J-dawg

Thanks for the encouragement. I'm going to try a little harder to do some 'self-marketing'

I'm a pretty useless developer who does about the same amount of real work as you per week. I also often don't understand the technical details other developers discuss in meetings.

I am generally quite open about my lack of aptitude, as I result I've never really been promoted, I've just bounced around between different junior roles. It always seems obvious that I'm the most junior member of any team I'm on, but I'm starting to wonder if that's all in my head.

Your post kinda makes me wish I'd tried a bit harder at bullshitting. Maybe I could've at least made a bit more money.

> Expecting simple and final answers to questions depending on a myriad of factors (some unknown or even unknowable!) is stupid.

I don't think "covid sceptics" are the only ones guilty of this. Far from it in fact.

Vocal believers in "covid orthodoxy" (can't think of a better descriptor right now) seem much worse at acting as if simple and final answers exist for everything.

Annoyingly necessary disclaimer: I am not a "covid sceptic" by any stretch, I am fully vaccinated and believe that many precautions are warranted. But I am sick of being told what to do based on uncertain emerging science.

Case in point: vaccine passports seem to be an example where the policy was concocted based on assumptions about the science which turned out to be untrue (the assumption being that vaccinated people wouldn't carry or transmit Covid.) I believe that most governments are only keeping them in place in order to inconvenience people into getting vaccinated. This is exactly the sort of thing that fosters more scepticism, even if a lot of it is misguided.

I don't understand how you could read the parent comment and decide that it's "blaming" teen girls, unless you are deliberately arguing in bad faith.

Teenage girls are predisposed to behave in the way described, and Facebook/Instagram is profiting by exploiting that. Nothing about the explanation above is blaming them. If anything the comment makes a stronger case for Facebook's actions being immoral.

On your second bullet point, did you mean to say

"but it's thermodynamically and metabolically far easier to cool than to heat"

Because that seems to be more in line with the point you are making. Sorry to be a pedant, I'm asking because your comment is very interesting.

I didn't really mean training as in pre-planned courses. More sitting down with someone more experienced and being coached through a feature or a programming concept. I guess I was wrong to expect more of this.

Does anyone else have a slight suspicion that this kind of stuff is promoted by authorities as a sort of "nudge"?

The goal, I think, is to emphasise the really wacky stuff so that anyone who might have more nuanced concerns about a vaccine (or anything else that differs from the "correct" narrative) gets lumped in with the crazies, and therefore shamed into keeping quiet.

The UK government, for example, has openly used psyops tactics on its own population for the duration of the pandemic, so I don't think it's too much of a reach to say that this could be another example of it.

> The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging. From the minutes of SPI-B, the UK government's pandemic psyops group

https://evidencenotfear.com/how-sage-and-uk-media-created-fe...

Compulsory disclaimer that I'm not an anti-vaxxer, I will almost certainly take the vaccine as soon as it's offered to me. I'm just someone who thinks that a government using these fear based tactics on its own people is utterly shameful.

That’s interesting, I didn’t know that.

I wonder what is different now. The woke movement doesn’t seem to get any weaker, even as it adopts more and more identity groups.

> Can you send DMCA takedowns based on owning the NFT for an image?

I'm also curious about this. Does the buyer now legally own the image itself, as well as the NFT?

This is amazing, I'm noting this down for future use.

As someone said elsewhere in this thread, it makes you wonder what's really going on while we are distracted by this stuff.

What I find interesting is that there (probably? maybe?) isn't a shadowy CIA-like organisation promoting this stuff, this "tactic" is a naturally emergent property of the woke belief system.

I think I find this more frightening than if there actually were a shadowy organisation pulling the strings: here we have a philosophy, which many well-intended people subscribe to, that causes them to behave like a sophisticated intelligence agency deliberately trying to disrupt a foreign power.

I admire your drive very much. I too started programming in my 30s, but have always struggled with it and now wish I had pursued something else.

I cannot imagine having the mental energy or the enthusiasm to spend most of my evenings doing side projects and reading CS books. I'm happy for you, but is that what it takes to do ok in this career? Hours and hours of unpaid work, even after you've got a job?

It just makes me wish I had focussed on being a product manager or something. I'm pretty sure most of them aren't spending all their evenings reading management books.

Another one here who is really not that great at it. I also find my interest in getting better at it waning by the day, because I know I'll still be mediocre no matter how hard I try.

But right now it's a choice between software or an unskilled low paid job, as I have no other skills.

How does one actually get "checked" for ADHD? It's not like there's a blood test.

Ok, now that I've checked, I'm the one who broke the guidelines by commenting on downvoting. Sorry!

I don't like seeing comments like this downvoted, especially with zero comments responding to it.

It seems a totally legitimate viewpoint, even if it's one that many of us disagree with.

Downvoting just to signal disagreement is against the guidelines, isn't it?

Plus you can extend that period of time significantly (or even indefinitely) by doing some form of work, even if not highly paid. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.

I really like the idea of "barista FIRE": make enough "fuck you money" that you can survive on a low paid job and supplement it a little with your savings, while leaving enough in reserve for retirement.

The PNC has been challenged in the past for holding on to records that legally should have been deleted.

If I put my tin foil hat on for a moment, I wonder if this "mistake" was a way of getting rid of some records that should have already been deleted.

Doing it this way, and publicly admitting it, might have been deemed safer than clandestinely deleting the records and then getting caught in a security audit later.

The UK took a wrong turn when it gave the police their own extra-judicial justice system.

The system of police cautions, warnings and fixed penalties allow the police to administer punishment with none of the due process that a court would provide.

The idea of a "police caution" is a misnomer that implies it's just harmless warning, when in fact it can affect the course of someone's life many years later.

Furthermore, people are blackmailed into accepting these cautions under the threat of going to trial and potentially receiving a more severe punishment after conviction.

Even more outrageous is the retention of records from the PREVENT programme and "non-crime hate incidents". These are people who have not even committed a crime or been arrested.

The whole system stinks, and given that most people manage to avoid interaction with the police it is sadly unlikely to get the scrutiny it deserves.

The outrageous behaviour of (some of) the police during recent lockdowns actually gives me a little hope, as it as drawn widespread attention to the way they routinely abuse their power.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the correction!

I remember a similar anecdote about a legendary F1 driver (possibly Michael Schumacher, but I can't remember).

During practice the drivers talk to their team over the radio about the car's setup. Most drivers would stop talking in the corners and come on the radio during the straights.

This driver would apparently just keep talking all the way around corners. Driving the car was basically automatic, leaving him free to focus on optimising the car.

I'm quite fascinated about how an idea like this gets as far as somebody founding a company when, as several people here (as well as the linked videos) have argued quite convincingly, it appears to be easily debunked.

Are the founders knowingly trying to scam investors? Are they just naive/stupid?

Or am I (and the debunkers) being too negative, and this is just the first iteration of an idea that could one day change the world?

What's really going on?

> I think an intermediate level of mastery is when you realize that a computer is a logic machine built to serve humans and it will always listen to you if you're willing to put in the effort. You can always go a level deeper. Great engineers know all of the tools at their disposal and will bend the computer to their will if they need to.

I've worked with some people who definitely seemed like "masters", and this was true of all of them. Quiet patience and an unshakeable belief that this thing is going to be fixable, even after trying multiple things that have gone nowhere. And they're almost always proved right.

It also made me realise I need to get out of this business as soon as possible, because I'm the polar opposite. After a few failed attempts my brain goes into panic mode and the problem seems insurmountable. Then I "wake up" an hour later after a bout of procrastination, no closer to a solution.

I often wonder about the chicken and egg of how people attain this state. Are they first and foremost technically brilliant, and the confidence emerges from that? Or is it more of a personality type that has allowed them to solve lots of problems and become technically brilliant along the way?

I don't have anything to offer other than sympathy, but I just wanted to thank for this post.

I'm going through exactly the same thing as you, and asking myself the same questions. You're obviously more experienced than me, so it's actually reassuring that this happens to more senior people.

I agree with most of what you said.

Also, the fact that EVs produce almost zero local pollution makes them incredibly compelling. So much so that I'd still be in favour of them even if they produced the same amount of CO2 overall. Just to make it clear which "team" I am on.

I'm just pointing out that the EV debate seems to have become one of those things where people pick a side and then stop accepting any nuance.

The comment I originally replied to was making the typical glib lazy assertion that ICE cars are some terrible medieval technology and EVs are all sunshine and rainbows. It's more complicated than that.

Can we not pretend that electric cars don't pollute the planet?

To be clear, I am a big fan of electric cars. But this seems to have become another one of those things that has become so polarised you're not even allowed to express healthy skepticism.

There are a lot of ways to interpret this question, as shown in by the variety of responses in this thread.

But we could rephrase it to "why aren't top speeds limited to the maximum speed limit?".

It's got me thinking about the creeping culture of safetyism, especially against the current backdrop of Covid-related restrictions.

In some ways it makes no sense that cars are not restricted to a sensible top speed. Either a simple dumb limiter set to the top speed limit for the country, or something more sophisticated using GPS (or a combination of the two). Doing so would possibly (probably?) save many lives per year. Yet it's unlikely to happen because:

1. there's a powerful automotive industry that relies on cars retaining their power as a status symbol

2. there are a lot of powerful and influential people who enjoy driving fast cars.

It frightens me that we are seemingly only able to retain our freedoms when there is some powerful industrial lobby to protect them.

People are currently being subjected to much, much greater restrictions of freedom than having the top speed of their car capped. Entire livelihoods are being destroyed on the basis of "saving lives". Perhaps this is justified. I personally don't think so but a convincing argument can be made.

If there's a conclusion to this, it's that we need to move past the "if it saves some lives, it's worth it" style of argument.

It sounds brutal, but some values are worth holding on to even if they kill people. You may balk at that statement, but you implicitly accept that compromise every day, even if you've never explicitly thought about it.

This one is excellent! I'm going to save it and re-read it regularly

It's the reality of bureaucracies, not capitalism. You really think this couldn't happen outside of capitalism?

The article misses one possibility, which I suspect is actually the most likely: The underperformer knows they're underperforming, but it's in their best interests never to admit it.

I know because I've been there. I was underperforming and I'm also naturally very self-critical. So in reviews etc I'd be very open about my weaknesses and the need to improve.

In corporate culture there is nothing to gain from self-awareness. You've just handed your manager an invitation to use you as a scapegoat (see @czep's comment), to leave you out of pay rises and give you crappy tasks.

There's everything to gain from being permanently confident and upbeat about your abilities. Then your manager may A) be fooled by the act and think you're a great performer or B) figure out that you're struggling - but then you're in no worse a position than you would've been by being downbeat in the first place.

Thanks for that. And you're right, I hadn't seen that document before.

But concerns absolutely are being dismissed. I've personally listened to Matt Hancock and other ministers doing it.

The idea that someone might want to wait just a little longer to see if any side effects emerge is not necessarily irrational.

Would you not concede that, if and when any unexpected side-effects do emerge (however rare or insignificant), this gung-ho attitude will backfire?