I agree with both comments. ~500 can surely build some amazing tech, smaller teams have done more. I personally do think there's still a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit left, especially with the boom of possibilities due to AI, or simply what one can do with modern CPU/GPU performance, new browser APIs, modern tech factors, etc.
I also do agree and think leadership talent and vision in a lot tech companies is painfully lacking. This are the companies that could burn some money and use their wedge in the market to build some really cool things, but they wont. I guess to some degree, ironically, the money they're making might be part of the problem.
I mean, you don't hire 500 people to build something from scratch. You get at best 10 core leaders/founders for a tech, establish an MVP, then hire the other 490 to expand and scale.
Tho in honesty, 500 if overkill unless you really are tapping into some multi-disciplinary project that needs experts in a dozen backgrounds.
If you don't know what a DAW is, think GarageBand. Ableton Live, Logic and Reason are other examples. It's fully built with React and a custom state-management library, that's been fun and challenging. It's starting to take shape, but there's definitely a long way to go.
> You can have more kids, but most people probably only get maximum one chance in their life to spend half a year in space
That's not generally how having kids works haha. As you mentioned Sunita Williams has been to space five times. She's also 59 and the only information I found on kids is that she was looking to adopt a kid in 2012. It doesn't sound like she'll be having any more kids.
> Sunita Williams (one of the two stranded) is up there for her fifth(!) trip to the ISS [...] I don’t think she minds being in space, even if it’s unplanned.
Personally, I've been many times to New York. It's a very fun city. But if I booked a weeklong trip that against my will it became a yearlong one, I'd mind it.
I also can't speak for Sunita Williams, just for me in this hypothetical NYC stranding. It could be a very fun year, for sure. I'd certainly try to make the most of it. But I'd mind it.
> Personally, I've been many times to New York. It's a very fun city. But if I booked a weeklong trip that against my will it became a yearlong one, I'd mind it.
You didn’t spend years of your life and beat out 1,000 other candidates just to earn the opportunity to visit New York. Your full time job does not primarily consist of preparing and training to go to New York. You don’t get up every day and go to a job that earns a federal government salary when you could earn twice as much in the private sector because that’s the only way you can achieve your childhood dream of occasionally visiting New York. You certainly didn’t volunteer to take a test flight on a vehicle that could very plausibly catastrophically fail and kill you because that was the only way you’d ever be able to go to New York again. And if you did get stuck in New York, you probably wouldn’t become mayor.
Looked up two definitions of rescue. First, is the default that shows on Google (via Oxford Languages) [1]:
> verb. 1. save (someone) from a dangerous or distressing situation. 2. informal, keep from being lost or abandoned; retrieve.
Per this one, if you miss the last train across the bay the the Uber _would_ indeed be "rescuing" you if you felt distressed. If we consider the informal definition, I'd say you're also being rescued since one could say you were abandoned by the train and thus being retrieved by the Uber. Next, Merriam Webster [2]:
> transitive verb. to free from confinement, danger, or evil
Similarly, if you understand "rescue" as freeing someone from danger, this isn't a rescue. The astronauts aren't in danger really— they have all the supplies and support they need. Nonetheless, they certainly are in confinement, so this could still be called a rescue.
I personally do see how the fact this mission was already scheduled, and the little danger around all this, can make "rescue" feel like a little much. It's the same word used in The Martian, after all. But nonetheless I would still call it a rescue mission. These two astronauts are confined up there not by will but by circumstance, and the taxi flight was modified to sending only two people instead of the usual four, specifically to make space for these two astronauts to come back [3].
I think the USA is overdue an ideological renewal. Free market, neoliberal capitalism isn't cutting it. The profit incentive isn't cutting it. Supply chains where it takes hundreds of contractors and subcontractors to build anything aren't cutting it.
We see this in Boeing, where management with an ideology of profit maximization and a structure dependent on a bunch of suppliers has led to a crisis. On the other side of the Pacific, BYD has vertically integrated critical parts of car manufacturing and now is moving extremely quickly and affordably.
Another example; the Federal Government invested billions on banks in 2008, billions into the auto industry in 2009, is now investing billions into Intel, but refuses to take any shares for some reason. It has this ideology of investing billions in the private sector to save industries key to national interest, but "state owning shares is spooky so we want nothing in return". It seems so backwards to me.
If the industry is that important to the country, maybe at least have a seat at the board of directors? You don't have no nationalize anything, but at least be in the same room. Other countries, from China to France, have demonstrated there's a lot of value in this state-private sector joint ownership.
I don't know what the right answer is, but the current status quo seemingly ain't it— not just in execution, but in ideology. Something fundamental is non-ideal.
You don't like free markets and you cite semi-governmental-department Boeing and too-big-to-fail-gets-bailed-out-every-time banks and auto companies as an example?
You'll find free marketeers everywhere complain about these exact companies, for the same reasons.
I like free markets. I just don't like that China is eating the West's lunch. They just seem better at playing the "free markets" game than anyone on this side of the globe and I think the USA is doubling down on the ideas that defined it in the 1970's, rather than saying— "it's a new world, let's see what we can learn from it to up our game".
China has definitely learned plenty from the world, and fundamentally changed the way it does things from 1970 to today. Deng Xiaoping in the 80s marks a stark ideological change that transformed China to the core. Who is the last US president one can say that of?
China in 1990 was a poverty-stricken, hungry backwater, following a philosophy that just bankrupted their richer big brother.
Ideological change was needed.
By contrast, the US system of capitalism + democracy is not only blowing the rest of the world out of the water, it has shown itself to be remarkably resilient and responsive to change.
China has thus far prospered by being great at manufacturing. Can they innovate and change as needed? We’ll see.
The US has thus far prospered by being great at whatever is currently most profitable. Will they change as needed? Yes. Change is how their system works.
I'm not saying the USA should stop being a democracy, or even being capitalist, like China didn't change its system of government in 1990. What I'm saying is its fundamental beliefs, goals derived from those beliefs, and systems designed around those goals —even within the same political and economic system that currently exists— could use an update.
Let me put it this way. Everyone has heard of Maoism [1] of course. There's also Dengism, which does claims to not reject Marxism–Leninism or Maoism, but instead adapt them to the times China was going through [2]. Turns out what Mao believed might or might not be true, but it certainly wasn't working. A change in system of government wasn't needed, but a change in philosophy was.
Now Xi'ism [3] has been taking shape, and rightly so. The world, and China's place in it, are very different from where they were two decades ago. It doesn't seem to far-fetched to re-think what the purpose of that government is, what it believes to be true, and to figure out how to shape policy around it.
To give another example closer to the USA, in 2022 Mexican President Obrador held a rally, where outlined the philosophy of his political movement. Inheriting largely from what people had been calling Obradorism, he defined Mexican Humanism, which takes from the general current of mumanism but adapts it to the moral and ethic values, the needs, and other philosophical currents of Mexican politics [4].
It just seems to be there haven't been fundamental "-isms" in the USA in a while. The philosophy is the same. The USA considers its position in the world the same. The game the country is playing, it's purpose in the world, it's goals all seem the same as they did last century. All we get is "Bidenomics" or "Trumponomics", which are not so much philosophies, but just different ways of spending money within the confines of the same set of beliefs— corporatism, neoliberalism, hegemonism in the exterior, political nationalism in the interior.
IMO presidents and candidates here just seem to have so little substance in ideology. Bernie is the most recent one I can think that really talked ideology, and spoke widely about democratic socialism. He wasn't talking about tearing the constitution, just about thinking of different goals within the same framework of government.
I'm not surprised that "identity politics" takes over instead, and people come to worry about where the grandparents of a candidate were born. If candidates give you little philosophy to relate to, I guess you have to assume their philosophy based on their skin color.
These are interesting points. It’s worth noting that in the 90’s, the US won the cold war, and also the same generation has been in charge since then. Why change things?
The next crop of leaders will likely be much younger, and you’ll see new ideas.
I do think the US can depend on Europe, Canada and Mexico. South Korea, Japan, and Australia are far from the USA and close to China. They have high incentive stay friendly with China.
I do think China can easily outproduce the US. But I don't know that the US needs to maximize output per dollar. The USA can print dollars, and already creates a whole bunch of dollars out of thin air every year. The inflationary effect of printing a few more billion, specifically to maintain local shipbuilding capabilities, might be worth it. Just going for dollar efficiency has led the USA to de-industrialize, perhaps too much.
The status quo can't be maintained, that's for sure.
> South Korea, Japan, and Australia are far from the USA and close to China. They have high incentive stay friendly with China.
While that was to some degree a concern years ago, before Biden took office, those countries have decisively and openly taken sides with the US and are members of a network of alliances that also includes The Philipines and, to a degree, India. The US has been building and improving bases, military training, etc. in and with those countries and all over the region For example, there is AUKUS, a major agreement between the US, Australia, and also the UK, for Australia to become the only country outside the UK to receive one of the US crown jewels, nuclear submarine technology. Australia also is hosting an expanding number of US bases.
> I don't know that the US needs to maximize output per dollar. The USA can print dollars, and already creates a whole bunch of dollars out of thin air every year. The inflationary effect of printing a few more billion, specifically to maintain local shipbuilding capabilities, might be worth it.
The economics is trickier than that: Production is real economic value; printing money is just a statistic. Productivity = output/dollars. If you increase the dollars in that equation, you don't change the output and you reduce the nominal productivity number (though usually it's measured using inflation-adjusted dollars, so it's really unchanged).
The US can increase output by borrowing more dollars, increasing the volume of investment in shipyards without increasing productivity. But borrowing does cost something - IIRC the debt payments will soon exceed the military budget - and can cause inflation, which eventually negatively impacts output. In the end, China may be able to invest far more.
> Just going for dollar efficiency has led the USA to de-industrialize, perhaps too much.
+1. I'd go as far to say that multi-repo probably needs as much, if not more effort to properly keep functioning, but all that effort is better "hidden" so people assume monorepos are more work.
With a monorepo, it's common to have a team focused on tooling and maintaining the monorepo. The structure of the codebase lends itself to that
With a multirepo codebase, it's usually up tu different teams to do the work associated with "multirepo issues"— orchestrate releases, handle dependencies, dev environment setup, etc. So all that effort just kinda gets "tucked away" as overhead that each team assumes, and isn't quite as visible
I'd say there's 4 main advantages, summarizing what other comments are saying but also from my own experience:
- atomic PRs. All changes for a migration/feature living in one spot makes development much easier, especially when dealing with api changes and migrations
- single history. This is useful when debugging. A commit can more easily encapsulate the state of "the whole system" as opposed to a single part of it. This makes reverting, if necessary, easier
- environment consistency. updating the linting tool, formatting tool, UI library, etc is never a priority, so there's always drift, where an old repo gets stuck with old tools, dependencies and an old environment
- not shipping your org chart is easier when everyone can see and work work on the whole codebase, as easily as possible.
Very cool! I've played diep.io plenty, so no comments on the gameplay haha, I'm familiar with the decisions made here, both the cool ones and the frustrating ones.
I did encounter a bug where out of nowhere I was jolted onto the bounds of the map (specifically the lower-left corner) and died, killed by "Unknown".
I think thse bugs in this kind of game are especially scary because you lose everything when you die, which makes you a little weary of starting again. You might get far just to randomly die for no reason. If those are ironed out, I think you've got yourself a pretty good .io game to build upon and keep evolving here!
I also do agree and think leadership talent and vision in a lot tech companies is painfully lacking. This are the companies that could burn some money and use their wedge in the market to build some really cool things, but they wont. I guess to some degree, ironically, the money they're making might be part of the problem.