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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Disclaimer: I could be wrong or not up to date, but this is my current understanding.

    On the small scale, forces like electromagnetism and gravity pull things together much much faster than the rate of cosmological expansion. That’s why “we” don’t expand, and neither does our frame of reference. There’s a potential end to the universe where the rate of cosmological expansion (which increases over time) finally exceeds gravity and electromagnetism and eventually even the strong force, causing everything to fly apart forever.

    Light waves propagate through spacetime itself, and basically it ends up being that there’s nothing pulling it back from expanding as the space it travels expands.


  • I did recently discover you can turn off “Web and App Activity” for your Google account, which seems to disable Google saving most of your data (searches, viewed places, etc), for what that’s worth. It definitely cripples Google maps even more than I think it should, since now I can’t even search for labels I’ve added to Google maps myself.

    I’ve been meaning to try Organic Maps as well, but haven’t even gotten around to installing it yet.











  • Look up how HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) works. They just need to generate a personalized playlist for each person which points at things already hosted on CDN, and insert the ads where they want in the literal text file that your video player reads from to serve you the video.

    I don’t know much about it, but it looks like there’s specific tags designed for dynamic ad insertion. Idk if YouTube plans to use them in this case though, if they want it to be undetectable to the client.



  • Thinking about it a bit more, I think it’s more like the metrics used to get in front of a human (the automated/hr part) aren’t well matched to the actual goals. We end up interviewing a lot of people who are good on paper according to the first sort, but actual good hires within that aren’t as common as we’d like. But none of the engineers ever know about any of the people who were disqualified due to having an unimpressive resume…

    So in the end, the initial sort does indeed end up wasting time and money, but no one’s gotten around to making a good solution for this yet. The alternative so far is to interview a bunch more people, which is also really expensive anyway.

    Basically, we have no efficient way to find people who are bad on paper but are actually quite skilled.


  • That… Isn’t what I’m saying? I’m saying they won’t bother to go to the interview phase with those people most of the time because they have higher probability options to try instead.

    Usually getting in front of a human for an interview is the hardest step. Once you’re talking, you can generally show your expertise, and most interviewers I’ve known are receptive to any sort of past experience that’s techy and related enough, or even just problem solving related.


  • Just to put out the other side of this, you’re competing with a lot of people with more visible credentials. If the hiring manager can look through the stack and pick out 10 people to interview all with easily understood credentials, they have no reason to consider anyone else. Interviewing isn’t free for the company, every additional candidate to consider is probably at least an hour or more of time the company is paying someone for.