used as a substitute for conversation or discourse -- than funny. It seems they are overwhelmingly trying to express emotions than be lighthearted or funny.
I'm part of several gaming subreddits that hold an overly hostile view of the game's developers, and the number of memes used to stab or jab at said devs outnumbers old-school "funny" memes or even the more contemporary "shared experience" memes practically two-to-one.
Plus, there are all these unwritten social rules about meme templates, and indeed they seem to have their own economy of sorts.
Take everything together and it seems that memes are serious business, which is stupid if you ask me. Memes are supposed to be funny and lighthearted!
"Supposed to be" funny, sure, but this is drifting towards "funny sad" or just anger.
I think with all the frustration out there, urban red-state Millennials like myself are stuck expressing themselves in meme form since our congressional representatives (Missouri) appear to be chasing rural voters who think Biden is a scary socialist. One of these days I'll find time to grab a stamp and mail off a few memes on paper to my congressperson, since they don't seem to be reading my emails to them or listening to the voicemails I send them.
To wit:
"If the money to feed, clothe, and house the homeless has to come from taxing Jeff Bezos... I'm not going to lose any sleep over that."
I know it's a luxury that I'm in a position to do this, but anyway: in general I won't continue interviewing with a company that expects me to put in significant effort into just preparing for the interview. Make a full presentation, build a small service or other not-trivial take-home coding challenge, put together a business proposal, etc.: I'm sorry, I don't do any of that for free. My resume and references speak for my abilities, and while I'm happy to have them probed and challenged (heavily!) in an interview context, that doesn't extend to my putting in hours of work just go conduct the interview at all.
This isn't high school, and you're not going to give me homework just for the chance to work for you. And I use the homework analogy intentionally, because just like with school, this doesn't scale. I can't interview at, say, 10+ companies all of whom are expecting me to put in paying-employee-level work just for the interview while also holding down my regular job. And I'm not going to go with a significantly shortened list of candidate companies just because their interview process is so onerous that I literally don't have the time to talk to more.
Again, I know not everyone can do this, but realize that companies try to exploit you during the interview phase, too. You need to also have standards for what you're willing to put up with.
I signed up for a freelancing site that had an involved screening process. The first two parts were pretty simple. The third or fourth part required a 20-30 hour project and a presentation. I laughed and bailed out before that. A few days later I found some other freelance thing that had a half hour phone screen.
Could you give some insight as to how you perform interviews?
How do you get the candidate to clearly show they have the broad knowledge and creativity required to be a good developer? What kinds of whiteboard coding problems do you usually give?
So I have some experience with this. I decided to add BLE beacons to my vehicles and bicycles, and an RPI to listen for the pings and retransmit them over mqtt. The idea was I could setup some Home Assistant alerts for things like "multiple vehicles are absent at once" or "vehicle went from home to away at odd hour" where "odd hour" is something like 12AM-5AM, a time when I wouldn't expect me or my vehicles to be departing.
The way I implemented it was to have each beacon transmit on I think 1s (might have been 5s to save power) intervals, and some python code on an RPI that listens for them, with a timeout for each. If the listener gets a ping it immediately forwards it to mqtt as a "home" ping, using the beacon id to set the topic. If it doesn't get a ping within the timeout then the rpi generates and sends an "away" mqtt message for that beacon. My expectation was to have it alert me within ~2-3 minutes of a vehicle going from "home" to "away". In practice:
- BLE beacons aren't very popular really, most of them are made by small foreign companies who don't sell them in places like Amazon. The ones Amazon does sell are kind of crappy. Setting them up usually involves downloading a vaguely-sketchy app to your phone (I haven't figured out how to configure them from the rpi). They all seem kind of janky honestly.
- Bluetooth and Wifi use the same (some) hardware on an rpi, meaning if you start rapidly scanning for BLE tokens your wifi performance will drop to the point of the rpi being unusable (ssh sessions timing out). I fixed this by buying a separate USB bluetooth dongle, although even that was a pain to get working in the pybluez module - in general bluetooth under linux along with the python bindings are finicky and crap out easily, it seems.
- I have my dmesg and syslog spammed with "Bluetooth: hci0: advertising data len corrected" when using bluetooth scanning, I managed to find a couple bug references to it and other people complaining about it but no fixes over multiple system updates.
- It's just... Not reliable. I don't know why. I've tried really hard to make it reliable, and maybe the problem is the RPI-as-bluetooth (maybe if I used a microcontroller as the receiver it would work better?), but I've tried all variations of scanning windows and such and dug down into the code for Bluez without figuring out either what I'm doing wrong or where the issue is. Beacons will supposedly not ping for minutes at a time despite being on a 5s interval no matter what I do, and this is for beacons maybe 6 feet from the receiver (although ones further away do timeout more).
The last thing is what finally killed the project for me. I had it (still have it) all setup in HA with notifications and schedules and such, but I just turned off all the automation for it until I get a chance to tear it down. Failed experiment.
This has much to do with fading and such. If the polarization of the antenna sending is 90 degrees from the antenna receiving, for example, you will get no signal, even if close. This sort of thing can make the signal get weak as though it was 3x as far away at random as things move.
I'm sorry but the claim is YouTube just randomly deletes channels with no notification? And they do it in order to suppress... Whatever this was? That seems remarkably unlikely.
The whole article is extremely thin on facts and very fat on speculation and breathless rhetoric.
Counter-argument: A positively staggering amount of decisionmaking at a company consists of "look at what other, successful companies are doing and mimic them". It's cargo cult management by the very definition: they see the other people doing the correct incantations and bounty fall upon them. Clearly, we just need to utter those same incantations and we'll have the success they did.
And I'd further counter that: yeah, actually, you and your company ARE special. Every company is. There is no One True Way of running a business, or any individual aspect of that business. Everyone's triangulating around resources, people, industry, corporate vision, etc. If anything I'd say the argument that "you are not special" is the fallacy, as it leads directly to the kind of cargo-culting that you see so many failed companies do.
Finally, when we see successful companies, how often is it because they just mimicked what everyone else was doing? Not very frequently, as it turns out. Well-behaved companies seldom make history.
> Counter-argument: A positively staggering amount of decisionmaking at a company consists of "look at what other, successful companies are doing and mimic them". It's cargo cult management by the very definition: they see the other people doing the correct incantations and bounty fall upon them. Clearly, we just need to utter those same incantations and we'll have the success they did.
They never do.
I recall talking to someone who was very very happy to brag that his company was doing "everything just like Google" and following the exact same practices he read the company did on various engineering blogs.
I asked him what was the compensation like and how he managed to get kids from Stanford to work at his company instead of their startups and he just gave me a blank stare. Said something about how they were not in Silicon Valley and paid median salaries and that he had "no trouble finding Google caliber talent in the local market." and that "it's not really the local market's customs to give stocks to coders".
I think someone ended up buying the whole thing. Not the company but the office furniture they left after going broke.
I'm talking about the standard things that people do that are common across companies.
Absolutely make your USP special.
But logging? DB access? Deployment? Those are generally solved problems and unless you have a very good reason not to... "doing what everyone else does" is going to be a lot less pain in the long run.
Yep there are many solutions to the same problems out there. So thinking is required to choose the solutions that works best in your specific situation. Taking into account your business, team, customers, runtime environment etc. etc. Simply cargo copying somebody else without understanding the pros/cons is what crappy devs do.
I guess in 2021, HNers think the NY Post is a legitimate media outlet straining for objectivity, rather than the tabloid rag that they are. And I guess we'll all have a highly partisan discussion over it despite the Post obviously having a huge axe to grind against Twitter, further calling into question their "reporting".
As someone who joined and then departed the management track fairly recently, there’s another aspect here that’s not mentioned, but contributed to my finding other work: as what I’ll politely call social awareness has grown in companies, even technical managers are expected to buy into and boost to their team a lot of policies I flatly do not agree with. Not too long ago prime concerns for employment were suitability to the job, now it’s whether they’re the correct gender or race. Team dynamics are supposed to focus on sharing deep meaningful emotional personal things which I believe is both inappropriate and unprofessional (and hurts team dynamics). I was subjected to sensitivity training where I was supposed to admit my racism/sexism by virtue of not being a female POC, and new employees who were not white men (or H1Bs) know they can get away with all kinds of bullshit because while they may not have been diversity hires the company is highly motivated to keep a diverse-appearing workforce. Conversations about technology or business basically became nonexistent - I felt like I was being asked to be a social worker first and only. Eventually it became so frustrating I left for an IC role and couldn’t be happier. Now when my boss asks if I want to get involved an effort to root out all the bad technical words we use and replace them with rightthink I can just say no thank you instead of pretending I buy into any of it.
This is just shitty company strategy or corpo/wanna-be-corpo bullshit, I think you can find smaller companies where poor performance is harder to hide, thus they can't afford it and everyone's happy (except people who actually benefit from that bullshit, but they are not there because they were already fired).
I was interviewing for a position and when they got to asking me in the initial phone screen various diversity questions I politely told them I didn’t think the company would be for me. I’m all about diversity but if you’re trying to project your “wokeness” in the first conversation I’ll pass thanks.
