Idk about this, I have gotten almost every job I have ever had on cold-apply, including internships. The only one that wasn't that way was talking to a (internal) recruiter in college.
Don't discount that path. I did not have the best grades or anything, but (IMO) a mix of skills that was a good fit for the job at hand and confidence I could apply them.
Most of the people you will interact with in the (corporate) world have no understanding of their own understanding, and are operating in unknown unknown territory. Being confident, demonstrating competence in something jointly known/unknown or known/known helps a ton.
That's fascinating. I know only a handful of people who got their jobs through cold applying. The majority of my friends were either referred by colleagues or received inbound recruiter email. That is, with the exception of my cohort in CS undergrad; we attended our university career fair for out entry into the workforce.
It's heartening to know that the cold apply method can be successful.
Cold applying works reasonably well IME, but you have to be able to nail the interviews for it to make sense. I'm great at what I do, I only apply to jobs which should be a good fit, and I still only get interviews 1-2% of the time. I then get offers 95% of the time, which keeps the process manageable.
I've gotten 3/4 of my tech jobs through cold applying though [0], and been offered many, many more. I know it's possible.
Ok that note, I love my current job, and I would've never found anything like it through my network. Cold applying was a literal game-changer in that regard.
[0] One was through Google Foo Bar, and one was through Codefights (now Codesignal or something), so those were slightly more tailored than cold applying.
Every job I’ve ever gotten has been cold apply, with no degree except a GED high school diploma equivalent. You can certainly get jobs through cold apply, I get a job offer for basically every job that gets to the interview, even when I hadn’t worked as a dev I had two job offers I had to pick from. I like to think my passion, knowledge, and genuine interest shines through in my cover letters and my interviews.
When did you last do that? I’ve heard from multiple friends that the job market has completely collapsed in the last couple of years & that it’s much tougher than in the past.
For me it is more curiosity about what they are doing. If you work in the same field you should be able to have a chat. If it doesn't flow you can't work there if you get along perfectly it would be dumb not to hire you.
The thing is, some people don't view "maintaining networks" as work, and it's something that not only comes naturally when they do it, but they actually do it naturally, automatically.
These people have a real advantage.
It's like how I may have a real durable advantage because I really enjoy reading about software, computers, etc, so I just consume a lot of information passively.
Or maybe how I get a lot of practice arguing or convincing people on reddit or space battles.com.
If someone viewed reading Hacker News as work, I'm not sure they'd EVER do it.
That's where the author is, and it's fine. IMO, these people tend to be better represented online, because getting a job through connections/influence/visibility is necessarily going to be louder than clicking submit on a form.
My current job was done via a connection, but every previous job has been through spamming my resume to every job I'm even remotely qualified for and/or I find interesting.
I have a degree now, but I dropped out of college the first time around, and so I didn't have any connections in the software industry, or anywhere really. When I dropped out, I assumed any desk job career was out the window. I applied to Aldi, Lowes, Burger King, McDonalds, Starbucks, and Taco Bell in one day (driving and applying in person).
On a lark, and almost as a joke to myself, I applied to exactly one software job from an ad on Craigslist, and they were the only ones who actually got back to me, thus jumpstarting my software career. I've had a lot of jobs in a lot of different places, and despite knowing lots of interesting people I've only managed to convert that to a job one time.
I have no idea how people use friendly connections to get jobs.
Same. Much more difficult as an immigrant because you have to prove a lot more than other candidates but I have always managed to get a job with cold-applications, zero referrals, which even I find interesting because I dozens of people at different companies, have thousands of followers on LinkedIn, and am super active in local meetups as an organizer, which means lots of locals know me, at least by name, but still no good referrals whenever I apply for a job, which is why I always resort to cold apply.
Congrats!
I have never heard anyone saying that this "easy apply" function/button leads to _anything_ - Ive tried it myself couple of times, I do not get event a rejection: Its just like its going to dev null
> I have ever had on cold-apply, including internships
FYI cold-applying to bigtech (e.g., FAANG) is like throwing your application away. Pro-tip: ping people on LinkedIn and ask for a referral. If you're a decent candidate they'll happily do it because there's a O(1k) referral/hiring bonus at all of these companies.
As far as I know, you still cannot rename a resource. Insanity.
I don't even work with it that much and have a laundry list of complaints about the weird little edge cases or funky pieces of documentation required to make things work.
man, I fucking love concrete. So cool. If you like concrete, check out [Tyler Ley's youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@TylerLey/videos). Anyways, I am curious why Meta is investing in this. They use a lot of concrete no doubt, but it's nothing compared to a highway, all the commercial builds, etc. I would have expected them to release something like a very general materials optimization framework to explore a space, but glad to see it applied specifically to concrete.
There are a lot of alternative cements to portland, interested to see if that is in-scope. The list of admixtures is also very long and also fairly secretive. UHPC is a pretty cool development, and I am especially bullish about removing rebar and replacing it with FRP bar to limit the eventual rust cracking that comes with the gradual march of carbonation.
Anyways, very cool and looking forward to the mix developments that come out of this framework.
good. There are plenty of laws, especially around technology, that deserve a good public mocking.
At least in the US, you have 70+ year old lawmakers proposing (not even writing) laws they do not understand, passed to them by opaque groups with a obscured, albeit clear, interest.
See the latest age verification bills passed by Meta through a convoluted web of influence. Bring back the technocrats.
Regardless of whether this actually works (I have my doubts, but also understand it might be difficult to get range time on a device like this :)), it exposes a fundamental issue with arms control today.
Small firearms are hundreds of years old. Drones have been commercially available for many years and are easily modifiable into something that is 80% as good as what is currently being fielded in Ukraine.
It is not technically feasible to restrict someone from assembling basic, non-firearm-specific components to build a firearm. In the US, there is an increasing effort at the state level to serialize, restrict, and document individual firearm parts. However, an 80% good barrel can be fabricated at home, a 100% as good receiver can be printed on any recent 3D printer, and the rest of the parts (bolt, trigger assembly, etc) can be designed around easy home fabrication (see FGC-9). There is no practical way to trace, regulate, or stop behavior.
It isn't possible to restrict someone from building a capable drone either. The firmware is opensource, the parts can be ordered from almost any marketplace, and an energetic payload can easily be made by any amateur chemist from chemicals in any hardware or camping store. EW is often touted as a solution, but is frequently beaten by tethered drones. Cheap COTS IMUs are getting good enough to provide surprisingly accurate short-term INS, to say nothing of autonomous systems that need no external input past initial targeting.
I personally think this is a far bigger risk than most countries realize, largely because they are 10-15 years behind the technology. I believe this will force most governments into spending an order of magnitude more to defend their institutions at every level, not just core government security.
At least in the US, these threat vectors will absolutely be used to justify intrusions into civil liberties, but no amount of infringement will be able to even partially mitigate these threats. I think this should start to play out over the next 5-10 years.
These discussions always focus around enforcement and never on alignment. The moat for this stuff historically has never been strict enforcement; it has been that the people who have the know-how on how to do it have nothing to gain by doing it, since they are well-educated and benefit from the current socioeconomic order (they have no motive to change it; rather, they want to climb it).
This is shifting. First, economic stratification is getting worse, and as economic mobility declines people start looking for alternatives. (See all of Gen Z cheering for Luigi Mangione). Second, AI will enable people who are less educated to build these kinds of weapons.
For example, you can use a Kalman filter to greatly improve the data you get from an IMU and GPS via sensor fusion. Before, this required a specialist skillset; now you can get a "good enough" implementation by prompting Claude.
I really wish the debate around this stuff wasn't framed in terms of preventative enforcement because it naturally leads towards more enforcement (when your only tool is a hammer...). The root of the issue is that the government does not trust its citizenry to follow the law without Big Brother watching. That in and of itself is a symptom of a larger grave political crisis in America: the decay of the state's political legitimacy.
> The root of the issue is that the government does not trust its citizenry to follow the law without Big Brother watching.
People did fly two planes into the World Trade Center. That was a thing that happened. Along with all the regular mass shootings, all the way up to Vegas.
> That in and of itself is a symptom of a larger grave political crisis in America: the decay of the state's political legitimacy.
Well, only because people are actively chiselling away at it because they think they will be able to loot the ruins.
your argument here rests on whether someone with the know how to do these types of things will not be able to find a job in the near future. I’d call this unlikely
There are no few smart, knowledgeable people in the world (perhaps self-educated, perhaps not) who for a huge variety of reasons may be either unwilling or unable to hold a typical job.
I’ll bet most of us here know at least a few people along these lines.
I am certainly pro T2A but your argument doesn't hold - laws to regulate arms are not effective only in a binary way - if they reduce the number of arms they are doing what they say on the tin.
Whether we should be trying to regulate arms is another issue.
I am not arguing laws need to be binary-effective. You are right, most of the current laws are designed to slowly erode public support for the 2nd amendment by making the barrier to entry so absurdly high that the average person cannot feasibly own firearms.
I am arguing that the new laws being proposed (e.g serializing other firearms components, ammo serialization, assault weapons bans, higher gun-owner standards) have absolutely no bearing on an entirely new source of firearms. Many Dem-controlled states have passed "ghost gun" regulation, but there is no real enforcement mechanism and it's mostly an additional charge to tack on after an actual crime has been committed.
You can see states like CA trying to go after 3D printers, but I suspect this will fail. There is no software out there that can realistically determine whether a part is a firearm component, other than dumb hashes of known parts. 3DP is a general tool, it is like trying to ban milling machines, files, or basic handtools.
I see it the other way round: there's no way to achieve public safety without drastically reduced gun ideology and availability, but there's no way to do that while the second amendment is in place, so you get both illiberal, ineffective and irrelevant laws and regular mass shootings.
Let's assume you get rid of the second amendment and totally ban civilian gun ownership in the US. No legal firearms other than for the police/military, full confiscation of guns, etc. Let's also assume the public is broadly supportive of this effort, and that there are not large black-market caches for sale.
I am arguing there will still be a significant number mass shootings/casualty events, political assassinations using a firearm, etc, and that the only way to effectively prevent them is to roll back most of the bill of rights.
The gun is a very old piece of technology and you do not need a sophisticated one to kill people effectively. Shinzo Abe was assassinated with a gun that could be described as primitive at best. Mangione used a 3dp firearm to kill the United Health CEO. Rebels in Myanmar are fighting the military junta with 3d printed small arms.
I am fundamentally arguing that the capacity of any one person has dramatically (100,000x) increased since the bill of rights was written, for better and for worse.
To be clear, I fully support the bill of rights and want to see it expanded. However, I reject the idea that simply eliminating the 2nd amendment and removing guns from civilian ownership can fix the underlying issues. I think you will see "casual" shootings and hopefully even mass shootings go down, but they will not go away and I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world.
> I am arguing there will still be a significant number mass shootings/casualty events
These are extremely rare in other countries? It's very hard to achieve true zero, yes, but the UK has about 30 gun deaths per year, almost all of which are crime-related rather than mass casualty events. Those tend to be rare, and tend to be bombs. The Shinzo Abe assassination was also such a "black swan".
> I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world
Why do you think that would be, given (important!) your premise "the public is broadly supportive of this effort"?
We're skipping a lot of discussion to focus on the UK, which has arms measures that exceed (in some, but not all, cases) even the far-fetched hypothetical I threw out above. Shinzo Abe is not a black swan in the context of Japanese political history nor the history of political assassinations generally, but I digress.
To answer the point, there is no technical limitation keeping people in the UK from building, creating and shooting homemade or otherwise improvised guns that I am aware of.
What the UK does have is universal healthcare, a 3-4x lower incarceration rate and dramatically improved social safety services.
I think you can group the majority of shooters into three buckets -- ideologically driven (think white supremacists, Islamic terrorists, anarchists, etc), the mentally ill, and the criminally motivated (gang shootings mostly). The US has only amplifying factors for all three groups.
For idealgoues, there is no wider span of acceptable discourse than in the US. Commonly espoused views in the US legislative and executive branches are criminal offenses in a number of peer countries, e.g hate speech is still constitutionally protected speech in the US. The rhetoric is insane, accusations of nazism, faciscm from the left and similar accusations from the right, and generally a very high degree of polarization.
For the mentally ill, the support system in the US is abysmal, with cracks big enough to drive a truck through. There are multiple books written about the failures of America's mental health system, I will not belabor the point.
For the criminally motivated, gun crime is concentrated in young, mostly black men in decaying post-industrial cities in the midwest and (south)east. They have almost zero political capital, low social mobility and very little pubic support. Other countries certainly have their ghettos, but take a trip to Gary, IN or Jackson, MS. You would be hard pressed think you are in the richest, most powerful country in the world.
Fundamentally, the point still stands. There is not a feasible technical path to keep firearm technology out of a massive number of hands. The skills needed to produce a functional firearm have never been lower, and they will keep declining until almost zero. The only technical (preventative) measures run squarely into the bill of rights -- think a lowered bar for a warrant or infringements on the 1st amendment limiting the sharing of technical knowledge. Changing the culture -- around mental health, around poverty, and around power is very difficult, so we will see an attempted erosion of civil liberties, just like 9/11 was used to erode civil liberties with the introduction of the Patriot Act and similar legislation.
Again, I am arguing devils advocate because I would be quite unhappy with increased forearm regulation - I live in a very rural area where firearms are a tool and a cultural artifact, and I like them.
With that said - almost nobody goes through the trouble of manufacturing anything. Making it difficult to access firearms means that most people who might think about getting a gun will just get something else. Your opponents not having a gun also makes you less likely to feel like you need one.
I won't argue that it's possible to deter a sufficiently motivated person, but most people are not that motivated. Making undesirable things 'uphill' is pretty effective.
Obama and Biden were the best gun salesman the USA has had in awhile. It's not clear they reduce the number of arms, depending on the culture. In USA culture we've seen the number of arms in civilian hands expand even as regulations increase.
Idk about this, I have gotten almost every job I have ever had on cold-apply, including internships. The only one that wasn't that way was talking to a (internal) recruiter in college.
Don't discount that path. I did not have the best grades or anything, but (IMO) a mix of skills that was a good fit for the job at hand and confidence I could apply them.
Most of the people you will interact with in the (corporate) world have no understanding of their own understanding, and are operating in unknown unknown territory. Being confident, demonstrating competence in something jointly known/unknown or known/known helps a ton.
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