That's pretty weird. Usually, less companies mean less demand for labor. If supply is the same, that means price-for-labor (salaries) would go down. Unless, this was accompanied by people leaving (reduction in supply). Do you have an explanation for this?
Curious about the military job (and other services including Police Departments). Are you eligible for pension/benefits as a presumably civilian subject matter expert? How does one get such a cyber gig?
Its Army Reserves. Yes, I am already locked in for a pension. I am not a civilian. I am completely interchangeable with full time military, evidenced by my 5 military deployments.
How does a person get such a job? They join the military.
When I joined cyber wasn't a thing, because I am old. I joined the first cyber organization shortly after it formed and was a member for about a decade. I was promoted out of that organization and shortly thereafter a formal cyber organization was created, not just a few units. By that point I had become an officer doing more generic systems integration and physical communication infrastructure things.
The biggest difference between the military side versus the corporate developer side is that military tends to run towards problems. The goal is have everything working so that you reach steady state and don't have to do high visibility work. High visibility is bad, because it suggests you are failing something important. Corporate developers, on the other hand, tend to be either trend chasers that want high visibility yet low effort work until things fall apart and then they run away or are long term employees that want boring steady constant employment.
That's it. I have been an acting/deputy brigade S6 on and off for years. Its more people and expectation management at that point than anything directly technical, but you are still expected to be an expert, like being a corporate associate director. I just promoted out of that and am looking for the next thing.
Asian companies in North America behave the same. Don't seem to give a crap about employees or lives. My jaw continues to drop at what I come across.
It goes both ways. I am a non-asian manager but my asian employees don't seem to say no to unreasonable request. I've actually had to talk to some of the younger employees about burnout.
I don't understand why it is okay for anyone .. employees or managers to be tortured.
What are some of the unreasonable requests you've observed (or made)?
Have you seen burnout arise solely from "too many hours worked", or has it tended to be coupled with other factors (like lack of control / agency, goalposts that keep moving such that they never get achieved, coworker disagreements, toxic office politics).
That's a very good point. I know they've got boxes because I've used them, but didn't deal with any of the setup myself and we're probably a large quantities case.
Spot on. Things are actually MUCH more relaxed in the office, which is why some people don't want it (e.g. people with caregiving responsibility). Everyone I know with children 0-10 wishes there was some more flexibility in scheduling. RTO just steals that from you. It has nothing to do with the amount of work.
For VC funded startups, I would imagine sec 174 is less bad. For bootstrapping, I just can't imagine how to make it work. A Canadian company can hire globally without the craziness of this amortization too.
> A Canadian company can hire globally without the craziness of this amortization too.
Do you mean legitimately or in a wink-wink sense?
Because the issue dealing with the foreign country not your own country, right? That’s why so many US companies go the contract route with international talent right?
I'm reading about the founding story of many startups .. at the early stage when they had few users, there was no moat. Success seems is a big moat. If this guy had taken venture financing(I know this wasn't a thing back then but humor me), trademarked milkbar, peppered ads everywhere, it isn't inconceivable that he'd get to 500 stores. Would that have led to lasting success? Unclear.
I think a wider issue I'd like to see a discussion on is the current workplace. I think employers are pushing individuals and teams beyond their limit - what are you going to do? Quit in this job market?
I'm literally doing the math on what sort of pay/title cut I'd be willing to take to move from a large corp to a sane, non-toxic workplace. I'm mid-career and know some people my level who have just exited the rat race. I was hoping once US rates get cut, things get less meaner .. but looks like this will continue for a while longer.
As it stands, tech at large companies has become a terrible career. I'm saying this as someone who is deeply passionate about technology and work at the cutting edge of AI. I think a big part is cargo culting and MBA-think in management. Instead of working, we spend months and months planning to do work. Other people in this boat or just my pond?
Back when I was in undergrad, I recall how I was taught C. Just read one of the bible books on a weekend, and was ready to go. I was recently taking a look at Kotlin books and literally banged my head on the table. I realized the language has a good rap but it is ridiculously feature-laden .. to the point they threw in the kitchen sink. A key positive of languages is easiness to learn. I really wonder about Kotlin. It may be well-designed, but did it really need to be so big?
I'm also curious if it is just me. I am a grey hair now, with many other responsibilities. Why were C, Python and Go so easy for me when kotlin seems so hard to penetrate (for me)? Is there a way to quantify language complexity?
Take the K&R C book. It describes the language itself only - not the standard library. The Kotlin docs describe the language _plus_ parts of the Kotlin standard library which is why it appears to have lots of features. You'd have to read through half the standard C library documentation & pthreads docs in addition to K&R C to get the equivalent experience.
I will also say: Android Kotlin and pure server Kotlin are entirely different beasts. If you are on Android and you are frustrated with Kotlin, it is probably Android.
Kotlin compiles now to JS, WASM... even LLVM bitcode if you want it to. Coming to Kotlin from a pure lang perspective, I'm not sure what it would be like, it might not be you. I know as someone who came to it through Java that it is a massive improvement on what I had before.
What do you mean "so big?" Kotlin doesn't feel "big" to me.
`
enum class Sample { A, B }
val x: Sample = Sample.A
val y = when (x) {
Sample.A → 0
Sample.B → 1
}
`
I think if you give it time you might like it. It takes some getting used to, sure, but especially compared with the alternatives (Java to use JVM, Java on Android, etc) it's pretty great.
Cross-platform Kotlin is very new but it works surprisingly well.
I found Kotlin easy to pick up, and use, but there are always complicated parts of it I haven't yet grokked. I'm sure a working knowledge of it is easy to obtain but I'm with you on the more dense pieces.
Scientist here and have book marked this article for close reading (so apologies for this question if it is discussed in the article).
I had a few brushes in RL (with collaborators who knew more RL than I did). A key issue we encountered in different problem settings was the number of samples required to train. We created a headless version of the underlying environment but could not make it go a lot faster than real-time. We also did some work to parallelize but it wasn't enough (and it was expensive). Is the TM related RL training happening in real-time or is it possible to speed it up? That seemed like the key problem to make RL widely used, but curious about your thoughts.
I'm not sure about your particular case, but if your environment really is headless, then it should absolutely be possible to run it a lot faster than realtime. It depends on what the environment is and if you have access to its source code (we do not have that in TrackMania so it's a lot harder). Either the environment is purposely throttling the amount of time it simulates, or it just takes so much time to simulate the environment that it's not possible to speed it up anymore.
We're lucky in case of TrackMania because it internally has systems to both set the relative game speed and also completely disable all rendering and just run physics. Linesight achieves about ~10x speedup where the most time spent now is in rendering game frames and running the inference on the network. They also parallelize training by running more game instances and implementing a training queue. For the "raw" speedup ratios, TM usually achieves about ~60x (one minute is simulated in one second) and I use this speedup to implement bruteforce functionality in the tool (coupled with a custom save states implementation).
It's possible to speed it up by running the game as fast as it can go (so, not limited as it normally is for human consumption). They talk about running it at 9x speed, so months of training could be done in 80 hours.
