Gene_Parmesan

I'll take that as a given.

I think what you're missing is that most people don't want to run into vitriolic hate speech while they're going about trying to organize their neighborhood parties (and so on). We can talk about the idealism of free speech all we want; the problem is any platform that stakes a claim as caring about Free Speech almost immediately gets overrun by that sort of vitriolic hate that most people don't want to be around in their daily lives.

I went on one of the "free speech" video platforms about a year ago because I was curious, and on my first visit, right on the front page, were videos about how the Jews rule the world and Holocaust denial. I'm not remotely Jewish and I was immediately put off from ever revisiting.

This is a core problem that people who legitimately care about censorship and free speech need to address. It's extremely unfortunate, but "anti-censorship" has well and truly become a dog whistle in the modern era.

Remember that free speech is about the 'market of ideas.' In even totally free markets, not every product sells. An anti-censorship social network startup cratering because its platform immediately got overrun with hate is not censorship, it's the market at work. The vast majority of 'regular' people I know do not consider Facebook's rules prohibiting hate speech to be censorship. They're just grateful they aren't running into it every time they open their phones to scroll their feed.

I found the book "Programming From the Ground Up" to be a pretty good intro to programming in x86, and importantly, more recent than this text. I had to do just a tiny bit of research to find out how to get my shell to emulate 32 bit mode, since it's x86 and not x86-64, but it is in fact Linux based. I imagine it'd be an order of magnitude easier than trying to figure out a DOS setup.

The full x86 ISA is daunting, I'm sure, but for a beginner looking to get a sense of what asm is, you don't engage with the entirety of the ISA. The PFTGU text is great specifically because it assumes an audience of beginners who want to learn the basics of how asm operates to enable core programming concepts. It's not aiming to be exhaustive like the linked text.

Edit: And also importantly, it's also (legitimately) available for free online.

Here's my anecdote.

When the team was still intact -- the people who were WFH were the same people who had been in the office together -- things were mostly fine.

Now there's been significant turnover and it feels like we're imploding. Management has no idea how to onboard people remotely; the team culture is completely gone. Communication is horrible. People who used to be dependable are now half-assing things. A 40 hr/wk job has become one where people are working 55, even 60, because the new people can't see us all physically leave the office after 8 hours to be able to trust that yes, really, it's just 40 hours. All of this is a huge personal tragedy for me; you can even see my profile where I've had a number of comments talking about how positive the working environment has been historically. It's all changing though.

It just feels like a disaster. Everything hummed along fine for the first several months, but as churn has happened something has been lost. We never spent time and effort looking at how to become a remote organization. We simply told everyone to WFH.

I've been reading about some of the downsides of fully remote work for over a decade, and I'm just seeing them in spades now. Even teams who were built to be remote from the ground up have (pre-pandemic) write-ups talking about the challenges of communication, team bonding, trust building, and so on.

What I see in my circles is a bunch of people who say how much they love not having to leave the home. What I don't see is a ton of people arguing that it makes their team better. Let me be clear I'm not discounting the value of being able to be at home; I know it's a huge benefit to many parents, for instance, and I know there are some who used to have a 2 hours commute. I'm just saying I haven't actually heard any arguments supporting the idea that it is a net improvement for the team -- and when the team becomes dysfunctional, people's mental well-being and happiness begin to suffer for other reasons.

These are all obviously just personal anecdotes. I would not be surprised, however, to see companies start walking this back slowly over the next few years, especially the non-tech companies. I think we will see increased inefficiencies show up as churn continues, as well as people with even moderate extroversion getting fed up of the isolation. Further, there is a strong tendency for people to want to work with other people "like them," and so I don't see local/regional companies being open to hiring nationwide for very long. Google hiring nationwide is one thing; Regional Health Insurance Corp, with business 100% focused within a half-state-sized region, is something completely different.

I could be completely wrong. I hope we can sort of collectively settle on some sort of moderate state, one where WFH days are liberal, but you don't have organizations of 1000+ people who never physically see each other. For instance, I feel somewhat stuck at my current position because the thought of trying to grow trust with an entire new team of people over calls and internet chat is horrifying to me.

When it comes to work, you obviously cannot engineer happiness, but there are a number of things you can look for in an employer. If you know where to look, there are absolutely companies out there that place an emphasis on employee empathy, flexibility, kindness, etc.

I would know because I work at one such place. The thing that a lot of people are not willing to accept however is that you generally have to give up other things. I work at a nonprofit. We start at 17 days PTO and after year one you bump to 25 days. You are strongly encouraged to take it. We're given nearly $5k per year, essentially no strings attached, to be used as we see fit for continuing education efforts. Everyone is extremely kind, empathetic, and flexible. You are strongly discouraged from ever working more than 37.5 hours in a week. It's as close to heaven in an employer as I've ever found by a mile.

Of course, because it's a nonprofit, I need to take a discount on pay, to the tune of somewhere around 20% below market in the region. Is it worth my happiness though? Completely. I have no regrets and continue to work here despite interest from places willing to pay me that extra 20% and more.

I see a lot of devs getting hung up on getting "what they're worth," as if they're selling a hunk of meat to the highest bidder. If that's how you treat yourself, that's how you'll be treated in return. After about a decade of professional work, I prefer to see myself as being entered into a mutually beneficial relationship where salary is merely one piece of the picture. I've long since realized that my expenses rise/shrink to meet my salary, mostly without me noticing any actual change in quality of life, so just maximizing that number feels pointless.

This is all not to say that I don't have ambition. My ambitions are just more multifaceted than "make XXXXXXXX/yr." Feeling fulfilled by the work -- that's an ambition. Having work that energizes me rather than drains me -- that's also an ambition. And I really do mean that, you have to strive for such things. They're not going to fall into your lap. It also requires you personally to understand what happiness means (contentment and inner peace rather than chemical euphoria) and pursue that instead of alternatives.

Personally I really don't see the point in living a life of toiling away at shit work just to make an extra 20%.

Oh, and by the way, we are no slouches. We create extremely high quality products at a fast tempo - because we all love what we're doing and are invested into the mission. We work for 7.5 hours and then we turn off and enjoy life, and come back rested and refreshed the next morning.

I had the opportunity to hear him speak about language design at an MS Build conference and was very nearly actually fanboying; my coworkers were more than a little bemused.

Non-lawyers often seem to misunderstand this phrase. "Innocent until proven guilty" is a statement defining the fact that in criminal cases, the burden of proof rests with the government. They have to present evidence proving your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; you don't have to present any evidence proving your innocence beyond a reasonable doubt.

That's all it means. Obviously judges are not supposed to come into a case assuming you are guilty, but you can say that about any type of case. The phrase certainly doesn't mean we have to pretend that you are perfectly innocent up until the point of verdict.

> Glad to see this, as someone who has almost only been with people with depression

I would gently suggest you spend some time thinking about this. What makes you seek out relationships with depressed people?

I say this because I was in a similar life situation. Examining the question I just asked you very deeply helped me to a place of significant improvement for my own wellbeing.

> it's now shifting to blaming "loved ones" for "failing" them.

I didn't get this from the article at all. I think you are feeling some defensiveness, which is normal, but still.

> This article doesn't understand how hard it is to listen to hours, days, months, years of a person you care about constantly speaking of ending their life.

That's because -- as difficult as this is to accept -- in these situations the right thing to do is to leave the relationship.

I would (again, gently) suggest you research codependency. Doing so would be for your own health and happiness. I know when a therapist first called me codependent it felt like an aggressive attack; I took it extremely personally. I hope you don't feel the same. Just trying to help a fellow HNer.

I put this as a sub-sub-reply in a different chain, but this 100%. I know for me, when our couples therapist talked to me about codependency it felt like a full on attack. "How dare he suggest that I'M the one with a problem?? SHE'S the one that has to change!!" That sort of thing.

It was very hard to overcome the defensiveness but remains the best thing I've ever done for my own mental wellbeing. It's important not to hear the word "codependent" as an attack.

The book "Codependent No More" was a lifechanger for me. I highly recommend it to anyone struggling in a situation like this.

> And how did your wife come to see the problem?

Making someone "see the problem" is missing the point entirely. Firstly because often, people with depression are fully aware of how they are treating people. They simply can't help it.

Your role as a partner is to love and support them. You also, however, need to prioritize your own mental health and happiness. There is an extremely common relationship 'trap,' one I've lived through. You are in a relationship that is causing you personal distress and unhappiness -- but your love of the other person makes you feel trapped. You can see how much they are struggling, and can't bear to hurt them -- often because you are afraid of what may happen if you leave.

When you love someone with a debilitating illness, mental or otherwise, you need to decide whether you can accept the other person as they are. If you can, then you have to do that, and choose to stay with the person precisely as they are -- while having and enforcing healthy boundaries. If you cannot -- and often times there are extremely good and valid reasons why you cannot -- then you owe it to both of you to discuss this and potentially end the relationship. Sometimes such a conversation can be the spark of change for the other person, but often times it isn't, and that's okay. Staying in a relationship that is making you miserable is doing no one any benefit.

It's a supreme challenge with depression, but you cannot allow the depression your partner experiences to affect your own emotional health. The best tool for this is something called "loving detachment." I'd recommend you read about it, and about the concept of co-dependency in general(*). It was a life saver for me.

The worst relationship mistake you can make (after the obvious choices like affairs or so on) is being in a relationship with a mirage. Too many people have a false ideal of their partner -- their partner after they've been "cured" or "fixed" or "realized the problem" or "got clean" or whatever. You cannot have "you must change" as a condition of the relationship. Either the person will change or they won't, but staying in a relationship where you expect the other person will change is controlling and damaging. Are you in love with the person? Or with a made-up vision of the person you have in your head? Remember that love is unconditional.

The best thing I did in my relationship was spend a year (I'm not exaggerating) thinking about the realities of the situation, the options I had, the way my life could end up whether I stayed or leaved, and so on. It was an extremely difficult time and required the help of therapists, both personally and as a couple. In order to do this properly you need to admit divorce as a possible end -- and I don't mean the empty threats of divorce many of us make. For instance, the hardest session I ever had was when my personal therapist pushed me to walk through a concrete plan for leaving. Where would I go? Who would I tell? How would we split up our possessions? And so on. Making the possibility real is extremely important. In order to not feel trapped, you need to fully believe that leaving is an option.

In the end, the decision I made for myself was that I could accept my wife as she was. Almost immediately my mental wellbeing improved drastically. I no longer felt trapped. My wife's depression did not magically become cured, but I learned how to detach from it and be a good partner while protecting my own health.

In the years since, my improved wellbeing and happiness has slowly but surely helped turn the relationship around. Her depression is still not cured, but now I know how to be a good partner for her, which has in fact helped her to a large degree. She now trusts me as someone she can turn to for help, rather than viewing me as someone who was taking her mental health personally (which I was definitely doing). In the end, this is thing most spouses don't want to realize -- it's you that has to change, not your partner with depression, whether that means leaving the relationship because it can't and won't work, or learning to love them as they are.

(*) It can be really easy for spouses to take suggestions like this personally. I know I did. Being called co-dependent by the couples therapist felt like a full scale assault. How dare he say that I'M the one with a problem!! Doesn't he know what I've BEEN through?? What I was missing is that he was telling me that to help me. Learning about co-dependency -- and how to overcome it -- was the most liberating thing I've ever felt.

The reason salaries for game programmers are so low is that there is an effectively endless supply of new crops of graduates who have told themselves since they were 12 that they want to make video games for a living. Classic supply and demand dictates that, with such a high supply, big studios can get away with paying very little (and can extract additional "benefits" as well, such as demanding insane hours and so on).

There is more to life than how much one can produce, surely. You may be interested in a little piece of literature called A Christmas Carol - the core of the message is as accurate now as it was when it was written, if not more so, and I personally believe that core applies whether you celebrate Christmas or not. (I'm obviously being a little facetious as I assume most if not all of us are intimately familiar with the tale - I personally like the George C. Scott version!)

I really am not sure why you got downvoted. Here is a NYMag article that supports what you're saying: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/and-now-for-the-good...

> Steering public attention away from the total number of infections and toward serious cases only -- as some Biden advisers have encouraged -- could prove a challenge after nearly two years of intense focus on the pandemic's every up and down.

At some point this definitely needs to happen. I don't know whether now is that time. But at some point, this thing is going endemic. Reporting purely on case numbers ad infinitum is just going to cause warning fatigue, and people are going to stop listening. Again, I'm not saying I think now is the time to make this transition. But I recall watching a nightly news report over Thanksgiving saying that in vaccinated adults, the rate of hospitalization with Delta-variant breakthrough infections at that point was... 0.0 in 10,000. That's not to say no one is going to the hospital; obviously that's not true.

But we run the very real risk of making people stop listening to the warnings. It's like those who live in hurricane regions; after years of hearing "better put your SSN on your arm so we can identify your body," and then evacuating - and coming back with nothing amiss because the storm missed you by 100 miles - they stop listening. And when the big storm does hit, they don't evac because they just roll their eyes and think "Oh, not this again."

Obviously you can't stop warning people about incoming hurricanes. And just like in COVID, there are serious complications with hurricane forecasting that cause overwarning to be necessary to some extent. But if there's a serious COVID variant that is actually a ruthless killer that arises, we will need people to listen.

I was reading yesterday that the Omicron wave appears to have already peaked in South Africa, just 3 weeks after its identification, and they expect it to peak here by end of January. That is significantly shorter than Delta. On top of that, they are finding the Omicron cases much milder than Delta. They seem to believe that Omicron has migrated out of the lungs and into the upper respiratory tract, where it is less dangerous but better able to spread. A researcher quoted in the article called it a "best-case scenario."

Yet we are still having warnings as if the apocalypse is about to come.

Again, I don't know what the right timing is for this, and until we figure it out I'm 100% on board with listening to the CDC. But - we don't report on the daily number of cold cases because the cold is part of life. And if/when COVID becomes something that is a mild upper respiratory infection for the near-entirety of non-immuno-compromised people, I think continuing to report daily on how many thousands of new cases we have serves no purpose other than continuing to stoke fear.*

And because this is important context for some sorts of people, I am an extremely progressive liberal who is steadfastly continuing to wear masks in public, and have been booster-ed for 2 weeks now.

*(This is a concern of mine because, as we know from 9/11 and the terror alert warning system that we now know was totally bogus, but had to deal with on the nightly news for years, there are elements in this country who are happy to take advantage of tragedies to stoke fear.)

My coworkers think I'm insane, but I do my side projects in C because I find it so much more relaxing and satisfying than what I do at work (Angular and C#). They can't understand why I find C relaxing because they find it terrifying. I just find it so much simpler to work with functions, structs and pointers rather than abstraction chains ten layers deep.

Granted, I'm using it on homemade game engines, which are very amenable to the simple type of code C allows you to write. I wouldn't want to write an HTTP server in it. But for what I build, I find using C to be the equivalent of woodworking, compared to the Ikea furniture I put together at work.

Just since we're all on the topic, anyone with an interest in literary translation owes it to themselves to read the book This Little Art by Kate Briggs.

> Carlsen's defense against Caruana in 2018 featured 12 draws before moving into tiebreakers

I really hope they are able to figure out some not-too-unnatural way to reduce the likelihood of draws. One easy possibility I saw suggested a number of times would be to remove the increment. Give additional time at certain move thresholds like they do now, but then at some point, that's it. No more time. Time pressure should remain a legitimate possibility of a threat throughout the match. When two GMs are in the endgame, +30s each move is an eternity, and how many tiny moves did we see them make just to get another +30s?

Oh well. I know excitement isn't the main driving force, I just think it's a real shame to see a world championship matchup like Carlsen/Caruana go to 12 straight draws and be decided by tiebreakers.

I would say first, that's the power of exponential complexity. Second, AI in games tends to consist of somewhat complicated goal-based & fuzzy logic behaviors. Third, game AI agents have interactions that take place within a 3d world that has to be modeled accurately. That means lots of expensive computations for things like line of sight, pathfinding, and so on. Finally, given that games are soft real-time and include remarkably expensive 3D rendering, the compute budget available for AI functions I would guess would be somewhere around the order of 2ms per frame (on a 16.7 ms frame, for 60fps).

Though, two through four can usually be handled without issue, provided the devs know what they're doing & architect the engine correctly. (edit: And keep the scope in check, which ultimately is the responsibility of the leadership.) Unfortunately, this appears to be where #1 messed things up for them.

Wasn't the ostensible justification here making the cards more available for the enthusiast gaming market they were (to some extent) intended for?

That's an honest question, I can't fully recall.

I'm not sure I agree with this 100%. If this were true, an investor like Warren Buffett, who has always invested by focusing on the fundamentals of the company he is investing in and focusing on real performance/value metrics, would not be able to be as consistently successful as he has been.

It's hard to say though, because the market in which he made his initial chunk of capital is not the same market today, and it's impossible for me to parse out the self-reinforcing effect of "price goes up because Buffett has taken a large stake" versus the sort of fundamentals I'm referring to.

edit : Having said that, I do believe there is a class of people who are able to make money off of the stock market in a way totally unrelated to the reality of the underlying instruments - profiting on churn, market-making, small percentages on massive positions, etc. But I don't think that means the underlying instruments are actually worthless/not tied to real value.

I don't see the tautology. The point is, when someone claims they are a "victim" (I would agree the term is only a loose fit here), we believe them. The whole point of the statement is to not demand evidence.

Obviously we're not talking about the legal system here.

I do think this whole idea has minimal relevance to the thread as I really don't think the PC qualifies as a victim. Just wanted to clarify the idea of "believe the victim" as it's extremely important in potential cases of sexual assault (which, again, not relevant here).

I find average mechanical keyboards to be perfect for my typing style. They never cause me hand strain, stress, tension, etc. Membrane keyboards, however - and especially whatever you call the keyboards on Macbooks - feel like I'm trying to finger drum on glass. I end up with tons of hand pain.

However -- the qualifying fact is that I am a pianist, from the age of 5. I believe that a lot of the biomechanics I learned at the piano keyboard transfer to the computer keyboard, whether I want them to or not. I can't help but try to type the way I play piano to some degree -- in large part, this means an elevated wrist, a pretty high finger force and more of a hammer-type finger action rather than a pressing-type acting.

A very important part of any instrument training is learning correct technique, and a large reason for this is the prevention of injury. I've had decades to adopt the correct technique for keeping my wrists elevated and my fingers hanging down without tension. And I'm sure the increased finger strength helps, too.

One caveat with that is that a huge percentage of the Han Chinese population lives in the east of the country. The west makes up only 28% of the population, and a big percentage of that is minority populations.

So any response you get is likely going to come from people who would probably live in the same time zone either way.

Pair programming can't alleviate the need for code review. Good pair programming may reduce the amount of changes needed, and thus speed up the review phase, as a secondary effect of increased code quality.

Bad pair programming will suck up time by occupying two people at reduced efficiency, and won't lead to better code.

I've had some really great pair programming experiences, but we as a team aren't mandated to use it. We see it as a tool to pull out when cross-domain knowledge is needed, or when facing a particularly thorny problem. If you get the right two people together, they can fill in the gaps of each other's knowledge. The person not driving has more mental capacity available to think through potential alternatives.

However, the success of pair programming depends as much on the personalities of the individuals doing the pairing as anything else. They need to function as teammates, without any ego issues or any other thing that may prevent either party from feeling fully comfortable sharing their knowledge. Trying to pair program with someone who is defensive about their code/abilities is a true nightmare.

You'd have to go quite a ways back for that one.

Charles Dickens, "Nicholas Nickleby" -- "[h]is looks were haggard, and his limbs and body literally worn to the bone"

Many professional classical musicians of all sorts of instruments will practice 6-8 hours per day or more. Whether that's necessary or not is up for debate. Either way, many of them have an almost obsessive relationship with music and their instrument -- at least at the highest levels -- which means they probably want to be playing that much.

I was wise enough at the early age of 12 or so to realize that whatever that "commitment" gene was, I didn't have it, so I kept piano a personal passion rather than try to go to school for it like my parents wanted.

Seriously. Anyone who cares at all about privacy should never have touched Chrome in the first place. The reasons for its existence were obvious from the outset.

There was a really interesting (and disheartening) story by NPR this year about recycling in the US: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-recycling-...

One of the comments made was that consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card. In reality, the system we have only works if there are companies that want to actually use the recycled materials. If there are none, it just gets landfilled.

I bring this up because one of the things mentioned was Pringles cans. Everyone thinks they are recyclable. But the can is two sheets of cardboard glued over a thin sheet of aluminum. The paper companies don't want the cans because they don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto for the aluminum people. So the cans just get thrown out.

In fact some people make arguments that recycling programs do more harm than good, because they allow consumers to alleviate their guilt about waste without actually helping the environment. The cynic may say that's intentional.

If liquid cash is considered an asset, so too can cryptos. Most of them would rather not be recognized as such formally due to regulations they desperately want to avoid, but call a spade a spade, etc., etc.

Just some genuine honest curiosity here; how many workloads actually require 64gb of ram? For instance, I'm an amateur in the music production scene, and I know that sampling heavy work flows benefit from being able to load more audio clips fully into RAM rather than streaming them from disk. But 64g seems a tad overkill even for that.

I guess for me I would prefer an emphasis on speed/bandwidth rather than size, but I'm also aware there are workloads that I'm completely ignorant of.

I agree, but this has always stuck out as odd to me. Why is this so true even of the developers in web when people in something like C# are perfectly content using the established tools/frameworks they know year after year? I have seen sometimes seen this in the same person - someone who would never complain about using Entity Framework, but who is always pushing for the latest trend when working in the front end stack.