What socialist policies? Did we get free healthcare or free higher education or subsidized government housing and food and I somehow missed all of that? Did the government suddenly start focusing on economic inequality first and foremost and eliminated all institutional racism?
The US as it stands right exhibits quite a few hallmarks of fascism rather socialism: amalgamation of the capital and the state, marginalization of minorities, an extreme abuse of power, extreme nationalism. One of the tenets of socialism is that the worker class has no state, that it can only work if the workers of all nations unite, that's the exact opposite of nationalism.
the only common thing I can think of between the soviet flavor of socialism and Trump's administration is that both are authoritarian.
The government is taking equity stakes in corporations. It's anti-trade and anti-business. It's picking winners and losers in the economy.
In a lot of ways we are tangibly shifting to a soviet style centrally planned economy, just without all of the welfare (which, to be fair, the actual soviet economies were bad at providing).
I find it insane there are folks who unironically claim Amazon's pay is mediocre when there's only a handful of companies that pay more and Amazon's pay L5/6 is 2+x of the higher end of the the average for a senior eng.
Good for them, I guess, but also has nothing to do with the reality
I claimed Amazon's pay is mediocre in the context of this conversation, which was talking about FAANG companies. This is demonstrably true and backed up by data. You might feel that Amazon's pay is not mediocre if you compare it in some other bracket, like all US salaries. Or I could downgrade it from mediocre to "bottom-of-the-barrel" in specialized fields like AI research. But that's not what was being discussed.
> The word balance never came up.
Probably why it’s considered one of the worst places to work for. Works well when you are a small company that is trying to attract talent to build great things with the promise of big rewards. Doesn’t actually work that well when you’re trying to keep an established company stable and don’t offer much in return. If all you can offer is mediocre pay and a threat of PIP if I don’t work 60+ hours, I’d rather stay unemployed.
In his next comment he explicitly confirms he wasn't even comparing to the FAANG companies but to his very own "crème de la crème" set of companies.
> I’m not sure what you mean by FAANG standards, but Meta and Netflix both pay way more and Google and Apple pay similar if not more with waaay better work culture. Tech companies of the last decade like Uber, DoorDash, Block, Snap, Airbnb, Snowflake etc. all pay more than Amazon while the new generation of AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are not even comparable. The only way you would consider Amazon pay to be very good is if you come from Microsoft or one of the old school companies like Cisco and IBM. I would put Amazon pay as middle of the pack or mediocre.
That was the context and this context was just so unrealistic and absurd.
I just provided anecdata of a family that has both Amazon and Google incomes, where, without revealing details about our incomes or levels, I claimed that Amazon pay one spouse receives is very competitive from what the other is receiving from Google (clouded by the different roles, SWE vs. UXD, a SWE at Amazon would probably make more than a UXD but I have no evidence that is true).
Ya, you don't know the industry then. SWEs often make more than UXDs. It is the difference between getting into computer science and going to art school (admittedly, the latter can also be very competitive).
Ah, I guess you were claiming that I was a shit SWE out of left field (because I'm just comparing myself to my wife)? I don't really get your context, you are going need to spell it out for me.
Keep in mind, L6 senior engineer at Amazon maps to staff at most firms. L5 has a crazy wide band to accommodate everyone from folks with 2 years experience in-house to 10+ years of experience.
alias grep=rg ? Given that Claude Code is intelligent enough to use --help for cases where rg's flags aren't compatible with grep, it might just work well enough
Only if you have been living under the rock for the last 5+ years.
Pytorch/torch is one of the most used ML libraries out there. Many torch-related products are named in this way: torchvision, torchaudio, torch elastic, torchrun etc
Dude, wth with this hate. I commented on what I thought about the title. I didn't say anything about the work. How do you get so insulted?? You basically proved that you are wrong by yourself. Torchvision is a package for computer vision. Torch audio is a package for audio processing. Based on this history, you expect Torchcomms to be a communication (wireless) package. Torchbalancer could be a better name but what do I know, right? This is only an opinion. If it's going to make you happy for the day, feel free to downvote. I wasn't living under a rock, but you just weren’t paying attention to what was right in front of you.
This just reeks of bigotry or at they least of disingenuousness
Nuclear and chemical weapons, artillery were invented by West. The US remains (hopefully continues so) the only country that used the nuclear weapons against another country. All defunct European powers routinely engaged in slave trade, drug trade, ethnic cleansing (in very inventive ways sometimes as the Americans nearly exterminating the entire bison population which was the main food source for Native Peoples).
> This just reeks of bigotry or at they least of disingenuousness
...and yet, Russia today is overtly and unapologetically engaged in genocide and ethnic cleansing in it's invasion of Ukraine, not to mention what the regime has been doing in other regions such as Georgia.
If you seriously had a problem with whataboutism involving the US and Europe, you'd be seriously pissed at what Russia has been doing for over a decade. But here you are, making excuses to whitewash Russia.
Also, you may want to look up the definition of genocide. The parts of Ukraine that Russia took are almost 90% Russian ethnically.
Somehow you don't hear any calls for Ukraine to return the parts of Poland that were attached to it by Comrade Stalin either. They've been a part of Ukraine for barely longer than the parts of Russia where the fighting is happening.
Well, formally, you are right that Crimea is 90% Russian ethnically, but what about price?
- In 1940s, USSR totally resettled all Crimean Tatars to Siberia, and only in 90s they got permission to return home. For comparison, imagine US will resettle all people from Florida to Alaska - you will not name this genocide?
And yes, resettling of peoples, was typical for USSR, and Russia was main power in USSR, even when prime ministers was from other parts of Union, so demography policy was pro-Russia. For example, up to 1990s, Russia constantly resettle Russians to Eastern Ukrainian regions, and same way, now Kazakhstan, and other Asian exUSSR counties have large share of ethnically Russian population.
Because it was in many ways, the same as a generation before that and one before that.
40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.
All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
It sounds callous to dismiss any improvement to medicine as trivial, but frankly I grew up under the assumption that humanity would cure diabetes, cancer, blindness, deafness and perhaps death itself by the end of the millennium.
It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.
I was talking with a historian of medicine who surprised me with the observation that the age of cures was past, and that we lived in the age of management. Antibiotics gave us cures, and vaccines eradicated diseases, but those advances had their limits: there is no penicillin for viruses or cancer. Advances since the mid-twentieth century have been more about managing conditions, which is much more profitable. Cure syphilis, and the patient goes away happy; treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.
>treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.
This is oft-repeated but it doesn’t pass the smell test. All it takes is a single principled academic to blow the whistle if there was any active suppression of cures or even research on cures.
In order for that quip to hold water, literally everyone involved in medical research would have to be a corrupt monster maintaining a worldwide conspiracy to keep sick people coming back for more treatments.
I guess I grew up in 'then', and that sort of 'assumption' is so depressing. But I get that some people only want to see medicine, and by extension science, as black-and-white.
"We haven't cured diabetes" (only made massive strides in control and management and came up with whole new classes of drugs that attack root causes). "We haven't cured cancer" (except the ones we have cured, the ones we came up with vaccines to prevent (HPV), and came up with all sorts of innovative and less unpleasant treatments extending lifespan with less side effects), "Haven't cured blindness or deafness" (except for the types we have cured).
And haven't cured death...well, I guess you got us there.
But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
I agree with you that we’ve made progress. To me, the most impressive achievement has been nearly curing cystic fibrosis and our array of tools for dealing with HIV. And yet I think it’s important to be honest. The age-adjusted diabetes mortality rate per 100k has been pretty much flat for thirty years. Life expectancy growth has been meager and the US has fallen far behind Europe. Overall health/physical fitness/mental health seems to be on a steep decline. 90s and 2000s optimists had high hopes for the world. They would have good reason to be horrified at things today.
If we’re lagging behind Europe, that doesn’t seem to be an issue of progress, right? If they are ahead, then the tech must be here ready. And we’re a bit richer than them, so we could presumably afford to implement whatever policies they are doing. Living just seems to be a higher priority over there…
Meh, it’s just a reflection of there not actually being much medical progress and lifestyle becoming the dominant tie breaker as the few breakthroughs we do have spread through the world.
“We can’t fix most damage to any organ so follow a lifestyle that minimizes it” is not a meaningful medical advance IMO.
>But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
Good comment until here. This is a strawman.
There is a huge gap between the vision of what medical advances might have brought us with technological breakthroughs and what has actually materialized.
Cloning and stem cell research was supposed to let me grab a new organ whenever I needed it. Instead I’m still waiting for a poor person to get in a car wreck and be declared brain dead so they can scoop out whatever is useful.
Cancer is still killing half of my family members, just different kinds after a cancer breakthrough helped them with an earlier kind. Others are hit by strokes, heart failures, and the occasional horrific Alzheimer’s.
50 years I’ve heard doctors saying “it was just their time” as an excuse for some old person dying. The field barely has a grasp on human biology and we’re barely making inroads.
I was also very excited about it and that's why I immediately upgraded to Android 16. But it turns out that it is not part of this update. The same with the new Material design, it doesn't come with Android 16 update. So weird that they announced both of these features as if they are part of Android 16.
I also think it's a very poor choice of words. If Sovietization meant introducing inefficiencies and bureaucracy in the egg supply chain, this is not even remotely what the article claims is going on here: the eggs producers are very intentionally (rather than incompetently or bureaucratically) throttling the egg production because it's more profitable to produce less
If the authors meant monopolization of the egg supply, well, that's also pretty far from being uniquely a Soviet phenomenon.
It was a really dumb thing to bring up and it chips away at the authors' credibility.
The US as it stands right exhibits quite a few hallmarks of fascism rather socialism: amalgamation of the capital and the state, marginalization of minorities, an extreme abuse of power, extreme nationalism. One of the tenets of socialism is that the worker class has no state, that it can only work if the workers of all nations unite, that's the exact opposite of nationalism.
the only common thing I can think of between the soviet flavor of socialism and Trump's administration is that both are authoritarian.