CodeyWhizzBang

I think it's the personal essay style that is quite popular at the moment - the mix of topic with the author's experience of that topic. (Personally, I quite like that style, but then I think I read for the experience of reading as much as for the practical takeaways).

That sounds like it's almost a case of the students not trusting that the ideas the teachers are explaining will be important.

Maybe this is extrapolating too far, but I wonder if something has happened in technology that has led to a new generation rejecting the knowledge of the previous generation because they're so often out of date on other trends or habits.

But isn't the issue that it is people going into computer programming who are struggling with the concept - not just casual users, for whom it really doesn't matter that much if they don't know how to navigate a folder structure.

To extend the plumbing metaphor: it's as if no one on the plumbing course got the concept that taps had to be attached to water pipes and then wondered why they didn't work.

I agree. It would be interesting to see the PHP sites broken down into wordpress and non-wordpress

I would extend this and say anti-vaxers and covid-deniers are also a symptom of this. The "freedom of speech" group are clearly just as easily upset, but about different things.

The fact that parts of some governments in some countries support and enable these views suggests we're already quite far down the path to a neurotic society.

I checked the historical precedent. Current situation looks pretty dire.

Also checked what was coming to me via my eyes and ears from the real world. That also looked pretty bad too.

I don't think he's saying that what we have now is worse than what we had then. He's saying that with today's hardware we clearly can have instant start up times in pretty much every app. But we don't.

There's also the point that banks want you to put down a sizeable deposit so that if the market crashes and you lose your job they can sell the house, recover their outstanding debt and you lose your deposit.

So you might be able to afford £1,200 a month in mortgage payments (which on a 30 year mortgage could mean you could borrow £400,000) but you'd need a 20% deposit, meaning you'd need to have saved up £100,000 to take advantage of it.

And even then, for £500k in London that's, what an okay 2 bed flat.

I moved all mine across to YouTube Music - they have an automatic process that copies it across in the background for you.

When you write an article on Medium you can choose whether to put it behind the paywall and monetize it, or make it available to everyone for free and not monetize it. That feels like a pretty good capability to me really.

For me, it's not that they can't stand up a website, but that there's very little barrier to entry. An article on the New Yorker, say, tends to be better than one on Medium not because the writer can make a website but because they have a strong editorial team that only publish content of a certain quality and edit it to improve it. An article on Medium may not even have been proofread.

I don't think you can fairly say that type P pretend to mentally fragile. There are plenty of people who will be genuinely upset.

Isn't the issue that it allows bad actors to pretend to take offence and we don't have a mechanism of validating whether the offence is real or malicious?

Weirdly, Medium seems to be the closest.

Isn't the point that "western medicine" is a set of things that have been shown to work based on the outcome of controlled tests - double blind tests and so on. As a result of these tests we say that, in general, statistically, "medicine" cures the condition more than doing nothing does (or, more precisely, more than the placebo effect).

If we put something through that process and find that outcome, we classify it as medicine. My understanding is that tests of some Traditional Chinese Medicine (which I assume is what we're talking about here when we say "eastern medicine") aren't able to replicate successful outcomes and so we therefore don't classify those things as medicine in the west.

That's not to say they don't help trigger the placebo and so on, just that we haven't proven it through double blind studies and so on - which is my understanding of what OP means by "empirical".