I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.

First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.

That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.

Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.

Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

“Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good goat trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

-John Lewis

Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. Seriously. It’s an old joke, but it’s funny. I upvoted it, I was just playing off of it. Threaded humor is like jazz. We just have to play off of each other.

I’m afraid I can only give half marks for this one because that’s technically a molecular biology joke, not a chemistry joke. As a biologist, I’m very sympathetic. It’s just that DNA helicase isn’t going to be covered in the coursework of chemistry, much less in a freshman chemistry book.

On the other hand, a tasteful pun about bondage would have received full marks.

It’s a genre called magical realism.

I never read the books, but this sounds like what they mean.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful and kind response.

You have changed my mind on the subject. As a queer person it’s easy to see us as one big community, and I know that things like humor can read totally differently than how they sound over brunch. And as I said, I have always meant that kind of parodying in an explicitly trans supporting kind of way.

But your comment made me understand that those are not my jokes to make. We are all team rainbow, but the experiences of the trans community, especially now, belong to the trans community. While it was not my intention to trigger an emotional reaction, the fact that I did so and your very gentle and kind correction has made me resolve to not make that mistake again.

So you changed a mind today and educated a person. Thank you, and all love to you ❤️

That’s the combination I use for my luggage.

The joke is that it is emphatically not deadnaming. It’s disregarding a preferred nickname, but calling into the discussion the topic of deadnaming because he and his culture are massively transphobic.

I know we’re just two strangers passing in the night, but I want to be extremely clear that I would never deadname someone, regardless of their political beliefs or their stance relative to the trans community. I completely and totally respect the rights of all trans persons and for all people to define who they are.

I will also continue to call X Twitter and refer to it as deadnaming for the same reason, but if tomorrow Elon were to come out as trans I would respect their chosen names and pronouns.

I’m a cis gendered mostly gay man who has been active in the LGBT political and civil rights community since the days of ACT UP, I know the semiotics of genderism well enough to put together a course on it, and I’ve seen every episode of Pose.

I know your comment was very well meant, and I am in no way criticizing you for it. It’s coming from the best of places. I just want to be very clear where I’m coming from as well.

I think he meant “SECDEE!”

It’s just political posturing.

1. They don’t have a military. The National Guard units would come under the command of the President of the US, and any units in rebellion would know they’re facing courts martial for crimes that would be career limiting in that the penalties could include anything from life in prison to execution. It’s literally treason by the legal definition.
2. Even if any significant number of troops were to choose to violate the law, modern war isn’t about riflemen. There’s a massive infrastructure required to keep tanks and planes running, not to mention things like carrier battle groups. Northrop and Raytheon aren’t going to be forfeiting USG contracts to sell missile systems to Ohio.
3. Only the president has the nuclear codes, so nuclear blackmail can’t work either.

There isn’t going to be another civil war. Too much has changed between then and now in terms of military and economic organization. This is just Texas whacking off yet again, as they did under Obama and Bill Clinton.

The very real risks we’re facing are the election of Donald Trump - this is the biggest threat - and far right domestic terrorism. The former is an existential threat to the United States and should be treated as such. The latter is a law enforcement issue and should be treated as such. I suspect the Proud Boys are infiltrated all to hell as are the other major organizations, but there’s the potential for a significant amount of harm being done on a larger than 9/11 scale, although it’d be drawn out.

Not only is this just about the only deadnaming I support, I think we should all use the Spanish rolled “R.”

Also it’s the only time I’d be comfortable saying “No, where are you really from?”

TFW when all of your bugs are like cockroaches that run away from the light but hide in the dark where you can’t see them.

People also like to argue it’s an acronym, but do you pronounce NASA the same as you pronounce the first letter of each word of National Aeronautics and Space Administration?

Um, yes?

I’m assuming we’re talking about the two A letters here, since nothing comes to mind about a different pronunciation of N or S in American English.

In American English - at least in my experience - the first sound in aeronautics is exactly the same as in “air,” which is also the same as in “administration.” We don’t generally say it as in “ear-onautocs.”

Also, I’m curious - has anyone ever published a study describing whether or not the difference in pronunciation differs between sectors in the computer science community? Particularly, is there a difference between normal developers and those who write in a Lisp?

Wings evolve from legs though, generally speaking. This means that a four legged dragon with wings would have conceivably evolved from a six legged creature. You can get hand-wings or arm-wings, and we’re not entirely sure but think insect wings may have also evolved from legs or some other kind of similar structure.

But pretty much you can either have wings or legs/arms. You have to trade them in. That’s why the whole angel/demon thing doesn’t work either. The traditional harpies work but they’d be furry and not feathered. I haven’t worked out the wingspan for them but you could probably come up with a reasonable guess. They’d be more bat-people than bird-people, and I suspect that their chest areas would be less generously proportioned than is typically seen in the artwork. I’m not going more into the physics of that one though.

BFD.

For me your comment history shows about a half dozen comments from 6 months ago with body=“null”

I am selecting the files I wish to transfer and the ones I do not. It is my bandwidth. I also use reader mode as an accessibility feature.

The whole YOLO thing never made any sense to me. If you believe in reincarnation or an afterlife, then you have every excuse to risk your life doing whatever you want. There’s usually some kinds of moralistic restrictions, but except in the most extreme religious fundamentalist societies, I suspect wingsuiting on weekends is fair game. If you’re going to live forever no matter what you do, why not?

On the other hand, if you only live once - if you’re one and done - that seems like a demotivation to risk your life before you’re actually done with it.

There’s an old borscht belt joke about insurance - “What if something terrible happens, and you don’t die?”

Thank you for this - this was a fantastic explanation.

OBL had written and communicated frequently his opposition to what he saw as the US occupation of what he considers holy land, and it was very much a known driving factor in his actions. We knew about it since the Clinton administration.

I think it’s good and necessary to get rid of “they hate us for our freedom” as particularly stupid western propaganda. Of course they do. They see the West as a decadent cesspool that disobeys god. So does the Islamic Revolution government in Iran, so does North Korea, so does China, and so on. That’s not why you 9/11, any more than you invade Vietnam to end oppression and bring peace. And they’re definitely pissed about Israel too, but my point is that everyone up to and including (iirc) the Red Army Faction issued statements about Palestine. Palestine is a cause celebre. There’s a saying “When all was said and done, more was said than done.” That’s what we’ve been seeing since the Yom Kippur war. OBL could have gone after Israel. There could have been Al Qaeda fighters on their borders. Hell, they could have been funneling weapons in and training Palestinian fighters. It’s lip service and de rigueur.

The problem comes in when people view international relations like a Marvel movie with good guys and bad guys. Note that I am absolutely not saying everyone is the same. As a member of Team Rainbow, I’d rather live in the US than Saudi Arabia, and I’d rather live in California than Texas. The hero story - Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill - has deep roots in American exceptionalism and the beacon of democracy stuff. While not exactly false, it’s also not exactly true, and the idea was weaponized deliberately by people like Leo Strauss at Chicago to create a mythical America that people would think about using exactly the ideas you’re talking about. That’s where “they hate us for our freedoms” comes from. They don’t. They hate us because they’d rather be the ones in charge.

From a moral perspective, I consider something like 9/11 and the bombing of Hiroshima at the same level, just to be clear. That’s not a popular opinion with a lot of people.

But at the end of the day, you have to decide whether Hitler had a point, Pol Pot had a point, Idi Amin had a point, or whether, despite them having a point of view, we’d rather see an international order one way or the other.

I’ve stopped working on that kind of thing because I do believe it’s morally ambiguous at best. I do think people should be fully aware of the motivating factors of all of the actors involved - whether AQ, PLO, IRA, UK, USA, and so on. Just don’t take any of it at face value and instead think about actual, not idealized, outcomes.