@drahardja When I was at Microsoft, I encountered the phenomenon of the -1x engineer. The people who threw a load of code at projects that then took at least one full-time engineer to fix bugs in and refactor. These people were often rapidly moved to positions where they could do less immediate damage, such as going to cross-group design meetings. Unfortunately, this raised their profile and got them promotions and transfers to other teams who did not initially know how much damage they’d done in their previous team.

Interestingly, if you look at commits, these people had the exact opposite profile to the so-called ‘ghost engineers’. The people fixing their bugs would often make a load of single-line changes, they would be the ones throwing a thousand lines of spaghetti into the repo at a time. Often, it wasn’t just that the code was bad, it was the design was fundamentally flawed and they were solving entirely the wrong problem, but they wrote a lot of code and so looked productive.

The best engineers increase functionality or performance and write a net negative volume of code.

The anti-science movement is going to be put in charge of the #NIH. The goal is simply to make the corruption endemic and hurt the American people. Don't let the liars attacking our intellectual institutions tell you otherwise.

(gift link)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/health/nih-trump-kennedy-bhattacharya.html?unlocked_article_code=1.eE4.U-1I.GLGq1hb1OpFA&smid=url-share

Has anyone made an activitypub server designed for blog/blog comments?

E.g. blog posts are posted as messages, and then people can reply to it to post comments to the blog. But before a comment is publicly posted it has to be approved by a moderator (another activitypub account would be easiest, e.g. a star or a boost).

MIT has a set of books labelled "Open Access" but it's a little clunky to find them on the MIT Press site, and so I've gone ahead and mirrored 400+ of them here:

https://archive.org/details/mit_press_open_access