You're right. They're smaller than you probably imagine (about the weight of an average Labrador). That's still definitely big enough to be a problem if they felt threatened, I'm sure, but the animals my friend was in charge of were raised to be around people for outreach purposes. That particular cheetah, for example, had once been on the Today show.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessamyn_West_(librarian)

West is plenty notable on her own, but in THIS particular crowd here at HN, it's probably fun to note that her dad was first-wave computer engineer Tom West, who was a big part of Tracy Kidder's SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_West

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

There are lots of data manipulation tasks I've run into at client or customer sites where, if I had my druthers, I'd use perl or python -- but there's no way to get those in the environment. But Excel is there, and Excel has VBA and a strong API.

If you internalize how Excel works (which is to say: you use the native concepts and don't just leap to how you might do it in perl), there's great power available there. I've written things in Excel with abstractions and class structures I'd be proud to have implemented in "better" languages.

I've also seen "normal" end users discover this power, and find it a tremendous boon to their day to day working life. (This was also true 35 years ago with Lotus macros.) People who would never think of themselves as programmers still have muscle memory for Alt-F11.

It was... weird. I had a friend who was working there, and I needed a gig. At the time, in the city I was in, this constituted a pretty big advantage.

The role would've been customer facing but technical, which is where I've spent my career. I answered some reasonable panel questions, and then they had me give a preso on any technical topic I liked. I'm good at that, so I aced it.

Then we got to other questions: specifically, questions from me.

"Are you currently profitable?"

They were not. This, in and of itself, isn't a problem, but it leads to the next question.

"At your current burn rate, how many months of operating cash do you have on hand?"

(murmuring) "Two, but our founder funds us as we need it."

"Are there specific milestones that are tied to additional capital infusions, or any formal agreement, or is it all just at his discretion?"

"It's discretionary but he's very committed to the company."

Having already had negative experiences with one-rich-dude companies, I thanked them for their time and left. I was VERY surprised when they called me a couple weeks later to MAKE A SERIOUSLY LOWBALL OFFER, which I literally laughed at. At least the dude who made the call seemed to understand the company was insane.

My friend jumped ship shortly after. He had more tolerance for Weird Startup Shit because of family money, but it got too weird even for a guy who didn't need the income, if that tells you anything.

I've gotten to 56 without knowing how. It's unclear if that will change now.

I would 100% support measures that inhibit corporations from owning residential property.

Apartments are probably a special case, but I'm not entirely convinced the age of giant corporate complexes is a good one.

I also don't necessarily mind if a PERSON owns a house and rents it out (e.g., to spend a year somewhere else, or because it's a lake house or something), but I get suspicious of they own a bunch of them and make it a business. Denying corporate status would discourage that.

As it is, I guess you learned a valuable lesson about what sort of person seeks the profound authority granted to school administration.

No algorithmic platform can sustain or even encourage genuine human interaction, so FB isn't even on the table here.

The motivation vectors exist here to ensure that, over time, Chrome behaves in ways the end user DOES NOT WANT.

Those sorts of places were always the only places with reliably good communities.

I'm glad I was in a full house for Avengers: Endgame, for example. I don't know how much it mattered, OTOH, for Oppenheimer, or Hail Mary.

The funny thing is that I make a habit of doing what Carnegie describes here, and for the same reasons.

As I've gotten older -- I'm 56 -- I also realize I look like the archetypal middle-aged straight white dude, and my cohort doesn't have a GREAT reputation across the board, so I feel like I should be even MORE careful about the energy I put out into the world. And nothing lifts _my_ mood better than being nice to somebody else.

But the ones that do? Ho-leee shit.