Gunax

In the 90s, every year during my school's spring break I would go to my dad's office in downtown San Francisco. I was too young to be alone all day.

There is a fountain that survivors of the 1906 earthquake would meet at on the anniversary of the event. Because my spring break cooncided with the date, I got to see the survivors gathered as my dad and I walked to his office.

Of course there were already very few survivors left by then. I think I would have seen it around 1994 through 1998 when I was old enough to stay home on my own. Even in those few years, I could see the number of survivors shrinking.

I see people using enshittification incorrectly. It's not just that a service is poor.

The point is that people make a free and good service to cultivate users. Then, once people are established and moving to another platform is expensive, the bean counters reap from the disgruntled users.

I was skeptical too. But after reading the JEP i think i am convinced.

It makes an analogy to packages. We allow classes to exist in the default package. Therefore, I think it's reasonable to allow methods to exist in a default class.

Of course you shouldn't so this in real work, but that's also true of the default package.

I also like that main doesn't need an argument. Many noob programs don't even use the String[] args parameter anyway, so let's not require it.

So how this works is interesting.

I assumed they were just making any method called 'main' sugar for public static void.

But it's not that way. Instead, apparently the proposal is to allow for main to be an instance method.

Additionally, we are getting anonymous classes.

Because methods can share names (both between inheritance and with different args) we apparently get a warning if a superclass also has a static main being overridden with an instance main. I would have preferred if this was simply an error.

I am assuming these are not new programmers though.

When I learned Java as a first language, I remember being very confused by those words. They did not make sense to me for months.

To a noob, it's a meaningless incantation that needs to be inserted for each project.

This is hard to write, but I was subjected to involuntary treatment. It ruined my life. And I know I am not the only one.

While Deboer talks about involuntary treatment getting harder, this is right or qrong depending on how you measure it. We are seeing far more interaction with mental services. In Florida, the rate of Baker act has surged 121% [1].

So why the discrepancy? There are really different cohorts. Laws are being created around the psychotic homeless population. But most people interacting with mental health and even most people forced into institutions are not these things. Think anorexics and wrist-cutters, not psychos with knives.

[1] https://www.theledger.com/story/news/regional/2021/11/28/men...

There is something different about the way the Feyman lectures is written.

It's been years since I have read it, but I remember it explaining how one could derive the change in atmospheric pressure with altitude by just knowing a few properties of the gas.

I don't remember the derivation, and I am not sure I could reproduce it. But it changed how I thought about a lot of physical phenomena.

About 10 years ago I tried to write a gameboy emulator based on a pdf document i found on the internet somewhere.

I ended up finding the documentation wrong in a handful of places, which made the project tedious. Did you find that document reliable?

I think we need a term for 'taking public information and deriving nondisclosed information from it'. It isn't really spying, but it's more than just access.

It's not about agreeing or disagreeing, but I think a lot of the debate here is just people arguing the semantics of what's going on.

So to address this, I need to take a detour for a second.

Let's suppose there are two competing theories to explain the cause of the seasons. To the ancient Greeks, spring and summer signified the six months when Persephone returned from the Underworld, and her mother Demeter made the Earth bloom and grow bountiful after her absence. When Persephone left the company of the gods and returned to the Underworld, Demeter’s loss was expressed in the barrenness of autumn and winter.

Another theory is that Earth's axial tilt causes the seasons.

Now try to come at this for a second pretending you don't know the answer. Each accounts for the observations in different ways.

But the former is a malleable theory. Not because it's wrong--but because it's very malleable. For instance, the Greeks may not have known that the seasons are reversed between northern and southern hemispheres. If they observed this though, they wouldn't need to discard the theory. They can simply modify it to suit the new observation (perhaps Demeter visits the Southern hemisphere for six months and the northern hemisphere the other six).

In contrast, the Earth's tilt theory is strong. It accounts for the reason the seasons are different in the hemispheres. It explains why the sun's angle changes each day. It explains why the days get short in the winter.

If any single one of those observations were different, the theory would have to be discarded. It's a very fragile theory not because it's correct--but because if any of those observations were different, the theory would have to be discarded.

Now I think you know where I am going with this. The problem with the alien theory is exactly the same problem with Persephone. Any observation can be explained away or even taken as further proof. The theory is malleable. If the UFOs appear on RADAR, then it's proof they exist. If they don't appear on RADAR, it just shows they must be using alien technology to conceal. If they are in photos it's because they exist. If there are lack of photos, it's because they have invisibility technology. If they are only in blurry photos, it's because they only go where cameras are blurry, etc. That is, there really isn't any observation which can disprove them.

Consider also that there is nothing alien about the theory. Why can't they be angels? Or ghosts? I could easily replace every instance of 'alien' with 'ghost' and nothing would change.

(I first heard this distinction between fragile and malleable theories from Michael Shermer, though I cannot find a reference right now.)

I actually thought it was a very astute observation. Something could be very close and still be unknown, eg. a secret model of plane, or new weather phenomenon.

Reading between the lines, his point is that it's unlikely that ET only flys in people's LIZ.

But how accurate does it have to be to be considered perfect? As in within one hz? What about very high frequencies, where a single hz is much smaller, relative to the frequency?

No children were involved. Society has forgotten why we were ever opposed to child porn.

I have been using CodeWhisperer for about 6 months now (internally).

I think it's just a little late. 2 years ago it would have been amazing. 6 months ago it was decent.

But now that people have experienced GPT 4, it seems downright quaint.

On the contrary, I think this is the only solution that will actually occur.

The reality is America is incredibly difficulty to change. There are just too many people and groups with interest.

And I don't even mean this in the conspiratorial way--it's just that simple taxes are in opposition to some of our other goals.

For instance, we want simple taxes. But we also want to use the tax structure to incentive certain actions (having kids, buying an electric car, or whatever). Every exception is another check everyone else has to do. This is why every year you need to select whether you were a member of the railroad workers union, or invested in tribal lands, etc.

I just am very pessimistic about America's ability to adjust. America is legacy software.

By analogy, there's no way we could have reformed the taxi system. It was only by flanking the issue that anything changed.

Tl;dr but this debate has been done, a million billion times already.

The author concludes with a decent summary of the issue (ie. Is this the best method among the worst?). But doesn't actually find a better way of doing things.

And in the million forum threads on this issue, no one else has either.

My initial thought was: 'Why does this need to be top-down mandated by the law?' but it turns out the article addresses this:

> Critics argue that it’s fine if technological advances deliver the shorter workweek without government intervention, but that “top-down” interference in the free market is a bad idea. This idea doesn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny. If the reduction in hours was going to happen without being mandated, it would have happened long ago.

But that doesn't actually answer the question of whether people want this. It could be that we would rather put increasing gains towards more money, rather than towards reducing working hours.

The second reason I am skeptical is that higher income people apparently work more than the average. Presumably, those with high incomes have the negotiating power to reduce their hours. So we would expect this change to start at the top and trickle down, if that is what people wanted.

I also came across a bunch of people arguing that reducing work hours will lead to more inequality, if that's a thing you care about.

Ofcourse, I realise a lot of this libertarian work week is an ideal, and most people don't feel like they have a choice.

It's an idea that straddles science fiction and reality, but is simple enough for normal people to understand and have an opinion about.

This is a footgun I found at a few Amazon internal apps recently. I was able to clear away probably 3/4 uses of useEffect--some of which I was guilty of adding.

Given how common this error is, there is definitely an unmet need. What people want is a listener, ie.: - recalculate a var whenever a prop changes (this is what useMemo is for) - trigger a function when a state changes (should be moved to the function that changed the state)

I think I disagree, or at least we might disagree on what operations are common in React.

When I have seen useEffect used, it's most often uneccesary. People are using it to create dependent state (ie. when x changes, then recalculate y) or to handle the result of an event.

It's really only needed in components that handle fetch responses, which IME is much fewer than 99.9%.

The lawsuit makes two claims: - The bootcamp lied about past student outcomes - It was not properly registered to offer ISA loans

It's not that the bootcamp is bad per se, or even that it's worse than a university. Schools (including universities) cannot lie about outcomes.

It sounds like the argument is that gambling is a form of spending money.

I agree about 400 banks failing would likely be due to some greater catastrophe.

But financially I think it's the same. If 400 customers each use 1 bank each, then a single bank failure means the FDIC needs to make whole one customer.

But if every customer put 1/400th of their wealth into each of the 400 banks, then FDIC has to cover all customers for 1/400th each.

The cost to us as depositors/taxpayers is equal.

Meal kits ad delivery are actually two innovations that are only joined, it seems, because they make a technology startup (rather than just a business)

Meal kits can be sold in stores. And groceries can be delivered.

I get the impression that just doing one of those might be a viable business, but it wouldn't be treated as a startup.

Twitter lost any good will after it censored the NY Post. At this point, the public has no trust in the Twitter censor board to use their position for good.

I am sorry these people are impacted by that.

There is always a way to manipulate it. In this case, one would seek to downplay their own cohort.

This is only tangentially related, but when I was a teenager I practiced remembering my dreams. And now I cannot forget them.

This is actually negativity impacting me. I often get reality confused with something I have dreamed. I cannot always remember if a conversation I had occurred in my dreams or in reality.

Huh, funny because I am thinking the opposite (that it's bold to suggest they dont have a purpose).

I'm not basing it on any facts or data. It's just funny how our gut instincts are so different.

Does that help if you have to also pay more benefits out?

Social security is going to run out of money soon.

It's tragic that we cannot seem to agree that it needs to be fixed, nevermind how to fix it.

I'm not trying to start a flamewar. But this seems like a flaw in democracy. Why aren't we angry and upset? Why is the public so passive?

I like democracy, but maybe I have failed to understand that it is just a projection of regular human flaws. As individuals, we are poor at planning long term. Maybe that applies to groups also.