> Probably one reason why SWEs are disproportionately interested in FIRE.
SWEs are disproportionately interested in FIRE because it is (or was) an easy way to get a high paying job without an extended education period like becoming a doctor or lawyer. You could go straight into a six figure job after 4 years of college and even wear shorts to work, while your med school and lawyer friends were just getting started and had years of grunt work ahead of them and debt to pay off. SWEs are also disproportionately represented on online spaces like Reddit and forums where FIRE was popularized.
SWE jobs have been the most flexible I’ve had and seen across my career. I also had a manager who would police time spent in seats, but at every other job going for a walk was not an issue.
Contrast that with many of my friends in other careers who, still to this day, have stories about their managers imposing dress codes or forbidding headphones in the office. The average SWE is spoiled in workplace flexibility, even if there are exceptions.
> Those that paid, or did any kind of contributions upstream are entitled to be sad.
I didn’t even use pgbackrest but I’m still sad to see this.
I should have checked the comments first to determine my eligibility to be sad about this issue, before I had feelings that upset the sadness gatekeepers.
This is a very cool example of a targeted gene therapy for a very specific type of hearing loss. As the article says it only applies to a subtype of genetic hearing loss which makes up 2-8% of genetic cases, but it’s nice to see such niche therapies being developed and approved despite the smaller number of people who could benefit. It underwent an accelerated review through a new program met to fast track treatments for rare conditions like this which would normally be difficult to get approved due to the small scale.
> If connections expired after a year (or 3 months or 6 months), people would have to maintain their social relevance, and it becomes a natural editorial filter, keeping the overall network fresh and relevant.
This is a weird comment because it treats connections like they're only an asset for the person being followed.
The people doing the following aren't even considered. They're supposed to continuously re-follow the people they want to follow?
I don't see any upsides to this for anyone. I'm not reading social media every day. I don't want the network to automatically expire my follows and force me to remember and re-discover who I want to follow all the time. I don't want the people I follow feeling like they desperately need to pursue relevance instead of just being themselves.
If Selena Gomez is "socially irrelevant" then why do you care that she has 400 million followers? What does this take away from you in any way?
Because I don't want to see all her posts on my timeline anymore. I have to actively unfollow her to do that, which is more work.
That's more work than even following someone, because it asks for confirmation or pops up a separate modal to unfollow, which it doesn't do for following someone. And so I don't even bother.
This leads to stale social networks and algorithmic timelines.
I'll admit I'm not familiar with running, but in other sports it's not uncommon for amazing early career athletes to hold back a little bit on their first attempts.
It's easier to draw attention (and therefore sponsorships) if you leave some room to improve on successive attempts. It's riskier to give everything up front and then risk plateauing or regressing in your subsequent attempts.
> The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work— believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes.ti cannot.
You need some experienced people around, but companies that rely on institutional knowledge to get everything done have always been doomed to fail.
Even before AI, turnover was a real thing. People churn jobs a lot in tech even when the pay is good. They get bored and jump companies, leave to join their friends' startup, or move to another city.
Every company I've worked for that operated on a belief that institutional knowledge was king and documentation and processes couldn't replace it eventually had to face the music when key employees left. Ironically this problem was at its worst at a company that compensated very well, because those key employees would often realize they had enough money to retire early or go take some risky startup job instead of sticking around to be the insitutional knowledge base.
Companies that have too much tribal knowledge obviously do fail. But for a company to run well, some institutional knowledge will be there. And this will be the most subtle and implicit stuff that really isnt feasible to put down on paper. Or even if it is documented, its hard to understand without building alot of context. Even if that context is present in the docs, its not really possible to internalize it without actually seeing things at work.
All that is what takes time to learn and it cant really be eliminated either because thats what is critical for you company to run on
> I don't know if I agree with either assertion… I've seen plenty of human-generated knowledge work that was factually correct, well-formatted, and extremely low quality on a conceptual level.
Putting a high level of polish on bad ideas is basically the grifter playbook. Throughout the business world you will find workers and entire businesses who get their success by dressing up poor ideas and bad products with all of the polish and trimmings associated with high quality work.
Alzheimer’s is a good example of a disease where we don’t have great scientific understanding on the underlying causes, but that doesn’t stop individuals from believing they understand it better than the scientists.
Actual Scientists are calling it Type-3. But these are the same scientists that are actually reversing Type 2 diabetes without expensive drugs. Of course they exist outside the pharma narrative, and they don't have any uncurious attack dogs willing to defend their narrative-busting results.
I disagree with this move, but the people who lost these positions were in temporary advisory roles. This isn’t a career job for them.
The article says 8 members are replaced every 2 years and the terms are 6 years long. Between 1/4 or 1/2 of them would have been replaced during this presidency, and whoever gets placed now will start to be replaced by the next administration.
As for China: They’re not known for having independent advisory committees overseeing government decisions. They’re definitely not known for inviting foreigners to come join their government to oversee their spending. So if you’re implying these people are at risk of going to China to serve the same role, that’s way off the mark.
> As for China: They’re not known for having independent advisory
They’re not. But I’m currently pessimistic about America’s ability to maintain technological leadership beyond the early 2030s and I’d like to see what the alternatives are. (I’ve been impressed by what India is doing, both in research and commercialization, as I have with Ukraine. I’ve been impressed by EU research.)
The article talked about the board pushing back on political decisions. Do you really think Chinese oversight boards push back on political officers? Do they take to the press to lambast Xi?
Politics are different in China, certainly nobody is going to the press.
But they also have a culture where lots of politicians have technical degrees, and they've gotten better results as far as government and science. You don't have the problem of "global warming isn't real for cultural reasons" in the first place.
The Soviet Union had great math & science research infrastructure and leaders who were science and technologists. They still had political pressure that conflicted with science.
You don't have to be convinced. I'm in Wuhan right now and self-driving cars and autonomous delivery vehicles are pretty common. They have nice electric Buicks here because the local org that worked with GM for the brand has surpassed GM at building Buicks.
The US of 2026 has specific ideological pressure against scientists that is not nearly as bad as the cultural revolution but in the same direction.
It's not about which science would be good for Americans, or what would be the most effective directions to pursue, which way is best to minimize corruption while we invest in things that benefit everyone -- it's about the existence of particular scientific facts being politically incorrect therefore they must be suppressed, and additionally these scientists are effeminate elites and we hate them.
China does not have these attitudes in 2026. They have problems and are not perfect but they're probably better on "give scientists the ability to influence policy".
My priors are that you can’t remove political pressure on science _anywhere_ it’s a natural outcome of humans doing science. And I’m responding to the specific idea that technical political leaders are immune from that. History shows that’s not true.
Right, terrible example. China is the largest emitter of global warming gases and it’s growing. They don’t care for economic reasons, just like other nations don’t care for cultural reasons. Compared to democracies though, China also has added internal, domestically approved genocides, jail time for Hong Kong dissidents, IP theft, external influence ops, and are currently rattling to destroy a neighboring democracy. But I’m glad to hear their middle managers are actually technical. That’s good news for everyone.
We're just telling you what the President says! It's his explicit position, which he repeats constantly, that everyone in the government should be personally loyal to him and never do anything he doesn't want them to do. If you'd prefer for his side not to be full of toadies, you'll have to take it up with him; he's making a conscious decision to do things that way.
> Executive branch shouldn't be beholden to the Executive?
No. It should be beholden to the law. And sometimes the law creates independent agencies because that’s the only way to administer a complex, free society.
It's really a quite boring take. The executive branch is not the President's personal property; he's a temporary custodian of it on behalf of the American people, and he has a duty to faithfully execute the laws Congress passed. He has no legitimate power to randomly smash things just because he'd personally like for them to be different.
The "American People" are not the bureaucrats working under the Presidency. The American People are the common people that vote to have their will be represented.
And the President represents that will.
The government is the property of the public, the very people that assigned and put in place a President of their choosing, to direct a branch of the government. In effect to exert the power of the People.
The President in effect very much has the legitimate power, as given by the American People, to smash everything and anything under the Executive branch.
The wish of the President is in effect the wish of the people that have elected the President.
SWEs are disproportionately interested in FIRE because it is (or was) an easy way to get a high paying job without an extended education period like becoming a doctor or lawyer. You could go straight into a six figure job after 4 years of college and even wear shorts to work, while your med school and lawyer friends were just getting started and had years of grunt work ahead of them and debt to pay off. SWEs are also disproportionately represented on online spaces like Reddit and forums where FIRE was popularized.
SWE jobs have been the most flexible I’ve had and seen across my career. I also had a manager who would police time spent in seats, but at every other job going for a walk was not an issue.
Contrast that with many of my friends in other careers who, still to this day, have stories about their managers imposing dress codes or forbidding headphones in the office. The average SWE is spoiled in workplace flexibility, even if there are exceptions.
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