I did not go to MIT but spent my entire career in Boston startups and tech. It is impossible to overstate how influential CSAIL was (and is?) in addition to it sounding here like a wonderful place.
Anecdotally, I was considering Austin but am no longer, primarily b/c of the governor, ag, and socially regressive laws. Sad I'm going to miss out on a great music and growing tech scene. There are other options though
I also have a (former) long time friend that went hard MAGA and now wants to move to a state that reflects his political alignment
The entire tech job market is in a recession, but people want to blame politics. It's not politics. Some people don't like the Texas weather, and that is a bigger factor than politics.
I don't know if this counts as a "political" reason, but since I became old enough that there is a good chance that my next job will be my last job before retirement (if my current job does not turn out to be my last), I'd only consider moving for that next job if it is in a state I'd be willing to retire in.
Texas is not such a state because of their Medicare rules. Medicare is a federal program, but for some aspects of it states are allowed to add additional rules.
First, a very brief overview for those younger or foreign readers who have had no reason to learn anything about Medicare. When you turn 65 and start Medicare you can choose between "traditional" Medicare (also called "original" Medicare) and "Medicare Advantage".
With traditional Medicare the government is the insurer. They provide hospital insurance (called "Part A") which for each hospitalization covers up to 60 days at 100% after a $1676 deductible, then covers 30 more days $419 per day. They will also cover days after 90 at $838 per day, up to a lifetime total of 60 "after 90" days. After all those "after 90" days are used you pay all costs.
They also provide insurance for non-hospital stuff (called "Part B") that covers preventative services at no cost, and a bunch of other stuff with with a $257 per year deductible and 20% coinsurance.
There are a series of plans available to traditional Medicare users offered by private insurance companies that supplement part A and B by covering your part A deductible and your part B coinsurance. The plans are called "Medigap" plans or "Medicare supplement" plans. The federal government defines what these plans must cover but the companies that offer them set the price (and can offer additional benefits beyond what the government requires). There are 10 of these plans, called plans A, B, C, D, F, G, K, L, M, and N. Not all are available in all states, and some of those are no longer open to new enrollees, but generally in most states you'll have a choice of several.
When you turn 65 and first enroll in Medicare you have "guaranteed issue" rights. If you apply for a Medigap plan the company must issue it regardless of your prior health history and they cannot charge you more based on that history or on pre-existing conditions.
Every year there is an open enrollment period where you can change your Medigap plan, either to the same plan letter from a different company or to a different plan letter but you will not have federal guaranteed issue rights (with some exceptions such as your provider no longer offers the plan you are currently on).
So maybe you bought a Medigap plan from say UHC when you started at age 65, because they were the least expensive option for the plan you wanted. But now 3 years later they have gone up and are the most expensive, and also in that 3 years you've developed some expensive chronic illness. You want to switch to another provider for your plan to save money, but they will charge you more because of that chronic illness so that won't work.
So you are screwed...if you live in a state that doesn't provide guaranteed issue rights beyond what the feds require.
Several states do provide more. California, Idaho, Missouri, and Nevada for example provide guaranteed issue during a window each year after your birthday provided you are switching to a plan that has the same or fewer benefits than your current plan. In my UHC example this would mean that every year you could switch to whichever provider had the lowest premium for your plan letter. (I think Missouri is slightly more restrictive...you can change to the same plan with a different provider rather than to any plan with the same or lower benefits).
Some states go even farther. You can switch Medigap plans at any time, there is no restriction on changing plan letters except that A can only go to A and B-N can only go to B-N. New York is similar except I don't think they have that restriction on A <=> B-N.
Bottom line is that if you live in Texas when you start traditional Medicare with a Medigap plan you might get stuck with that particular Medigap plan and provider, at least as long as you aren't willing to move. If you move to somewhere where your current provider does not offer your current plan you have guaranteed issue to chose a new plan available in that new area.
It's a hypothesis that with RvW repealed, state laws become important for that. Similarly other laws may cause outmigration. Ultimately, California is losing people and Texas is gaining them so it's hard to say that this is driving depopulation of Texas.
Threads sucks because it's empty. Bluesky appears to be an extremely online leftist enclave (which might be valuable to extemely online lefists, but is less appealing to the rest of us). Twitter... remains the king? It has its issues but lack of poasters and a broad spectrum of opinions aren't among them. These services aren't bad because they're commercial enterprises.
The broad set of perspectives is "H-1B visas are great because it lets us exploit workers" vs "H-1B visas are terrible because I'm a racist." Read trending tweets and you'll see no different.
No, those aren't the only viewpoints on the site. Twitter's got leftists, rightists, uninformed randos, journalists, shitposters, everything. Skip "trending," for sure, but the algorithm is pretty good at giving you what you want to see.
I think some people were just so used to only seeing one type of opinion over and over which confirmed and/or formed their biases and now that Twitter/X was liberated they can't comprehend that their worldview is just one of many and in many cases when allowed people have easily poked holes in it. It's difficult for people to accept that they've possibly been wrong about things, or at the least have their beliefs challenged and not have an authority to appeal to that will make dissent go away.
I do think leaving Twitter because you don't want to be on a corporate social media network is a valid reason though. But Bluesky isn't that. It's just safespace 2.0.
Threads is full of major brands spamming corporate slop. Since it's still in the honeymoon phase it doesn't have ads, but you can tell that once it's big and mature enough they're gonna follow the Instagram strategy of filling it to the brim with ads.
IDK how this applies to Bluesky. The underlying infrastructure is only loosely tethered to Bluesky the company. If you want to pull all your shit and run it separate from the bluesky stuff you can and there's really nothing they can do to try and stop you or ban you.
They can limit your reach on their stuff but if you don't want to use their stuff it doesn't actually matter and you can continue to exist completely independent of them if you want.
The only thing missing are users willing to go out of their way to learn how to spin up fediverse instances and perform volunteer system administration in their free time. The type of work that otherwise would be paid to employees by said commercial entities.
This piece teaches me almost nothing about Vadim but shows me a ton about the environment he worked in. Someone built that culture, who are they? Why did they do it? Was Vadim complicit? Why did he feel so little control?
Hustle culture is not challenging, it does not help anyone grow, it simply exploits people. It's common, banal stuff.
“The vehicle is stable near or at our intended landing site,” Steve Altemus, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines said during a NASA news conference on Friday. “We do have communications with the lander.”
This is the quality of communication we can expect from commercial mission CEOs.
This feels unnecessary cynical. I could understand if the spacecraft said "Drink Ovaltine" or something else just advertising with paid placement, but the brand marks on it are just highlighting the organizations the actually built the thing. I was originally confused/skeptical about Columbia, but they did actually contribute to the design and construction of the lander, even if this press release is a little puffed up: https://investor.columbia.com/news-events/press-releases/det....
Also, you say "It's all just egos and entertainment now." What do you think it was in 1969? Is "beat the Russians" somehow a more noble goal than "sell a product"?
Back when I used to help organized and run a technology-specific usergroup, where we were constantly working corporate sponsors for donations to pay for food/beverages, I joked that on meeting nights I would gladly wear a NASCAR style jumpsuit, emblazoned with every sponsor brand logo/slogan. At least we would be honest shills. Sigh... no one took me up on the offer.
The US flag on the early moon landings, was absolutely an advertisement; the whole thing was done as a propaganda riposte to the Soviet Union's Sputnik. Doesn't mean it's not awesome.
That's because you were a child at the time. A child now will most likely have the same sense of awe and wonder you had, not the cynical point of view you've developed over time.
I get where you're coming from with the AD on the spacecraft. It's gross to see an ad for a clothing company on the moon.
But, NASA is predominately displayed on all of the original moonshot crafts. That's an advertisement for that organization. . .
And, I'm 100% sure ego had nearly everything to do with the original space race. Beating the Russians and what-not. That seems, in hindsight, to be very ego driven?
The Columbia logo on this craft is both. They're advertising the brand in a very cool and unique way AND they contributed significant heat shield technology to the craft itself.
It's about self-identification not advertisement. And NASA isn't a privately-owned for-profit corporation. It's like putting "US NAVY" on a battleship, except instead it's a vehicle furthering mankind's technological development.
NASA is an organization that represents the collective efforts of Americans (and others!). Columbia clothing is a private business that maximizes profit.
Experience is irreproducible. It depends on too many factors, we even don't know the full list of them, and some of them change irreversibly with time passing. You will not be 10 years old anymore. It is not a good reason for a depression, you can experience world now like you couldn't being a 10 year old boy.
Actually one of the absolute best things about having kids, that is not reproducible for no-child lifestyles, is seeing everything for the first time through their eyes.
All the other stuff people say about parenting can be reproduced via service or volunteering or something else. But that experience absolutely is unique.
Magic is real. The world is wild and exciting, and it's all there for that kid. It's amazing to watch and be a part of.
So, while you can never go back to being at 10 year old boy, you absolutely can get a taste of what that's like via adoption or having your own. In my opinion, that is.
It's carrying a payload for Columbia, among other things, which makes this type of marking generally called a “sponsor logo” rather than an “advertisement”:
“Besides NASA’s tech and navigation experiments, Intuitive Machines sold space on the lander to Columbia Sportswear to fly its newest insulating jacket fabric; sculptor Jeff Koons for 125 mini moon figurines; and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University for a set of cameras to capture pictures of the descending lander.”
I’m just glad it’s not something “too on the nose” comedically, like for Coca-Cola or something that makes me think of Wall-E. At least it’s a hiking/adventurey brand and not KFC.
We planted an American flag on the moon. An advertisement for the Coca-Cola of American imperialism versus the Pepsi of Soviet communism. The entire space race was literally nothing but ego and propaganda.
We are truly spreading the worst of humanity into the cosmos. Good job it's only us that appear able to witness it.
Defraying costs by using ads is a strawman. If you can't afford to do something, maybe don't do it. If you really, really want to do it, maybe ask yourself if the world genuinely needs what you're doing. If it does, find a way. If the only way you can do it is by selling advertising, you've taken as mis-step.
That's an extreme position to take that rests on the claim that sponsorship/advertising is objectively bad.
Media & journalism have been underpinned by advertising for over a century. Tons of educational and informative services are available to the public for free because of advertising. Sponsorship has built art galleries, hospital wings, research centers, etc.
In this case, there's a relatively innocuous logo on a robotic lander that is 230k miles away on a desolate rock. It's not like this is a billboard in a nature preserve.
Whether advertising is objectively bad isn't necessarily the debate, but at some point it can cross a line. That line might be different for everyone, but most people will have it. You yourself give an example of something you suggest might be unaccaptable to some:
> billboard in a nature preserve
Where's the line? Why shouldn't we put billboards in nature preserves?
In the startup world and in much of the tech corporate world in practice predictability is valued above all else. It's because investors, perhaps reasonably, value and therefore demand predictions.
But as we know that is fundamentally difficult. So many tech orgs make up a "hero-hustle" culture to compensate. "We're top 10% and we work all the time, this is the best we can do!"
Strong leadership is strong leadership, building the right product development culture is really hard.
The hero hustle hides all the bad stuff which will then never get fixed.
Predictability is a fantasy. It's predicting the future. No one can do it. When you hear someone say they've figured out a way to get predictability they are lying, in much the same way people who say they've come up with a new guaranteed way to make money off the stock market are lying.
Predictability depends primarily on the time scale, plus a few other factors. I have seen existence proofs of mature, disciplined organizations using stable technology consistently hitting >90% of commitments over periods of up to 3 months. Over longer periods or when more research is needed then predictability will necessarily be lower.
While perfect predictability is impossible, many organizations have lower predictability than they could. This usually comes down to lack of discipline, which is a fixable problem (much easier than beating the stock market). Insisting on high levels of discipline eliminates the need for "hero hustle".
The first two machines I touched were a CDC 6400 and DEC 20 at Lehigh University in the 70s.
Both - while built by large teams - "felt" like they were designed by a single person, complete consistency across hw, OS, tools, and apps (programs). It's so foreign from the experience we have now it's difficult for me to describe.
You noticed the conceptual integrity of the systems, as described by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month.
From Chapter 4:
> "I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas."
> "Because ease of use is the purpose, this ratio of function to conceptual complexity is the ultimate test of system design. Neither function alone nor simplicity alone defines a good design. This point is widely misunderstood."
> "All my own experience convinces me, and I have tried to show, that the conceptual integrity of a system determines its ease of use. Good features and ideas that do not integrate with a system's basic concepts are best left out. If there appear many such important but incompatible ideas, one scraps the whole system and starts again on an integrated system with different basic concepts."
