Gene_Parmesan

Electron apps definitely have performance issues and I do not defend them. I just also want to make sure we're recognizing that apps like MS Teams are doing a lot more than MSN Messenger did back then. Whether you use/need those features or not, the apps are much more capable. Our computers have gotten an order of magnitude faster for sure, but the workloads they're tackling have not stayed flat.

I'm fond of saying that one of the big differences between theory and practice in CS is that in practice, we don't immediately drop the coefficients. Instead we study the problem to learn what the coefficients are and use that knowledge to guide our approach. For instance, there are times a linear search will just flat out beat a binary search due to cache effects.

Soooo many counterfeit books on Amazon, especially textbooks. Nothing quite like dropping > $150 on a big book only to get an obvious inkjet job in the box.

It does read a little bit like astroturfing, but as someone who had a (different) lifelong debilitating condition that has been almost entirely solved by a few doctor's appointments, I can say that nothing turns you into an advocate for something faster than this sort of experience. For me it was almost spiritual in the end. It was also oddly upsetting in some way, thinking about all the years I had wasted when essentially two hour-long appointments were all I needed. You gain this almost overwhelming need to help other people avoid the same morass you were in.

Another piece of anecdata here that middle school was far worse for bullying in my life than high school. However, I may be a bit of a special case because I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a single-sex prep high school (male in my case).

Having only boys in my high school meant there were essentially zero cliques, zero drama, and very little reason for bullying. There was no standing with the opposite gender at risk, and thus very little reason to have the standard sort of extreme pecking orders you tend to find in kids of that age. In all the years I was there, there were literally only two fights (in all four years, not just in my class). One amounted to a guy shoving another guy into a trophy case, so it's stretching to even label that a fight.

Single-sex high schools sounds like an antiquated concept, and I was kind of leery of the idea going into it, but my god, I am a huge advocate now. There was an all-girl's school close by, so things like football games still gave you an opportunity for co-ed interactions, but the days themselves were almost entirely distraction free.

By comparison, my mixed-sex middle school was a nightmare. Interestingly, since they were Catholic schools, many of the same kids from my middle school followed me to the high school, so you can't even simply attribute it to there being a different slate of kids. Some of the kids that were nasty bullies in middle school ended up turning into friends of mine by the end of high school.

This is exactly how "How are you?" is meant in American culture. It's not fake; greetings are culturally determined and especially the most common greeting phrases in any culture should not be treated literally but instead as part of a ritual exchange.

"How are you?"

"I'm well, and you?"

"Great, thanks."

It's just a ritualistic exchange.

Not the person you replied to, but OCaml, Scala, and F# all suffer from the potential drawback of being functional-first, and thus difficult for people to adapt to. If you are someone who is an OO programmer and are considering Rust for its potential performance and different model, it would be hard for me to recommend a language whose model is as different as OCaml's. Learning Rust entails learning the borrow checker and unlearning some of your OO habits; learning OCaml requires a sea change in your whole mentality & approach to programming if you've never experienced a functional lang before.

Meanwhile, both D and Nim have the benefits of being procedurally grounded, and hence more familiar to someone coming from (say) C# or Java.

Having said that, I think both of those languages may suffer from a lack of tooling/library breadth & depth. Nim in particular seems really cool, but it seems to be struggling to catch enough attention & interest to build a larger community -- probably in large part because it targets many of the same people who are currently high on Rust.

Yeah exactly. I had been noticing Reddit was really depressing and aggravating me; there was stuff on there that I would see and get angry about it, and the anger was what kept me coming back. When I realized that I uninstalled my reddit app from my phone that very night.

It was a fantastic decision. I still have my account, but I only engage with it when I'm sitting at a desktop computer and have a specific community I'm engaging with. I'm a huge Formula 1 fan so on a race weekend, I'll check out some of the posts on /r/formula1, for instance. But no more /all, and most importantly, no more scrolling endlessly for hours. It's been a really great change.

I'm as pro-science (and progressive) as anyone, but under this logic you would have to wear a mask at all times for the rest of your life. This is just not reasonable. We have dealt with flus and other infections that kill people every year without feeling like we have a moral obligation to prophylactically wear a mask at all times, whether we feel sick or not. At some point the mandate needs to end.

There is really nothing chilling about national media outlets getting a PR a few hours before the PR is made public. Promise.

I don't have a source for you, but my understanding is that the main reason for the change is that very recent studies have shown that people with vaccines and asymptomatic "breakthrough" infections carry a much lower viral load + viral shedding than previously thought. So even those vaccinated people who may have an asymptomatic infection are really at an extremely minimal chance to spread it to anyone else; they just aren't shedding enough virus particles to make the risk high.

If you are someone who is active on Twitter, your thoughts about how important Twitter is are biased by your engagement with it. None of the actual people I know and talk to in real life harbor any sort of extremist views one way or another. Literally none of them ever mention Twitter in daily conversation. (And many of them are software devs.)

IMO their statements are amplified by things like national media because of their extremism; the extremism generates strong feelings (whether positive or negative), and strong feelings leads to more eyes on the media for longer. That doesn't mean the people consuming the media also have those extremist beliefs.

Love those books. Not often I encounter someone else who's read them. Which is maybe a little unusual as it's not like they're unknown or rare. I guess Napoleon-era naval warfare is maybe a bit of a niche nowadays.

No, yeah, I agree totally with what you're saying. It feels like giving up to us but that is a whole lot of projection.

Teachers (good ones) teach and correct technique in ways that no apps or self study methods will ever be able to do. Unfortunately the most benefit here comes from in-person instruction which is hard right now. But in person, they can see the way you are holding the instrument, they can work directly with your hands, etc.

But yes a skilled teacher is always worth it if you have the money. Apps, subscription services, and so on have a vested interest in keeping paying customers. Therefore they ensure you always feel safe and comfortable. If you feel too challenged, your association with the sefvice will turn negative and you'll stop paying.

But learning an instrument is not comfortable; it's extremely challenging and requires hard work and commitment. It doesn't have to be like bootcamp, and of course it's really fulfilling to watch yourself improve, but there's no hiding how challenging it is, especially if it's your first one. Good teachers know this and have the pedagogy to help you through it in as efficient a manner as possible.

Besides, the good teachers are always in demand so they are usually not too concerned about losing a student here or there because they decided it was too hard for them.

The specific happiness that we're talking about here is contentment -- with your life, with who you are.

I think it looks so odd to so many of us because we tend to be an ambitious bunch, and I find ambition to be pretty inversely related to contentment. The sort of acceptance that this man displays feels like giving up, in a sense. And in many ways, it is -- but that's something that Buddhists have been teaching for centuries.

Don't forget that the rocket side of the world does, in fact, also tend to throw some of those rockets at other people.

That insulation you mention is heavily intentional. How many Americans would have continued to support the military actions in the Middle East if live videos of mangled bodies were being broadcast right into people's homes on a nightly basis? We in the West live in relative safety yet we refuse to recognize as a culture how much harm is done by our societies' actions to others' safety. We subconsciously know it's happening but we say "meh." It's the ultimate privilege -- yet we wonder why so many in the Middle East hate the west. "They just hate our freedoms!!" They hate that we reserve the right to a relatively safe life for ourselves.

For me, as someone who played OW just to have fun, what pushed me away was just the lack of things to do. No mode diversity meant stuff got stale really fast.

Remember OW was supposed to be a different game, one that they cancelled. They reused a lot of the assets and so on and hashed them together with the ultra-popular genre of the time. It mostly worked at the start but it was pretty clear to me after a little while that they didn't really have any clear idea about where to take it. It always felt like a "recovery" game, a "we spent a huge sum of money building these assets, let's at least get something out of them" rather than something with a well-thought out long term plan behind it.

Not only that, but whiteboarding very rarely tests for skills actually needed at the job. As you progress in your career, things like "I have held down the following software development jobs for X years...." are going to be far better ways to judge technical capabilities that are actually relevant to the job than 30-60 minutes of whiteboarding.

Many many different industries have jobs that require technical skills -- not tech as in technolgy -- and they get away just fine with managing to hire people. Nurses need to be able to nurse, a highly technical skillset; no one is having nurses give fake shots on test dummies during interviews. They use credentials and experience, and accept the risk that a hire might not pan out.

The fact that we want senior level developers to have to refresh/cram before interviews on how to implement graph search algs and hash tables just so they can pass some artificial whiteboarding section is a bit crazy. Their actual job experience over the past N years should be what counts.

Now, conversations about how one would solve technical problems of a sort actually faced on the job are totally on point, and really should be a part of any job interview in any field.

edit: Really, what we want as engineering types is for there to exist a way to gauge ability in a purely objective way. But there isn't one; it doesn't exist. Furthermore, you are building a team of people. IMO the focus should really be on fit and soft skills regardless. Make sure they meet a minimum bar of technical ability, then work to verify whether they'll be a productive, beneficial teammate.

Maybe, but the IP holders are never going to agree to this. You have not only the entrants themselves, but also engine manufacturers and so on. I really believe the manufacturers would leave the sport first; many of them are on a hair trigger anyways given the shift in consumer R&D to electric.

For these reasons, my phone is quickly becoming a device where I make calls and texts, check email, use the GPS, and consult the internet for information while I'm away from my laptop. I find it to be so much easier to not get stuck in infinite scrolling loops when I have to be sitting at a desk to do so. The smartphone's greatest strength and greatest danger is that it is always with you.

Our brains aren't built for constant stimulation like that. Every step back I've made from social apps has been a positive one for my mental health. I was amazed at how much my anxiety dropped when I deleted the reddit app, for instance.

I've recently read a fair number of interviews/comments from people who helped create the original social apps, and it's really interesting how many of them regret it. I don't necessarily mean the founders who cashed out, I mean as one example the software engineer (whose name I forget) who was one of those primarily responsible for the first implementation of the Like button on Facebook. The great irony of social networking is that as its use has increased, our self-reported levels of isolation and feelings of loneliness have skyrocketed. It's accomplished exactly the opposite of its stated mission, and I can't help but feel the whole enterprise is a net negative.

Not sure if this comment was meant in earnest or not, but to be quite honest, "accept that you will sometimes fail" and "redefine what success means" were actually two very important steps in my journey to accept what my limitations were. I didn't get diagnosed until 28, meaning I had had a fairly long life of not succeeding at things, but also not realizing that I flat out was unable to succeed at them. So having to readjust my self-image to include this idea of a disability was quite challenging.

If you don't accept that you are going to fail at certain things or at certain times, then your failures will feel like your fault -- if only you had tried harder, if only you had worked more. By accepting that you have real limitations and will sometimes fail, each new failure doesn't have such a strong sting anymore. Instead, you are able to recognize it isn't your fault; you can pass the blame to your disorder, so to speak. Then, redefining what success means for you allows you to celebrate victories again. Ten years ago I never would have considered things like "I haven't been late to a meeting in two weeks" as a success to be celebrated, but now I do, so I'm able to extract some sort of satisfaction out of life with this janky brain instead of a never-ending series of disappointments.

Yeah same here. I only tried audio books once or twice, it just didn't do it for me. I need the physical images of the words in front of me in order to keep them in my head. I've also found physical books to be much more forgiving of micro-distractions. When some sound from across the house distracts me, all I need to do to "pause" the reading is... stop reading. My eyes can wander around the page briefly and I don't lose anything. But with audio, I am finding myself manually needing to pause, rewind, etc.

I also listen to lectures and so on at higher speeds! People I know think I'm crazy when they walk in and hear someone yammering about some dev topic in a chipmunk's voice, but I just get so impatient with slower speech.

Can we not have random inappropriate and uninformed comments about ADHD, please? Whether intended or not, this comment plays into old, tired stereotyped thinking that really, all ADHD people need is to have more self-control. Thinking that ADHD is about self-control and not wanting to delay gratification shows a complete lack of understanding of what the disorder actually entails (in particular, ADHD qualifies as neurodiversity, and shares many genetic indicators and symptoms with autism spectrum conditions).

On top of that, it's completely unnecessary for the point you are trying to make.

Yeah, exactly. Although in addition to the text acting as SEO, the initial reasoning behind all the "recipes-as-blogs" approaches is that recipes are not in general copyrightable, as they aren't generally considered creative works. (Whether the food itself is a creative work is not the question, it's whether the text qualifies as such.) So cookbook/recipe blog writers add enough text to the recipe to make the content subject to copyright protections.

Then, as you note, when people do inevitably copy the recipe, they churn out new replacement text.

You'll notice, for instance, that a recipe 'database' site like allrecipes doesn't have these massive text blocks associated with user-posted recipes, because there's no need or desire to have those be copyrighted.

(This is not addressed directly at you, parent commenter, these are just general thoughts.)

I studied journalism in undergrad, and I have never understood why people are so drawn to watch these national 24hr 'news' channels. During a major crisis, sure, but day in and day out? I just don't get it. There just isn't that much that happens at a non-personal level (personal meaning self-, family-, friend-, work-oriented) each day. In terms of staying "up to date," I still am not clear on why this is important to do daily at a national-focused level, but if it's important to you, it can be done in a few minutes by reading a brief recap. If you do want a more traditional news cast, PBS News Hour is a good one.

But with these 24 hr networks, given how little of import happens on an average day, most of the time what you are being shown are not facts, but opinions. And these networks are all owned by massive, massive megacorps. Not sure why anyone is interested in getting drip fed opinions that originate, however loosely, from these conglomerates.

They try to get you to buy into them by convincing you it's important to "stay informed," but never really explain why. They play on your desires to be a good citizen, to be seen as intelligent, to feel 'serious.' If staying informed is important, it's most important at a local level, where your real connections can help you have a real impact. People are so focused on what all the senators tweeted yesterday that they are missing the real problems, issues, etc. that they could help address in their local communities. In this sense, news might not come from media at all -- and here is where social media could actually have real value.

My perhaps incorrect impression has been that middle class means something a bit different in a country with royalty.

I've often wondered about this commonly repeated belief that software of ~30 years ago was less buggy than software today, because it doesn't really line up with my memories. There's definitely part of it that comes from a standard "back in my day", rose-tinted glasses sort of thing.

But I actually think a lot of it comes from the fact that modern software can be easily patched, whereas older software couldn't. It is easy to believe that software today is buggier because of just how many patches we get for it. But back in the day, any bugs that existed in the product were not as visible, because we weren't getting weekly updates where the patch notes say "Bug fixes."

How many massive vulnerabilities existed in major products of the day, and continued to persist unnoticed by all of us because of the relative impossibility of patching them out?

On top of that, modern software is simply more complex -- often times an order of magnitude more complex. (Whether this increased complexity is always needed/appropriate is a separate question.) I'm not sure what metric you would use to be able to do a "bugs per complexity unit" sort of comparison between then and now, something that attempts to control for increased complexity, but my intuition is that it would be pretty flat.

This is kind of what I was thinking. Most of these sound useful, but they also sound like situations where the primary end goal was a paper, not a polished, widely usable software product. The practical realities of what it takes for enterprise devs to adopt tools at a large-enough scale to make the tool sustainable are just too much for a single academic paper to overcome. In particular, these sort of tools feel too specialized to really catch on as a FOSS community project. For developers with limited free to time to 'volunteer,' they usually want to spend that time making "primary" contributions -- the actual systems and end-products -- rather than secondary contributions in the form of tooling.

Hence we see the tools that survive are tools that we first recognize as products, even if they're free. VS Code is a good example, I think. Or, if they're not free, they're paid for (e.g. Jetbrains), and the money makes maintaining/developing the tool sustainable.

Not to wax too poetic but it has the feel of academia trying to start a fire with a flint and not understanding that they have to properly construct the rest of the firestarting kit -- clear space, get kindling, arrange the rest of the wood, make sure it's all dry. They just see the sparks coming off the stone and keep asking "Why isn't this fire starting?"

Let me put it this way. Instead of saying, "Wow, this tool had promise, but it didn't catch on because (??) and because it didn't catch on it hasn't been maintained," the observation should be more like, "Hmm, maybe if this tool had been properly maintained it would have caught on by now."

Maybe, but if a state actor has achieved this ability, I doubt they would make its existence public knowledge by stealing a few billion US$ in btc. That's chump change compared to the value of being able to surreptitiously crack the cryptographically secure messages of everybody in the world.

Note I'm not saying that I actually think someone has achieved this, I just don't think "no one is stealing btc" is a good non-existence test.