Have you tried using expo? It makes development with react native much easier and does a bunch of stuff for you out of the box.

I'm a solo developer writing a fairly complex mobile application with watch integration and while some bits of the setup might be frustrating, however I would urge you to persist for more than a day if possible.

Indeed I had a huge amount of trouble porting my project from my previous mac to a new M1 but after the frustrating setup I just returned to writing JS and swift code and things have been perfectly fine.

Worked at a faang for several years. Some things I didint like:

- They make team members compete with each other

- creating false narratives about peoples career progress

- people don’t want to share key and useful information even with team members

- false promises of verbally giving you a project and taking it away

- invalidating impact of a project because you don’t fit the narrative for a promotion just yet

- people get credit for work they didn’t do etc

How could I immediately tell that you worked at Amazon?

indeed haha

A good way to remember what you read is to become a domain expert and read everything about some particular domain you are interested in.

When you read in clusters around the same topic the same concepts will get reinforced over and over again.

A lot of new technology could potentially solve this problem.

There are certain types of roofs being installed called cool roofs that reflect heat and don’t absorb it that keeps the inside of building a little cooler.

For people who can afford new technology. For hundreds of millions to billions of people that's not an option.

Radiative cooling roofs, like those from sky cool systems actually cool your house during the day. I'm not sure how cost effective those are but the technology seems to be very promising.

Those radiate through the atmospheric microwave window, right?

Yep! Looks like the authors of the first paper I read on it (glass microspheres in silver-backed clear plastic film) are finally starting to commercialize it too... http://radi-cool.com/technologies/

Also air conditioning

Here is what helped me kick two major addictions in my life:

I smoked 3 packs of cigarettes a day for 6 years straight. It started to take a huge hit on my health and I quit.

I smoked marijuana every night for 4 years then quit and have just smoked it occasionally.

I started doing vipassana several years ago, everyday a little bit of a good chemical balance accumulates in my brain and body to the point where a lot of cravings start to disappear and you feel good in your head and body even without drugs like caffeine.

I wouldn’t say I’ve beat all my cravings but they’re 90% better ..

Another thing you have to understand about the us are weak family ties.

If you are unemployed in another country you could easily stay with some family member - cousin, uncle etc

This is not the case in the U.S

The scale that these companies operate on requires huge innovations in software engineering and computer science. Think about all the distributed systems that have come out of places like Facebook and Google over the last 2 decades.

Which they promptly keep to themselves and utilize to maximally exploit their users time and attention. Technology is a tool, not a generic force for good. Tools are agnostic to human value. If technology is being used exploitatively then it's a problem.

They don't keep it all to themselves, giant technology companies have open sourced things like mapreduce, kubernetes, golang, react, kafka, and more.

How many years did it take for Google to release MapReduce?

I think that's overstating. To be sure some real tech challenges in distributing work horizontally, but I don't think it's created anywhere near the amount of value that's come out of e.g. space race research.

The tech is less visible and more boring but I'm doubtful that this is true:

> I don't think it's created anywhere near the amount of value that's come out of e.g. space race

The space race gave us a lot of tangible, physics/materials/hard-engineering related tech. Software gives us a lot of internet infrastructure, communications, algorithms, etc. that are incredibly useful for the average consumer. Lots of people in this thread complaining about the negative value of ads and such, but the communications infrastructure, knowledge sharing, social change due to marginalized people being able to communicate things far and wide ... there's a lot of intangible benefits that have come as a direct result of focusing heavily on consumer internet.

vastly overrated compared to focusing on actual tech.

You don’t think map reduce, tensorflow and the countless other systems that have been open sourced haven’t had huge impact outside of their original use cases at these companies?

This is a really solid question with no clear cut answer on the surface. I wonder what sort of research is being done here?

Distributed systems that, more or less, are only really needed to run similar social networks as Facebook or Google?

That’s like saying the Cook maybe fat and morbidly obese but look at how efficiently he consumes such a large number of calories every day.

The real problem is that we don’t have good examples of leaders. A lot of the examples we look for in terms of whom to emulate comes from the pop culture view of corporate America and startups. At a previous company I worked at far too many people were trying to behave like Steve Jobs and give that as an excuse for being an asshole.

Some good examples, at least in my opinion:

* Jim Whitehurst (RedHat)

* Andy Grove (Intel)

* David Packard and Bill Hewlett (HP)

There are many more but they don't tend to show up in the news. They are people you meet or work for.

I think Bob Iger is also a really great example. Maybe not "super shy," but he's definitely pretty introverted. It's really interesting watching interviews with him.

Thanks, I need to look him up.

Ivy League schools already have pretty generous financial aid policies. Most students are not paying full tuition.

I’m currently doing this as well and for anyone else who is doing this you should continuously share your thoughts and progress on Twitter or your blog or YouTube or whatever. It’s easier to leave a track record and you’ll feel a lot better for doing it.