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Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#391

Post by JorgeGT »

prepend wrote: post #305
canada_dry wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son and I met Stephen and his son at the NY Maker Faire a few years ago. As you might imagine, his son (I think he was around 11 then) takes after his father and was heavily into programming already. Imagine having him as your father! Lucky bugger.

I saw a cool presentation by wolfram’s son last year. He seemed early twenties. It was a neat demo of using population data and quickly running it through Mathematica for nice chloropleth maps, charts, etc. He was pretty cool and answered questions afterwards. He was showing how the tool is useful for social science, but it’s so expensive. I hope that if Wolfram ever retires, he will open source it because it’s so us…

At least for non-commercial use, Mathematica for the Raspberry Pi is free! https://www.wolfram.com/raspberry-pi/

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#392

Post by sonofaragorn »

_lbaq wrote: post #236
eitland wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... whats standing inbetween great communication in remote teams are often trival, easily fixable things like poor software and hardware. Ironically for a big chunk of the time I've been working as an engineer, people have been falling back to consumer software instead of using broken entreprise videoconferencing. > When it comes to hardware, people use whatever headset and camera they have, connected to wifi serve…

I may have formulated this a bit poorly, by exemplifying my experience, what I meant was that people that work remote and uses voice, video, chat, should spend more time making sure their setup works really well, with good audio and video quality.

Any resources you could share along these lines? I'm definitely interested in improving my setup.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#393

Post by anjc »

duado wrote: post #238
ranie93 wrote: post #22

Through the article I found he livestreams many of his meetings on Twitch! This is particularly candid moment I happen to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGjvFyRk_4I&feature=youtu.be... edit: I wasn't aware of the negative opinions regarding his ego, but from listening to this meeting I can say they aren't unsubstantiated!

This is crazy. He is the CEO of an 800 person company and the people talking to him sound like they are completely unprepared for the conversation. Of course the third argument needs to be fucking documented! Their response should have been "yes, this is a clear bad, we'll fix the documentation by tomorrow's meeting." Not just sit silently on the call while the CEO has to go do it themselves.

It's obvious that these people are not stupid and understand that interfaces need to be documented. They are instead confused. I've had micromanagers like SW before, and have been confused many times at the state of something precisely because the micromanager took it upon themselves to "do it themselves" on the fly, just like SW did here.

Admitting that it's clearly bad and saying you'll fix it by tomorrow would be a neverending pursuit, because the micromanager's meddling is constant and touches everything.

No doubt somebody else will now be confused that this third parameter is suddenly documented when it was a task delegated to them, and somebody else is confused because they were told to deprecate the parameter.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#394

Post by ianai »

jessriedel wrote: post #363
fnordsensei wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a bit far. From my perspective, the point is that looking at inefficiencies in isolation is as bad as looking at benefits in isolation. Making a frank assessment about the efficiency of meetings is probably of limited value in and of itself in abstractly assessing the overall equation of trade-offs in running a distributed vs collocated business. Even more so when concretely assessing this particular company.

There's an asymmetry between the strong negative reaction to criticism but not to praise, even though criticism is more likely to offer substantive points. This suggests to me that people are mostly offended at the arrogance of the commenter rather than working about the risk that we could all become mistaken through reading overconfident criticism.

Every bully I remember tried to mask their bullying as “helpful” or positive in some way.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#396

Post by dennisgorelik »

Stephen Wolfram created his remote organization in spite of Richard Feynman advise:

~~~~~~~~~

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/you-dont-understand-ord...

You say you want to create your own environment - but you will not be doing that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in - but you will not be working in this environment - you will be administering it - and the administration environment is not what you seek - is it? You won't enjoy administrating people because you won’t succeed in it.

You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way.

~~~~~~~~~

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#397

Post by igravious »

saosebastiao wrote: post #344
chubot wrote: post #138

Some pretty cool things: - He's a CEO who dogfoods his own software! Not only that, he seems to be one of its most prolific users. That's amazing. Having worked for over a decade at Google, I sometimes wonder if the founders still use the products. Larry Page used to always harp on latency (rightly), and now Google products are slower than ever. - He's a remote CEO, and supports remote working! It sounds like the com…

> Having worked for over a decade at Google, I sometimes wonder if the founders still use the products. Larry Page used to always harp on latency (rightly), and now Google products are slower than ever. Is this for real? I've never felt like google's products have prioritized latency. Android latency has been atrocious from the very beginning. And gmail and google docs are easily some of the slowest webapps out there…

https://developers.google.com/speed/

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#398

Post by igravious »

smileypete wrote: post #333
kkarakk wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just burn em in a trashcan

I use a cylinder of wire mesh on something heatproof, in the garden. Better than a cheap shredder by miles, and some nice heat that makes it pleasant in wintertime. :)

Domestic burning of household waste is illegal where I live, I would have thought it would be illegal most places in the Western world by now. Burn paper = CO2; shred paper = more paper.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#399

Post by laumars »

jessriedel wrote: post #362
laumars wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to look at a something in isolation and assume you are qualified to cast judgement on where it can be improved but often a decision might have both a negative consequence and also a much further reaching positive consequences too. The sort of people who like to judge things in isolation miss those kinds of complexities. This kind of arm-chair critic seems to be on the rise on HN as well. People making short…

If you think they are overconfident, then say so. If you think their analysis misses something, then say so. But being against assessment in general is not a good approach.

> If you think they are overconfident, then say so.

I thought I literally did just that?

> If you think their analysis misses something, then say so.

I've done that in the past and it usually just descends into stupid augments where the ill-informed only dig their heals in deeper rather than acknowledging their mistake. I mean if they weren't someone who was over confident about their own opinion then they wouldn't be the sort to make those kind of remarks to begin with.

> But being against assessment in general is not a good approach.

I'm not against assessments in general. I'm against specific types of non-constructive assessments from people who are just blatant armchair critics.

If someone has a the experience to offer a constructive assessment then odds are they wouldn't delivery it as a passive-aggressive one liner.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#400

Post by SZJX »

pault wrote: post #369
yiyus wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it be antisocial or uncomfortable? I also prefer to see my family in real life than by telephone, but that does not mean I find phones antisocial. To repeat my point: I understand there are advantages in working from home, and that for some people the way of socializing may be one of these advantages. What I found surprising was that pault did not understand that I prefer personal interactions when there a…

Your original comment did not say that you prefer personal interactions. You presented a bunch of your opinions about the effectiveness of in-person communication as if they were facts. Several more times in this thread you've written that it's just a preference then immediately asserted that in person communication is superior. That's what I didn't understand. Also, you mentioned that you never worked at a remote fi…

This is an interesting perspective. I guess having the company set up in a remote-first manner vs. just having a few employees working remote are indeed very different scenarios then, and if one is ever to work remotely, they should only aim for a remote-first company.
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