The saga of tracking down an NVIDIA driver bug having to do with their Vulkan APIs and Window's absolutely insane labyrinthine APIs for dealing with high-DPI monitors.
I've been working on Anukari for a while now, and this is the first public demo. It's been quite fun to figure out how to simulate hundreds of masses and thousands of springs in real-time with no hiccups, with the physics simulation stepping forward 48,000 times per second.
It runs on the GPU and it took a lot of tricks to make that work reliably. The biggest difficulty has to do with the fact that the model is user-editable in real time, so all the GUI stuff has to be synchronized to the audio rendering thread, and due to the latency constraints that has to be done without locks, allocation, etc.
Hopefully sometime in the near future I'll have time to write up a detailed explanation of the design!
After reading this recent story [1] about record labels trying to kill AI-generated music, I realized that the record labels may be our best hope against the upcoming AI Apocalypse, as they'll obviously have the best technology to combat it. :P
Your theory seems to rely on a rather uncharitable set of assumptions.
I wonder if an alternate explanation could be that the manager job role tends to involve a lot of talking to other people, and that there's something advantageous, or at least more fun, about doing that in person?
Or perhaps the type of people that become managers tend to lean more toward extroversion, and thus on average managers enjoy in-person social interaction more?
I often meet and talk with people for 6 hours in a day. Have you ever talked on video calls for 6 hours in a day? Every person has a slightly different quality of microphone setup, you can't make eye contact, it's harder to read social cues, you can't get fresh air by doing a walking 1:1, etc. It kind of sucks, like, a lot. Especially for people, like myself, who ended up managing because they simply enjoy being around other people. It's just not that fun to talk to a plastic rectangle all day.
Now, I do still sneak in some IC work from time to time, and it's obviously great to do that remotely. And I understand that most of my reports spend most of their time doing that kind of work. So I wouldn't push them to go back into the office; remote work is the right thing for the team overall.
But if you surveyed me, asking whether I'd like to return to the office? Fuck yeah, I'd like to. But my motivation has nothing to do with your ungracious views on managers needing to feel like bigshots. I'm sorry that you've evidently worked with poor management to the extent that this is your worldview.
Yea I agree with this. Ever looked at an executive calendar? All day meetings. That’s almost all they do. Relationships are critical, so of course they’d prefer in person.
The problem is imposing that view on everyone, forgetting their individual contributor roots
C'mon, if you enjoyed social interaction so much, you'd be a salesperson; not a manager talking to the same people all the time. Nope, you like being in charge and 'directing' people.
In 13 years of software development, I've never had a productive meeting where a manager was present. Only when engineers get together to argue and hammer out details is it productive. If a manager is present, he/she makes the decision or just agrees with the lead engineer and no further discussion takes place.
So, my view is that managers are useless and a net drain on the company wallet. Walking around, making decisions you're not qualified to make, approving time off, talking to people for 6 hours, time tracking, pushing employees to work more is the most useless role ever created.
My favorite development job is one that had no manager. The lead communicated with the director, who reported to the CEO. It was great because the lead was an engineer that coded with the rest of us. No meetings or other useless activities. When the company was purchased, the software architect was made the new manager as part of the new structuring. Immediately, he instituted metrics and developer rules. Within a year most engineers had left. Thank you management...
At my last job, we 3 engineers were doing fine without a manager, once again the lead took care of things and reported to the director. But the director's best friend needed a job and became our new manager. And here we go again... Within a year and a half I'm the only engineer left on the team and I end up quiting 3 months after shouldering the load and working 7 days a week.
I don't trust any manager and I go out of my way to avoid them even as far as refusing promotions to avoid more interaction with one.
I'm a manager and I talk people using teleconferencing apps 6+ hours a day. I like it better than doing it at the office, where I comically have to use the same technology to talk to people in other offices.
I'd rather stay 6+ hours in meetings in more comfortable clothes (loose shorts) and sitting in a more comfortable chair - not to mention the lack of people wanting me to leave the meeting room because of THEIR meeting.
Yes, communication suffers to a certain extent, but occasional visits to the office eliminates the problems with 1:1s you mention. And at least in my experience, this small degradation of in-person communication isn't such a big deal.
So if you surveyed me, I'd say "Please let me stay home!". Also, if IC work is "great to do remotely", I'd rather see my team at peak productivity remotely than indulging any possible desire I could have to talk to them in person. As a manager, I exist to unblock and help my team, so what's best for the team is best for me.
I have been the CEO of a successful company for 5+ years and a senior director/manager in others. I very rarely had meetings. If you pick the right people for the job, and make sure they know what the goals/deadline is, then the best thing you can do is to not bother them with meetings. Find ways to measure progress without interrupting the team flow. Make it clear that you expect the team to solve problems themselves without constantly asking for permission etc. It isn’t rocket science. I spent about an hour a day working when managing. The rest was me doing my hardest to not slow down the team that was doing the actual work. It worked really really well.
> where I comically have to use the same technology to talk to people in other offices.
For my current company, I have no team members in my local office. So for the short period where I was going into the office, I never had an in person meeting.
Ahhh, sorry if it came off that way. Honestly, I have good friends that are managers. And I think I work for good managers. I just think it is probably not as satisfying being a manger or executive if you don't have people around you to manage. If everyone is doing their work just fine without all that close supervision, it probably feels like you are not as appreciated. But I was not trying to be uncharitable.
> I just think it is probably not as satisfying being a manger or executive if you don't have people around you to manage
I still get to manage my reports remotely. :P
Now, I like to view myself as helping them succeed, rather than browbeating them into submission to enact my will. But even if I was this caricature of a manager that you posit, why would it be better for me in person?
If anything, my "big shot" factor is higher remotely than it is in person. Physically, I'm just a normal person, made of meat and vulnerable like anyone else. If I am speaking to a large audience, they can actually participate. An audience member might throw out a little joke here and there, a bit of heckling, etc. I can't stop it! (Not that I'd want to, personally.)
But over video? Well, first, I can make it a live stream. Boom, I am in power, no heckling possible. But even if it's technically a two-way call, once you have a few dozen people, there's no audience banter. I control the conversation, completely. Heck, I'm the only one with my camera on. I'm the center of attention. I have the power to mute people. I'm a God!
> If everyone is doing their work just fine without all that close supervision
That's a pretty good description of my team. And you're right: like anyone else, I enjoy feeling appreciated. But bossing people around in person is not a way to obtain appreciation! Providing useful feedback, helping people ensure they're are working on meaningful projects, helping resolve weird interpersonal situations -- in other words, being a good manager -- is what results in real appreciation.
And all that stuff can be done remotely. But again, it sure is less fun, at least for me. Having a difficult performance conversation with someone over video sucks, for the same reason that it sucks to break up with someone via text message.
Don't you think it's a lot more plausible that extroversion correlates with becoming a manager in the same way that it correlates with wanting to see people in the office? Or that it's simply easier to do the manager job in person than over the internet?
I manage a linux team so this battle was lost for me long ago, but having managed a site-oriented team before, it was a lot easier to build relationships for me and the team members.
I definitely think there is certain personality traits that lend to the "traditional" manger role in an office.
What I think could be interesting over time, if this "new normal" let's call it, of working from home, persists, could that lead to a different set of personality traits being attracted to or being better suited to this new work situation?
I don't know, but it seems like the nature of work is changing rapidly right now and, that could perhaps, lead to a rapid change in the nature of a good manger or perhaps leadership changes because of it in ways ?
> Have you ever talked on video calls for 6 hours in a day? Every person has a slightly different quality of microphone setup, you can't make eye contact, it's harder to read social cues, you can't get fresh air by doing a walking 1:1, etc.
Have you ever tried meeting in person for 6 hours in a day? Every person has a different quality of voice so some people sound muffled and I can't "turn the volume up" to understand them. Screen sharing at a desk is awkward and involves huddling close to look at a screen, god forbid I forgot my glasses. Eye contact is annoying because some people like to stare deeeeeeep into my eyes when I'm talking about stuff and I find it distracting. Whiteboards are nice, but I can kinda do the same thing with draw.io or visio on a screen while chatting. And we haven't even begun to talk about people who don't shower enough or like eating stinky food.
lol, see? I can make in-person meetings sound terrible, too!
And then there's the larger in-person meetings in the conference room. I don't get my giant screen, keyboard, and mouse. Nah I gotta have my clumsy laptop, it runs hotter in my lap, the keyboard isn't as nice, and then they probably dimmed the lights a tiny bit because the projector is on. ZZZzzzzzZZZZzZzZZZZzzZZZZZzzzzZ
Okay now I'm just being totally unfair lol.
In person meetings can be nice, but I can totally live without them.
Edit: But I don't totally disagree. There's always gotta be that ONE PERSON who has their microphone like 500 times louder than the other people. And then somebody who has their microphone super quiet. So I either can't hear the quiet person, or get my ears blown out by Loud Howard. And the worst part is hardly anyone knows how to adjust their mic (or my favorite - some idiot in IT forbid adjusting the mic via group policy. WTF?!)
humbledrone made a nice comment explaining why he (a manager) likes going to the office. WWLink's response was a dickish "yeah but I don't", which is irrelevant, because the point of discussion was why managers like to go to the office, not whether or not ICs like going to the office.
Many people are "on the spectrum." The big question is: do those who consider themselves "normal" are going to embrace it or fight against it and insist everything is done in the traditional way? The conclusion of the article is they better be careful if they want to stay competitive.
I know the value I bring to my company. But I can bring this value to another company if the current one seems like they don't respect my feelings and the other one does.
> Now, I do still sneak in some IC work from time to time, and it's obviously great to do that remotely. And I understand that most of my reports spend most of their time doing that kind of work. So I wouldn't push them to go back into the office; remote work is the right thing for the team overall.
It is unfortunate that only one group can get what it wants. The people like yourself that enjoy working from the office do so because of the in-person interactions. If the people that want to work from home do so, then those in person interactions are possible.
I'm a big fan of "1-2 days in the office, the rest of the time at home" in order to get _some_ of that in-person interaction. Unfortunately, they requires a VERY specific set of circumstances; specifically, people willing to live close enough to the office to come in (though not necessarily as close as if they had to come in every day).
> I often meet and talk with people for 6 hours in a day. Have you ever talked on video calls for 6 hours in a day? Every person has a slightly different quality of microphone setup, you can't make eye contact, it's harder to read social cues, you can't get fresh air by doing a walking 1:1, etc. It kind of sucks, like, a lot.
I actually haven't had o be 5 hours of Zoom and could see that could get old quick. An interesting thought since its the managers inclination for in person meetings - if one could actually organize the 1-1s to be a walking session. But instead of having both the manager and the report driving into the office to walk around the office - perhaps the manager could drive to the report's neighborhood for a 1-1 walking meeting.
I have never in 25+ years of professional development had a productive meeting with a manager. However I have had plenty of productive meetings with engineers. My impression is that most managers mistakenly think they are productive and bringing value when they interrupt the people who are doing the real work. I have been the CEO of a company for 5+ years and in director/management roles for other companies. My teams were way more productive than the competition (according to our customers) and I almost never had meetings. The only rare exception was when a engineer was stuck or spinning his/her wheels. I would then get a few highly respected engineers together and let them help the engineer getting it resolved. All I did was to facilitate the meeting and keep my mouth shut after explaining the problem we needed to get solved. That’s all I needed to do. I probably spent about 1 hour a day on actual work. Mostly fending off bad ideas from other managers, defending the team from clueless managers who wanted to get involved, and making sure our customers stayed informed and happy.
But now think for a bit: are video meetings the only way you can talk to your colleagues?
Here are other ways you could talk or at least do some of the updating work: chat, email, shared doc, quick audio catch-ups (Slack amongst others). Not just to send what can only be sent by those, but why not explore different ways of doing this? Managers seem allergic to trying anything besides "doing a quick call"
Why don't you put a headset and try walking around and having a walking meeting?
"People have different quality headsets" Ok how much is one of those? I guess it fits the budget. Can't do much about the connection, sure, but maybe the company can think of supporting the employees?
Do all meeting need to be 1h long? I call BS on that one. If the meeting is done it's done, but some people feel like dragging it over.
Linux development has been, for the good part of 20 yrs, done without zoom, phone calls, 1:1 meetings. Mostly through chat (irc, not slack) and email. It's doable
Even with WFH meeting once or twice a month for a meeting works great. Lunch hour and afternoon traffic isn't as bad as rush hour.
I'd say the vast majority of meetings I'm in we are looking at code or documentation anyway so video calls work the best anyway. But I look forward to when using something like VRChat is a viable option as well.
So a manager prioritizing personal minor convenience (single individual) over productivity and comfort of the reports would be considered a charitable interpretation in MBA land? edit: removed "You" as the author is not part of the group that supports the behavior mentioned
I guess you didn't read my whole comment. I'll quote the part that you didn't read:
> So I wouldn't push them to go back into the office; remote work is the right thing for the team overall.
By the way, I definitely don't have an MBA. I've written around a million lines of C++ over my career. So I understand what it's like to work as an IC. Have you managed?
I retract the "you" from the above statement the rest of it still stands. I have managed people and had run my own company but will not extrapolate my experience more generally as I am pretty introverted by nature which is not very representative.
> And I understand that most of my reports spend most of their time doing that kind of work. So I wouldn't push them to go back into the office; remote work is the right thing for the team overall.
Offering a prize could potentially result in more than the prize value ($100M) being invested into those very technologies.
As an example, we can look at the Netflix Prize [1], which was only $1M. But that $1M bought them way, way more than $1M worth of work: "over 20,000 teams had registered for the competition from over 150 countries. 2,000 teams had submitted over 13,000 prediction sets." It's hard to guess the value of having 20,000 teams working on the Netflix problem, but $1M invested directly by Netflix would probably only pay for 3-4 engineers for 1 year, so it seems like they got a lot of leverage out of that $1M.
It's worth noting that the government surveillance secret wasn't actually kept very well, largely because of exactly the effect that Chomsky describes -- keeping all the numerous people in on the secret didn't work, and so we found out about it. I'd argue that the government surveillance example actually strengthens Chomsky's argument.
It's really about the upper limit of what a 6 inch chimp brain can process. Or a group of chimps can process.
Whether it's a chimp in govt or outside Rationality has an Upper Bound. Stick that on the Fridge.
When the problem faced is too complex and that upper bound naturally gets hit stories flow out of the head on both sides. The right move is not to focus on the stories.
The right move, for this has been studied for a long time under the Theory of Bounded Rationality, is to focus on simpler problems.
For me, the "instant back button" moment was the little pop-up at the bottom of the screen that played a loud chime sound. I don't care if the article contains the cure for cancer -- the moment you get in my face like that I'm gone and not coming back.
Speaking for myself, the accessibility and convenience is a huge part. Instead of lugging around a 60 pound fragile finnicky pedalboard, I just throw my Helix in a backpack and am good to go. It has way more pedals in it than I could fit on a real pedal board, and I can also switch presets with the tap of my foot (including rewiring all the connections between pedals, changing their order, swapping pedals, swapping amps, etc).
And yeah the sonic possibilities are endless. On a physical pedalboard, it's pretty involved to rewire everything to change the routing, or add/remove pedals, etc. With the digital modeling ones, this all becomes trivial and you can try all kinds of different setups much more quickly, save them and go back later, share them with friends, etc.
All that said, it's kind of like asking an acoustic guitarist in the 1950s why they would use an electric guitar. Electric guitars obviously have lots of advantages, but it's not like people stopped playing acoustic guitars. I still think real analog pedals are cool, they're fun to collect, in some cases they sound better, etc. And sometimes you don't need the mega-flexibility -- if you have a 4-pedal setup that does "your tone" maybe that's all you ever need.
People without perfect pitch (even non-musicians) can often hear that an equal-temperament major triad is a little bit more dissonant than a just-temperament major triad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcCkn0p7HDE.
I don't have perfect pitch, but as a guitarist I often tune my 3rd string to be a little bit flat (relative to equal temperament), because many chords I play have their major 3rd on that string and it sounds better to have it closer to just temperament.
Regarding singing, one of the reasons that Barbershop music has such a beautiful/smooth sound is because the vocalists sing the intervals of chords in just temperament, despite the fact that the bass note moves around in equal temperament. This is covered well by the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbershop_music.
The Barbershop example is orthogonal to what I'm describing. There, the singers are (apparently) choosing to sweeten particular chords to get certain relationships in the partials. That's something you can listen for and hear without having perfect pitch.
What I'm saying is that there seems to be a disconnect between the various theories of tuning systems and the way humans perceive melodic interval distances. It seems like people who have perfect pitch do a good, consistent job of organizing their memory of sounds into frequency bins. It also seems like what they are not doing is memorizing an idealized set of integer ratios-- or even any interval relationships in particular-- and then singing those intervals back in melodies.
If they could do the latter then you'd expect them to sing those intervals in melodic patterns that end up on a frequency measurably different from where they started. People with perfect pitch obviously have the ability to know when that happens, but I don't hear them describe that conundrum. It makes me speculate that what they are doing is leaping around "frequency lily pads" from memory rather than iterating over a list of well-defined intervals.
It's odd - I've messed around with this kind of thing too, and while I can recognize the perfect intervals sound cleaner, I generally prefer some dissonance and waiver in the chords. Depending on the style of music, it just sounds more interesting to me.
It's confusing to me too when it's phrased that way. Stallman's original quote makes much more sense, "Think free as in free speech, not free beer." In other words, contrasting free as in "no restrictions", versus free as in "no cost".
