Adam Vartanian

2.1K posts

Adam Vartanian

Adam Vartanian

@flooey

Software engineer at Relay. Counterculture-adjacent. Strong opinions, rarely tweeted. @[email protected] (he/him)

London Katılım Şubat 2007
225 Takip Edilen207 Takipçiler
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@VladdViever @monolith94 @Sierkovitz Sure, if you think Mark is crafting a narrative so they can put more UB in the game despite people disliking it, I can’t disprove that. But to what end? Why is that likely, compared to the totally reasonable thing that lots of people (but not everyone!) actually like it?
English
1
0
0
14
Owen Batista (He/Him)
Owen Batista (He/Him)@VladdViever·
@flooey @monolith94 @Sierkovitz If you read the post by Max, you'd see the point he was trying to make. It isn't as simple as "most players like it". Data can be manipulated to tell any story you want. Since we don't have the data, we only have MaRo's word, we don't have the full picture.
English
2
0
1
23
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@VladdViever @monolith94 @Sierkovitz That doesn’t mean those people don’t hate it! It sucks for them! But Mark’s been pretty clear that those people are a small minority, and so they’re not going to change, even though they’ve heard the feedback.
English
1
0
0
31
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@VladdViever @monolith94 @Sierkovitz That’s because people think not changing in response to feedback is the same as that feedback being ignored. Wizards can only make one Magic. If 90% of players like something and 10% hate it, they’re going to keep doing it.
English
1
0
0
35
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@patio11 Also the ETA is pretty much just retaliation for the ESTA.
English
0
0
0
25
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@patio11 UK government software is surprisingly competent as a general rule! It does have a problem of too many edge cases in the actual regulations meaning a bunch of them end up with “sorry, we didn’t build a flow for that, go find the form”, but the main stuff is good.
English
1
0
1
39
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
Airline app: You need an electronic travel authorization to go to the UK. Me: Oh no weren’t they a Visa Waiver Program counterparty? Airline app: Haven’t you heard? Everyone gets an ETA app these days. Me: *downloads* Oh no live selfie, passport scan, and interfacing with chip.
English
5
0
43
21K
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@patio11 Relational calculus and SQL are both useful things to teach, but they’re useful to teach to different sets of people with different goals. And the fact that we don’t separate those two and just have faculty fight about which one to teach is silly.
English
0
0
0
41
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@patio11 This is the science/engineering split, which for some reason is bundled together in one department in computing, much to its detriment. You wouldn’t expect to learn beam loading equations in a physics program, and you’d be horrified not to learn it in a civil engineering one.
English
1
0
1
175
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
At my university, like many in America, there was an old guard in the CS department which sniffily said that university is not a vocational school and that CS should be weighted to theory and not to job prep for joining a tech major. Waterloo: ceded the space to do right thing.
Ben Kamens@kamens

Happy to chat if helpful, but not sure my wisdom goes beyond: "waterloo students great. program unapologetically focuses on industry/career capabilities. students do so many co-ops that when you get them on 3rd/4th/+ rotation, they're more experienced than other college new grads (or even new grads + year or two). co-op terms longer than typical US summer internships. since impact of a short stint is often weighted towards end... co-op's internal importance w/in waterloo + competitive placement process seems to instill more drive. likely confounding factors though. actual logistics optimized to make things mechanical/easy for hiring companies. if you travel there in person for interviewing, you sit in a room for a day and whenever you press a button a new interviewee shows up at your door." was >10 years ago though

English
17
8
556
66.7K
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@lsv Ah, cool, makes sense. (And thanks, glad you find it useful!)
English
1
0
1
239
Luis Scott-Vargas
Luis Scott-Vargas@lsv·
@flooey Oh, it’s just I’d have to remember where MTGO outputs the logs and make sure I have it on, it’s nothing about your site (which is amazing btw)
English
1
0
1
479
Luis Scott-Vargas
Luis Scott-Vargas@lsv·
I may have drafted the best cube deck of the year (or more, it was pretty messed up) - how does he keep getting away with it??? (Link in next tweet)
Luis Scott-Vargas tweet mediaLuis Scott-Vargas tweet mediaLuis Scott-Vargas tweet mediaLuis Scott-Vargas tweet media
English
12
4
230
26K
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@patio11 (And the answer people give to that last one often depends on how much the person in question resembles the answerer in various ways.)
English
0
0
0
31
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@patio11 Also blurry lines are everywhere. Somewhere emails cross from useful product announcements to spam, but nobody agrees where. If someone structures their affairs to legally receive more Social Security income, are they a parasite or are they properly responding to incentives?
English
1
0
0
81
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
That’s a really good line. (I am skeptical of the literal truth of it, out of the ambient skepticism for nearly all claims of the form “For all X, Y” which are not amenable to mathematical proof, but across a great many ecosystems you can point to parasitic behavior easily.)
Cory Doctorow NO LONGER ON TWIT TER@doctorow

So Kathryn and I were talking about this, and she said, "Yeah, all complex ecosystems have parasites." I was thunderstruck. 15/

English
4
2
132
18.3K
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@ajlvi I’ve played it in the last 20 years but have no idea what clock you’re talking about :)
English
0
0
1
37
ajlvi
ajlvi@ajlvi·
Have you played Final Fantasy VI in the last 20 years, and do you know the appropriate time to set the clock to in Zozo?
English
2
0
2
1K
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
@MrKapitalist @Bootlegregore Yeah I think it will overwhelmingly be of the form "Your computer said something to you, re which who cares, but then you responded to it with a sentence which absolutely demonstrates mens rea and could not have been written by a professional screenwriter to be more devastating."
English
2
1
5
199
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
LLMs are surprisingly useful for the frequent case: “I am not a lawyer and I am sure the lawyers have reviewed this but X, on the face of it, looks obviously [illegal/contrary to policy/etc]. Am I reading wrong?” LLM: “Those words mean the same thing they usually mean.”
Dave Guarino@allafarce

Interesting feedback range I’ve gotten on our work using AI to unpack complicated SNAP notices for users: 1: “if it’s not the whole official notice does it have quality control?” 2. “the official notices are often illegal — you MUST go beyond just simplifying what they say”

English
1
6
254
38.8K
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@patio11 In the interest of pedantry, your “drafting error” commentary is sadly in error. That’s how lists with a conjunction are commonly written in legal documents. See, for instance, 11 USC 101(9)(A). (law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/11…)
English
1
0
5
1.3K
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
Today in Bits about Money: Chicago has, for most of my life, wanted to build a casino, largely for tax generation purposes. It is currently running a capital raise for a permitted casino. I don't offer investment advice, but I've certainly got some commentary.
English
12
17
243
37.1K
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@patio11 The UK rates pretty highly here. Faster Payments is approximately instant for most payments, and recent rules changes have made reimbursement for fraud almost universally available up to £85k (customer eats £100).
English
0
0
0
196
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
A conversation I have frequently about ACH speeds. Me: The most important factor to understand is Reg E and the broader constellation that makes banks liable for consumer accounts being drained. X: But other nations manage this without slowing down bank transfers. Me: Which one.
English
23
55
656
84.8K
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@patio11 One way to solve the UK immigrant bank address verification catch-22 is to have your US bank mail a replacement statement to your UK address. UK banks trust bank statements, US banks generally will mail a statement anywhere, done.
English
0
0
0
51
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
“Doesn’t this mean that a bank customer can probably get a bank statement issued to almost any address? If so, what is the probative value of a bank statement?” Not quite but rounds to true and still non-zero, respectively. Also if one straight up frauds here that is useful.
English
2
0
58
11.2K
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
The joys of trying to go through a bank's KYC processes when they ask for a bank statement from another bank but disallow it because the other bank's expectations with regards to acceptable addresses for statements do not match their expectations.
English
4
3
275
34.9K
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@patio11 Tradeoffs everywhere. Another one is that an SSN unlocks many government systems because the SSA makes getting one very difficult. If getting a new SSN were easy, then other systems would become harder to interact with to compensate.
English
0
2
146
111.8K
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
Note there is a balancing act between "make fraud rare" and "let a third party with fragmentary information and documentation, some of it wrong and/or forged, to successfully convince government to release funds as per their instructions." We want both of those.
English
2
1
173
15.3K
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@lsv So glad to hear you’re all home safe and sound! Good luck with the new adventures!
English
0
0
2
337
Luis Scott-Vargas
Luis Scott-Vargas@lsv·
Anyways, that’s why we were radio silent for so long - we didn’t want to make an announcement until they were home and safe, which luckily is exactly what happened! We appreciate everyone who reached out, and are now ready for the incredible challenge that’s raising four kids 😛
English
11
0
276
9.5K
Luis Scott-Vargas
Luis Scott-Vargas@lsv·
After the longest week of our lives, the twins are finally home! They had a rough delivery and spent a week in the NICU, but Leo and Sofia are home, happy, and healthy 🥳 @GabySpartz and I couldn’t be happier ourselves, and we feel so lucky to get to add them to our family 🥰
Luis Scott-Vargas tweet media
English
114
18
2.2K
52.7K
Sam Black
Sam Black@SamuelHBlack·
I should probably say that I have an account on the other app with the same handle, and I’d like to switch to it, but I can’t handle that when I close the app and open it later it doesn’t start at the tweet I last read and load new tweets above it
English
8
0
42
9.8K
Adam Vartanian
Adam Vartanian@flooey·
@patio11 This reminds me of moving to the UK and being caught in the address verification catch-22. Google had a thing in their relocation docs that basically said “Print this letter, go to this branch down the road from the office, they will give you a bank account.”
English
0
0
2
79
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
There is an answer to that question. It very may well be on the wiki these days. Long before it was on the wiki it was in the orientation packet and tacked to the office bulletin board.
English
3
2
182
9.5K
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie@patio11·
This is, by the way, a core life skill of the professional class. If you are e.g. in the State Department and get told you can’t have e.g. a checking account, your first thought will be asking a coworker “Who do we know who is not an idiot?”
Patrick McKenzie@patio11

@danielbrottman @jackinlondon Unsolicited non-advice: there are a lot of people with weird life circumstances who have car insurance, and if your agent can’t figure out the series of words their agents say to the insurers, maybe find one who can.

English
10
34
760
127.1K

Keşfet

@VladdViever @monolith94 @Sierkovitz @patio11 @lsv @ajlvi @MrKapitalist @Bootlegregore