I recently had to look at a particular kind of marketing, as a techie.
And suddenly I realized why Pinterest was so highly ranked on Google image searches.
It's not so much about a useful tool for individual users; rather, it's a marketing venue for manufacturing a lifestyle image that lets you extract money from people.
Like a fashion magazine with a greater illusion of participation.
Of course someone was going to decide that vinyl -- started as fringe genuine/hipster, and turned into marketable lifestyle -- had been milked or moated. The timing is right for you to extract more money for yourself with a new lifestyle twist to sell.
The exact gimmick doesn't much matter. Fire up the memetic lifestyle machine: we've got consumers (producers of money) to milk.
The phrase "grinding LeetCode" refers to a kind of unmentionable self-stimulus indulged in by people who want tech jobs money, but are bad at software engineering, and who want to work with other people who are bad at software engineering.
It was most popular during zero interest rate phenomenon, when there were numerous investment scams based on startup companies that could have a very lucrative "exit" for those running the scheme, despite losing money as a business.
LeetCode falls out of favor when companies realize they need to build viable businesses, and need software engineers rather than theatre performances.
What if I want to work at big tech? Does your message still apply, or if I want to work at big tech, it means I just want tech jobs money, and am bad at software engineering?
You could be an outlier. I, too, wanted to work at a particular Big Tech.
But then I looked again at the prep materials they recommended for their frat hazing interview theatre, and it was so depressingly trashy, that it made me not want to work there anymore.
And things I read publicly (e.g., culture of disingenuous mercenary careerism, scraping the bottom of the barrel that knows only the interview gaming) and hear privately (worse) mean that probably it was for the best that I didn't move there, though the bigger bank account would've been nice.
Any company still using LeetCode at all during interviews is signaling that either they are run like a frat house, or are so dim/indifferent that they're unwittingly cargo-culting one.
I used to use this on a CD-ROM, for SSH-ing into my personal server to check email (from work or SO's place), when I didn't have a laptop or handheld with me. USB flash drives often didn't boot by default on PC hardware, but CD-ROMs did.
Later, I made an immutable "Swiss Army knife" USB stick distro called LilDeb, based on Debian Live. And literally carried it on a Swiss Army pocketknife on my keychain. LilDeb was implemented in two big shell scripts, which you can still see at: https://www.neilvandyke.org/lildeb/
I've been able to find good deals on some things at Dollar Tree. Usually the good deals were a smaller quantity of a normal-quality brand-name item. I mostly avoid the substandard quality items. But even sometimes substandard is OK if, say, you want to make your political demonstration sign on white foamcore (much cheaper than the art supply store, and you don't care if it's smaller, thinner, or outgassing) rather than on an Amazon shipping box.
There was a Family Dollar across from a large public housing project here, where I also went looking for deals, but the shelf prices looked like a convenience store. I didn't find out whether they were fraudulently charging even more at the register like this article describes. (I hope it closed because the residents knew there was an affordable Market Basket a 20-30 minute walk away, over the city line and train tracks, and they were able to get there and find the time for it.)
That's great, and a mix of all kinds of signs is to great effect. (People from all sorts of demographics using whatever means they can to be heard.)
Sometimes the sign-makers are artistically inclined, and may have access to better materials.
The most memorable example was at the political demonstrations (and counter-demonstrations) leading up to the Massachusetts constitutional convention that legalized gay marriage. For the State House one I photographed (learning photojournalism on the side), the anti-gay-marriage people were mostly bused in, including a pair of angry-looking old nuns in black full habit, and handed out the same ugly stock sign. (There's an obvious joke that they couldn't find a graphic designer who was sympathetic to the anti-gay cause.) Separated from them, across a street was a huge counter-protest, with an ocean of all sorts of creative, colorful, and positive handmaid signs, held by generally good-natured and thoughtful looking people.
> Papers that make extensive usage of LLMs and do not disclose this usage will be desk rejected.
This sounds like they're endorsing the game of how much can we get away with, towards the goal of slipping it past the reviewers, and the only penalty is that the bad paper isn't accepted.
How about "Papers suspected of fabrications, plagiarism, ghost writers, or other academic dishonesty, will be reported to academic and professional organizations, as well as the affiliated institutions and sponsors named on the paper"?
1. "Suspected" is just that, suspected, you can't penalize papers based on your gut feel 2. LLM-s are a tool, and there's nothing wrong with using them unless you misuse them
I won't be surprised if B&N does a C&D on this particular trademark infringement.
Nook is a well-known brand in consumer tech, ereaders aren't that far removed from Web browsers, Nooks have a Web browser, and B&N also has a "Nook for Web".
Do you think they could be trying to open up the TV firmware, like when the WRT54G settlement launched what became OpenWrt and other open firmware projects?
> Do you think they could be trying to open up the TV firmware
Yes, SFC is indeed trying to open up the software as happened with OpenWrt [1], though in this case the software in question is the operating system instead of the firmware.
I think the SFC also wanted to establish a legal precedent about the rights given by the GPLv2 to users. Unfortunately, such a precedent might not be forthcoming [2].
I saw the (a?) architectural model for Stata before it was built. I was with an artist, and we just walked into somewhere it had been set up for an event. (Yay for MIT culture of letting students go most places on campus.) It looked pretty crazy at the time. IIRC, there was a clear sphere embedded in the top of one of the lower roofs. My joke was that the model looked like someone had taken a paperweight, and smashed up a previously ordinary-looking building. It was crazy when construction started, and you could start to see elements of the building emerge, like, they are actually building that. (Though they left out the paperweight sphere.)
Before it was built, a designer friend, who'd worked worked in a Stata building before, mentioned the frequent complaints of Gehry buildings, such as people in triangular offices, or with slanting walls, that couldn't fit a desk.
Years later, I was surprised and deligted to end up working in Stata. My office was pretty generic rectangular and functional, with big windows that opened. No complaints about the office, except the HVAC couldn't win against the early GPU compute my officemate was doing. Space in the building was in demand by everyone, yet there were large areas of dead space. I wondered whether some of the conspicuously unused space was because they could've figured out how to adapt it, but was being banked consciously, so that space could be made for PIs who arrived later.
Stewart Brand criticized IM Pei's building for the original Media Lab (E15), as not being malleable like the "temporary" Building 20, and maybe some of the same criticism applied. Though Stata, coincidentally built partly on the site of Building 20 that was razed for it, did incorporate plywood elements in the interior, I think as a nod to Building 20. This included large plywood tables that were moved around as needed for different purposes in the open ares outside the elevator on my floor (G10?), multiple times a day.
The strange bathroom placement, and the ones that used visibly dirty ("green") water to flush, weren't a practical problem, but multiple times were awkward to explain to visitors. I liked the big single-person bathrooms on the office floors, and they were luxurious for students and professors doing all-nighters to get in a discreet paper towel bath, compared to the indignity of trying to do it in a toilet stall.
One thing I liked about the larger building design was the main street ground floor, adding cafe and various random seating, which was a big improvement over the Infinite Corridor.
At one point, I had a fair number of visits to a client's (IBM) IM Pei-designed facility in Somers (NY). There were so many oddly-shaped conference rooms in the pyramidal buildings.
And suddenly I realized why Pinterest was so highly ranked on Google image searches.
It's not so much about a useful tool for individual users; rather, it's a marketing venue for manufacturing a lifestyle image that lets you extract money from people.
Like a fashion magazine with a greater illusion of participation.
Of course someone was going to decide that vinyl -- started as fringe genuine/hipster, and turned into marketable lifestyle -- had been milked or moated. The timing is right for you to extract more money for yourself with a new lifestyle twist to sell.
The exact gimmick doesn't much matter. Fire up the memetic lifestyle machine: we've got consumers (producers of money) to milk.
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