I was just forced to sign one of these after already being employed. I, very clearly, pointed out that I didn't actually agree but that I needed a job. Often people don't see these things until it is too late to back out like at on-boarding or even later, as in my case. It is bad enough to have non-compete clauses, they are evil and should be banned, but then to sneak/force them after as if your employment is a TOS that can be changed at any time is beyond wrong.
If you really are a good place to work people will stay. If you really are paying enough for the value you provide, people will stay. If you aren't then people will leave, for the competition likely since that is the industry they know. Non-compete is really just a power play that enables companies to pay employees less and it is an abuse of power.
I like the underlying theme of both Project Hail Mary and The Martian: No great evil just be human and solve problems with a little humor. We need more of that and less might makes right superhero movies.
I hadn't read the book nor watched any trailers (I hate trailers with a passion), so tonally it was a fair bit lighter than anticipated. However both me and my unsuspecting victim of a movie partner (she isn't typically into scifi) really enjoyed it, and I had a similar sentiment afterwards.
Saw it on IMAX, and did not regret that choice one bit.
More trees often means less density which leads to worse cities. There is a place for trees, but 'more is better' is not true, especially around a parking lot which has already dropped the density massively. A parking lot is a city dead zone. Trees next to that will just expand that dead zone. It is like in the US where there are ornamental 'parks' at huge intersections. Nobody goes there. They didn't help. Same with parks around government buildings. SF is a great example of wasted space due to this. Generally, you need to minimize parking areas massively and then pack as much city next to them as possible to make up for the services they robbed. In the places where you actually do have exceptionally dense city then you can think about patches of green strategically placed. Getting a diverse, ecosystem like, city is the right approach but there is no hard and fast rule to get there.
Is there any constructive counter to my arguments? It is a great area to discuss.
We often think 'if a little is good then a lot is better' but clearly that isn't the case for basically every resource. Take the 'put trees everywhere' concept to the extreme and you have a forest, not a city. I am 100% in favor of putting trees and parks in a lot of city spaces, so long as it encourages the city and doesn't create or expand city dead zones. People should be using that green space regularly. Not their cars and the more infrastructure dedicated to cars and car support the less there is for people and people support. Trees in parking lots is car support, not people support. I have never once in my life wanted to drive to a parking lot for the trees in it and rarely want to take mass transit or walk to a parking lot next to a park since I would rather a park that has great restaurants and other services near it, not a bunch of concrete for cars. You have to minimize the impact of a parking lot quickly to get use out of it. Expanding its footprint with trees isn't doing that, it is actively making things worse.
Everything south of San Francisco is either leaf-shaded or a shithole, and anyone who drives through California can see this stark discrepancy for themselves.
The idea of an 'owner' doing whatever they want on 'their' property is ridiculous. They bought that land with restrictions and an understanding that it was part of a regulatory framework. Should an 'owner' be able to set up an industrial chemical plant in the middle of a city without any regulation? How about an open pit mine? A gun range with no regulation? Should I be able to create a massive speaker system pointed at your house next door to drive you away with no consequences? All actions are actually interactions. Everything someone does on their property has impacts to others. We give 'owners' a lot of leeway but that shouldn't be unlimited. Requiring things like solar on roofs, or gutters on roofs, or restricting roof uses, etc etc are all valid concepts. It can, and should, be debated how far those regulations should go but 'get your government off my land' is never a good argument.
It seems inefficient to not put solar panels over a parking lot. I'm not sure how shade is a major consideration here or how light weight solar panels are a large expense compared to the cost of space in a city. Parking garages are often net negatives to cities and parking lots are generally major negatives to cities since they drive density down and reduce foot traffic (which reduces economic churn). At least this way the city gets another small use out of that area in the form of some local electricity generation. Density and variety of use are major factors in urban health.
They just lost my repos. I can not believe they snuck this in. My level of anger right now is far higher that I ever wanted to feel. I went to API access for anthropic, paying more in the process, to avoid them training on my code. And GH just -adds- this, without telling me? Without a prompt. They are dead to me.
make sure you opt-out anyway before deleting your account. they'll probably train on some archived version if it sees your profile didn't opt-out at some point.
honest question: is there any realistic mechanism that will make them accountable if let's say they just train on 100% of repos without regards to opt-ins? I operate under the premise these tech companies can do whatever they want and there's very little oversight.
No, there isn't. You're relying on PMs or engineers who still care will see it happening and call it out. Other than that, it can become evidence in some future lawsuit. But the damage to you would've already been don.
I blame everything on the air force AOC concept and the joint targeting cycle. They are, at their core, an attempt to manage every aspect of a war from one room. It 'works' in peace time when you have exactly 3 real decisions to make a day and a staff of hundreds to orchestrate it but in war it is completely unresponsive, blind because all information comes through the telephone game and bought 100% into the idea that 'if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail' problem. We have bombs. Let's bomb them. This is why we loose wars.
Our operational level of war is junk. We have forgotten how to create a task force that has has a clear mission with a clear duration, resources, battlespace, ROE and, most importantly, authority to act. McChrystal 'rediscovered' empowering small teams that every flag officer rediscovers eventually in war. If your supporting the commander's cycle means enabling them to make all the decisions then you have just decided to loose the war. They can't make all the decisions. They need to expand that decision making power. That is their job. Build teams that have the authority and resources. Let those teams, if needed, also build teams if the problem is too big. Most importantly though, let those teams act. If you can't trust those commanders to make decisions and act on them then you shouldn't have put them in the job. Divide and conquer is the only solution here and the JTS/AOC model of warfare is the antithesis of this.
I am a slow adopter of uv. I'll be honest, its speed has never been a big deal to me and, in general, it is YAPT (yet another package tool), but this one feature may make me reconsider. Pinning versions is less than perfect but I would really like to be able to stay XXX days behind exactly for this reason.
I think the python community, and really all package managers, need to promote standard cache servers as first class citizens as a broader solution to supply chain issues. What I want is a server that presents pypi with safeguards I choose. For instance, add packages to the local index that are no less than xxx days old (this uv feature), but also freeze that unless an update is requested or required by a security concern, scan security blacklists to remove/block packages and versions that have been found to have issues. Update the cache to allow a specific version bump. That kind of thing. Basically, I have several projects and I just want to do a pip install but against my own curated pypi. I know this is the intent of virtual envs/lock files, etc, but coordinating across projects and having my own server to grab from when builds happen (guaranteeing builds won't fail) is import. At a minimum it would be good to have a 'curated.json' or something similar that I could point pip/other package managers to to enforce package policies across projects. These supply chain attacks show that all it takes is a single update and your are in big trouble so we, unfortunately, need more layers of defense.
> I think the python community, and really all package managers, need to promote standard cache servers as first class citizens as a broader solution to supply chain issues. What I want is a server that presents pypi with safeguards I choose. For instance, add packages to the local index that are no less than xxx days old (this uv feature), but also freeze that unless an update is requested or required by a security concern, scan security blacklists to remove/block packages and versions that have been found to have issues. Update the cache to allow a specific version bump. That kind of thing.
If "my own curated pypi" extends as far as a whitelist of build artifacts, you can just make a local "wheelhouse" directory of those, and pass `--no-index` and `--find-links /path/to/wheelhouse` in your `pip install` commands (I'm sure uv has something analogous).
This is, unfortunately, a legitimate concern for some companies. There are a lot of DOD contractors out there that if they are cut off they have nothing else. With the current administration it is clear that they can, will and have taken these kinds of measures based purely out of malice. Anthropic may get a win out of this though in the short and long term depending on how non DOD/govt affiliated companies see their actions but small fish can't take those chances.
If you really are a good place to work people will stay. If you really are paying enough for the value you provide, people will stay. If you aren't then people will leave, for the competition likely since that is the industry they know. Non-compete is really just a power play that enables companies to pay employees less and it is an abuse of power.