I'm torn on this. Often I feel like the parent, but I recognize maybe I'm being stubborn.

You say libraries purpose is to help the community. If that's true, what you're saying makes sense. On the other hand, if their purpose is to promote literacy and reading, well, this is off mission.

I think of the former mission as more being a community center. My mother loves this form and spends a lot of time at her local library. I'm a curmudgeon and an intellectual snob apparently. I don't even like them having popular books, but I'm trying to be less rigid and more honest here and admit that some scope creep is probably healthy and the question is just where you draw the line.

I don't go to libraries very often anymore because so often they're effectively homeless shelters. Should I not mind this? I don't know, 'should' is doing a lot here, but the truth is I used to love going to libraries, browsing books, and soak up the general scholastic atmosphere.

Homeless shelter just isn't that much fun for me. If I want to be virtuous and go to a soup kitchen or otherwise try to interact with and help homeless people, I'll just do that.

What people in general don't seem to realize by taking things that almost everyone likes (libraries, as one example) and requiring one to go through some virtue test to go is that in the end, public support for the good is going to collapse, it will lose funding, and then no one can have it.

I think we're going to lose libraries.

> Let the library know about specific incidents so they can handle it.

Library staff is not equipped to kick homeless people out for fear that it will cause a scene and possibly escalate to an aggressive situation. They will just call the police. So then the police will come and remove the person, but they will come back the next week, or maybe the next day. So then what happens? Call the police again? This time maybe they get charged with trespassing and put in jail? This goes on and on. The library is supposed to be a safe place but that also means that it is somewhat of a helpless place for staff and quiet citizens. And over time it slowly becomes more and more uncomfortable to the point that regular people just stop going.

It's nobody's "fault". It's just a tragedy of the circumstances.

If you want to hire people who share your values and your values include moral responsibility for the megacorp one works for, you’re right not to hire from companies you feel are immoral.

I personally don’t ascribe corporate amorality (as opposed to immorality) to all who work for it and thus with narrow exceptions would blacklist someone for working at a company who, e.g., has a CEO I dislike, practices wage suppression, etc.

I would strongly consider against hiring someone who worked in certain addiction based industries such as tobacco or gaming (not gamedev, the other kind).

Thanks, that's a much better photo. You can really see the effects of light pollution well in that one too.

On H1B, its abuses, and big tech capture in general, it's a shame we can't generally admit that the democrats are terrible on this without others perceiving this as an endorsement of everything the other side wants to do.

Both major parties suck really bad here. I'm not partisan anymore, I'll vote split-ticket for whatever individual best represents my individual interests because if I'm going to exercise my apparently useless vote, I might as well use it to meekly voice my preferences in the extremely remote chance someone will decide pretending to give a shit would be helpful for them.

Our problems predate the current regime and they'll last past it. Pretty pessimistic if I'm honest.

I have a CS PhD from a good (but not top 5) program and have published in top venues. I perceived my chances of getting a job at Microsoft Research (MSR) to be low (on par with getting a faculty position at a top place) and didn't feel like going through the unpleasant prospect of coming up with job talks and slides, sending off to universities while I'm at it, writing diversity statements, etc, for fairly low chances at getting something at MSR.

I could have gotten something at a 'lesser' place, but my guess is they'd be even more likely to be disrupted by budget cuts.

Even getting one of these roles though leaves you in a position where the next guy who wants to save money can just axe the whole division and then you're on your ass and due to a general paucity of research roles and high competition, this can be very, very bad.

I went bog-standard industry and the PhD probably didn't help much there. My industry job largely wastes my training and research experience. In retrospect, I was foolish to get a PhD and people choosing to not do so are generally making the right choice.

> then you're on your ass

My understanding from PhDs in the research business at major companies is that once you're in the club, it's a lot easier to get a position at another one.

(No, not me, I don't have a PhD.)

You'd want to keep your network alive. Publish, be on program committees doing reviews, etc. If the number of jobs is fairly static and you're doing this and your area doesn't collapse, (e.g., the AI winter), your network can probably land you okay. Networks in the academic world is a pretty big deal and it's a small world. Some people like doing this kind of 'service,' I wasn't one of them.

If there are general headwinds (i.e., research spending in general drops, which seems to have been an ongoing trend), there is almost definitionally more people getting cast off than there are actual researcher roles, not including new entrants to the market.

As with all things, the better off you do (very high quality lab, for instance), the more places you have to try to grab onto if you get cast off.

My peers from grad school have gone every which route, industrial labs, academia, more applied research-lite positions, finance, and fairly direct software engineering jobs. A decent chunk that started in academia or at labs have migrated into more standard software engineering roles. Personally, I really miss research, but it is what it is.

I have anecdata that shows that plenty of intelligent, highly motivated, affable people with (hard science) PhDs still struggle to obtain employment of the "club" caliber, even after they're in the "club".

From a business perspective, did it work? Was the team more, less, or equally effective than one where you didn't expend the time and expense of hiring a more homogenous group? Was turnover better or worse?

I know you can't absolutely know the counter-factual, but I've always wondered this. Incidentally, when I was a young man and CS major, I changed majors and went into a different field because I wanted to be around more women, but I've never known if being outside that kind of monoculture actually is better for the business or not.

Is the business perspective the right one to go with?

Let's say it's legal to discriminate on race in hiring in the US. Then a Japanese restaurant hires only Japanese workers because they find customers prefer it. Do we want to have this?

It's a business. The business perspective is what's relevant.

The purpose of our state is to provide for its citizens. So we decided to use a market economy because it seems the most efficient way to do that. But we make up the rules that it runs by and we can change the rules as we see fit.

So it seems now we are saying DEI is not a good rule. Can we make a better rule or is the goal of that rule not good?

There are multiple axes upon which something like this can be evaluated. I'm not against us as a society collectively deciding we should enforce rules that may be counter to business logic (e.g., child labor laws to pick something uncontroversial).

When something is more controversial, it's common to look at the business case. It has commonly been argued that 'diversity' is good business even disregarding any desire one may have related to restorative justice.

Put simply, if it's good business and good morals we should do it, if it's bad business and good morals or good business and bad morals, we have to weigh the balance of it (bad business can lead to morally bad outcomes, like layoffs), and if it's bad business and bad morals we ought not do it at all. I was just focusing on the business case under the assumption that the poster believed it to be good morally.

sure, but absent infinite energy supplies with which much is possible, it falls under the general rubric of "no free lunch," which often in the physical world may fall under the conservation of energy (e.g., perpetual motion machines like wind turbines on cars) or the laws of thermodynamics.

The layman's "no free lunch" is a pretty good heuristic though.

The truck isn't to my taste, but absent any indication that this was due to something unique to this automobile I don't see why it's news anymore than people tragically dying in a Camry running into a tree at 3:00 am after a party.

There's nothing in the brief article to indicate any Cybertruck specific issues .. external bystanders were able to pull a survivor from the vehicle (eg: doors sprung open or were able to be opened), speed seems to be the probable cause, etc.

The only unique to Tesla possibility here (unconfirmed) would be "late night drunks relying on self driving" .. but that remains to be reported.

> would be "late night drunks relying on self driving" .. but that remains to be reported.

Alcohol and speed are the cause of _most_ fatalities on our roads. It's a pretty good bet.

I'm personally waiting for the story wherein a police officer finds an unattended child in one of these vehicles because the parents couldn't be bothered to bring their child somewhere. Much more likely to happen once these systems become more affordable.

Absolutely alcohol and speed kill across the board for all vehicles .. the point here is this isn't specific to a Cybertruck (or self driving vehicle in general) unless it's also drunks putting their faith in FSD and not paying attention and being ready to take over.

FSD doesn't speed.

If you define 'speeding' as driving above the speed limit, then FSD absolutely speeds.

"FSD (Supervised) can contextually drive above the speed limit or the predicted road speed to match the flow of traffic. [The Max Speed Offset Setting] specifies the maximum speed it is allowed to drive as a percentage offset applied to the speed limit of the road or the predicted road speed."

People can configure this to 40% above the speed limit if they wish. I'm not sure what the default is.

I own FSD. FSD will travel at the speed of traffic. The % above the speed limit you set doesn't change how it drives for the most part.

The only way FSD will go wildly faster than traffic is if you push the accelerator on purpose, at which point the car beeps and reminds you that it won't stop while you're pushing it.

Have you seen a picture with the doors opened

No. I read the text and had no access to pictures.

Assuming the text reporting to be correct, then perhaps they had a can opener and pulled them out through the roof, maybe they broke a window, perhaps the entire car split open.

It's possible the rescuer had a crowbar in their car, there are crowbars in all our vehicles.

Many vehicles have mechanical door latches

Yes.

The cybertruck (thankfully) doesn't have full self driving.

EDIT: I'm wrong, it launched without it, but it's since been rolled out.

I have a cybertruck. FSD rolled out weeks ago.

Oh, that's good to know. I knew it launched without it and didn't think it'd be updated so fast.

Probably something like requiring an advanced license, like heavy truck drivers require, to operate vehicles that cross certain mass and speed thresholds would be reasonable.

I like a fast car and I've done a little track time, etc. It's not the same as controlling a Camry and recognizing that would be reasonable.

I work at one of the big companies and some people do that even here. People just talk about their experience or other systems that they know. It always feels conservative to me, as often it's said to suggest emulating what some other group or company did to solve an often superficially similar problem, but with entirely different constraints. I think some people with certain kinds of thought patterns just pattern match and try to apply past experience a bit too broadly.