Also I doubt that every interviewer making a leetcode interview would necessarily pass it themselves. If you are the interviewer, you can choose the problem, learn the solution, and then profit from the dominant position during the interview.
I have seen colleagues do exactly that: I am fairly sure they would never pass a leetcode interview themselves, and they were not really good coders. But for some reason they really liked making candidates struggle with the one exercise they had learnt by heart.
I have been interviewed (and failed) by people I wish I could have interviewed myself right after. They were very clearly keeping the interview in their comfort zone while feeling superior and making me miserable. I am absolutely convinced that if I had had the chance to invert the roles right at the end and interview them myself, I could have made them miserable just the same.
When you are the interviewer, never forget that you are in a dominant position.
> In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers.
What do you get from it? Say you produce more, do you get a higher salary?
What I have seen so far is the opposite: if you don't produce more, you risk getting fired.
I am not denying that LLMs make me more productive. Just saying that they don't make me more wealthy. On the other hand, they use a ton of energy at a time where we as a society should probably know better. The way I see it, we are killing the Earth because we produce too much. LLMs help us produce more, why should we be happy?
It's overwhelmingly more of an outsider talking point than an actual issue in practice. There's a category of people that just says any extensible protocol must fundamentally have massive amounts of incompatibility, and brings it up every chance they can... and while that is technically always possible, it only happens in practice if clients diverge greatly. XMPP clients mostly work together much better than Matrix clients, from what I've experienced, as long as they've been actively developed at some point in the last decade. Which is by far most clients in use.
Without even getting started on the insane fact that there are multiple names for the same technology (H.264 a.k.a. AVC a.k.a. MPEG-4 Part 10, related to H.265 a.k.a. HEVC a.k.a. ...).
I think that there being a patent on H.264 means that whoever manufactures a board that wants to support H.264 needs to pay royalties, which explains why some newer boards (like RPi) just let you use the CPU instead?
But then what does it mean that the patent of H.264 have expired in big parts of the world? Does anybody care?
Finally, there are open source alternatives to those. Why the hell don't we just all use them and forget about those patents?
h264 still makes sense in some applications because it is relatively computationally cheap, and has very wide adoption in both software and hardware.
in the case of HEVC/h265, one of the main reasons today is Apple using that codec for photos (heif/heifs/heic/heics); it never came close to the popularity and adoption that AVC/h264 did. AV1 is superior to h265 in most ways; there is little technical reason to use hevc.
Matrix is in an interesting position right now because it's honestly not great, but it does exist.
And having control over something that is not great sounds a lot better than having no control at all (in this case over something else that is not great either, i.e. Teams).
Governments don't change easily. It took a threat of military invasion for some of them to start considering moving away from Teams. Whoever gets to replace Teams will probably stay for a while even if it is frustrating (again, just like Teams is).
I was very enthusiastic about Matrix a few years ago, but my experience has been relatively bad and I lost interest.
Apart from the experience, I think that there is a fundamental issue in the way Matrix is built: the Matrix servers have access to a lot of metadata (at least last time I checked, but it feels quite fundamental to the protocol).
The problem with Telegram is that it is not an E2EE messaging platform, period. It is a non-E2EE platform that has an option to encrypt 1:1 messages with a criticised algorithm. Whoever uses Telegram does it for all the nice features that are not E2EE.
> all of a sudden people started claiming it was self evident that "of course Meta can read your WhatsApp messages".
Because some people say stuff like this doesn't make it right. WhatsApp messages are E2EE encrypted, unlike Telegram. There are other things to criticise with WhatsApp, but not that.
> Signal who refused to stop collecting phone numbers until recently even though they never needed it
As you said, you're confused. Signal needed the phone numbers for convenience, so that you could reach your friends. Exactly the same reason as WhatsApp. Could they have done without it? Yes, but maybe Signal would not be as popular. That's a valid tradeoff, and Signal never lied about it. Also having to share your phone number with Signal is still better than any of the other popular platforms. Anything that is "more private" than Signal hasn't managed to get on the map.
> Because some people say stuff like this doesn't make it right. WhatsApp messages are E2EE encrypted, unlike Telegram. There are other things to criticise with WhatsApp, but not that.
Is this verifiable fact or Meta's claim? As far as I know neither the server nor the client are open source.
> As far as I know neither the server nor the client are open source.
That is correct. I have a few things to add:
- Meta employees (and there are many of them) have access to the sources. So if Meta was downright lying about it, chances are that someone would leak it.
- Thanks to the Digital Markets Act, we see that the encryption protocol exposed by Meta for interoperability is based on Signal. If Meta wanted to lie, they would have to either use a different protocol internally (but again, we know that the Signal authors contributed to integrate the Signal protocol in 2016, and a Meta employee could relatively easily see if WhatsApp had removed Signal and re-added it just for interop recently) or use the Signal protocol but have the app send the content of the messages to the Meta servers after decryption (which would be fairly easy to see by a Meta employee).
- People who don't want to trust WhatsApp should use Signal. Moving to Telegram because of a lack of trust would be weird, as Telegram is most definitely not E2E encrypted.
In other words, the WhatsApp situation is not perfect, but telling people to move to Telegram because "it's safer" is actually dangerous. Telegram is strictly less private, period. Signal is strictly more private.
I am not saying people shouldn't use Telegram. As far as I'm concerned, people can do whatever they want (and I hear that the Telegram UX superior). What I do not tolerate is wrong statements about the privacy situation. Telegram is strictly less private, Signal is strictly more private.
> There are other things to criticise with WhatsApp, but not that.
Nitpick: Facebook can obviously grant themselves the ability to read your WhatsApp messages, by pushing out a new client. What they can't do is covertly read your WhatsApp messages: WhatsApp is well-studied enough that people would notice the malicious client update within a year.
Google or Apple can also grant themselves the ability to read your WhatsApp messages. Someone grabbing your phone while it's unlocked has the same ability.
Absolutely, and this is why one of the only viable options for truly private communication is Signal on a degoogled ROM like Graphene. Matrix also works, but you need your server.
Or maybe it's a problem with your English? (Note: I'm being offensive just because you are :-) ).
> when Trump croaks Thiel will be the president in all but name.
This means that he will have the power, but not the title.
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