anyonecancode

First, I'll note that my initial comment was in the context of "when do we get on with our lives", which I took as a different question from "when _should_ we get on with our lives." What I think we _should_ do is not the same as what I think we _will_ do. Plenty of debate to be had around the "should" question of course, but it is a different question.

That noted, and since I did engage in your comment on the risk to children, I am curious about your statement that my response is inconsistent with what we know. As I understand it, we don't actually know why children have been less susceptible to illness so far, do we? I've seen plenty of theorizing, but I haven't seen any reporting indicating these are more than theories so far. If there's some reliable reporting on this topic I missed, I'd definitely be happy to see it!

> Children are at exceptionally low risk from Covid.

Let's hope the die keep rolling up to that result with each succeeding variant!

I'd imagine not too long after safe and effective vaccines are authorized for children under 12. At that point the majority of those who actively want protection will be able to get it. This is not the same as saying _all_ who want protection will get it, since no vaccine is 100% effective, and some people who would like to be vaccinated will not be able to because of health conditions or other circumstances, but I suspect society as a whole will decide "close enough."

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with that -- I think the number of "people who want protection but can't get it" will be uncomfortably large -- but this is my guess of when society as a whole will decide to move on.

Honestly, I think this means the future looks like the present, but more so. The places that will be hit the hardest will be more working class and in places that under invest in health and welfare. That's already the current trend, certainly in the US -- look at where medicaid expansion following the ACA has and hasn't happened, for instance, and who has access to decent health care and who doesn't. In some ways I think we're lurching back to previous centuries, where diseases like cholera, dysentry, typhus, etc were endemic, and could certainly affect the wealthy and professional classes, but were primarily scourges of the working class.

> Society currently only thinks a limited set of things - parental wealth, social status, skin color, etc. - are forms of privilege and we should work to reduce them.

That is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that society reserves privileged status to specific groups and denies this status to others, and that things like parental wealth, social status, skin color, etc are _markers_ of this.

In the United States, I believe the latter aligns with the facts we can observe. This is basically the argument of Isabel Wilkerson in "Caste"[0]. I'm not really up for trying to make the case for why I find this view convincing right now, in this comment I just wanted to highlight that it is a different argument than the one you made. If Wilkerson is correct, the actual markers of privilege are quite arbitrary, and phenomena such as racism arise from this rather than being themselves the root issue. The goal then is not so much ending discrimination as it is tearing down the caste system that fuels it.

[0]https://www.isabelwilkerson.com/

Yes, that is definitely one of the gaps I had, thank you (also the other replies to my comment -- upvoted all of you). I'm generally on a Mac (which runs docker in a linux VM -- the reason why is much clearer now) and so my exposure to linux is mostly in the context of ssh-ing into a server. I think the fact that OS X is linux-like without actually being a linux distro also subtly led me astray, as I've been thinking of different distros in the same way I think of OS X as different from Windows, and not really thinking about the "userland" vs "kernel" distinction.

A container as just an isolated process makes enough sense to me, but where I get confused is how it allows me to use alpine or ubuntu or some other base image that differs from the actual OS I'm running on. That's what makes it feel more like a lightweight VM to me, and which doesn't seem explained by just cgroups and namespaces. Or if it is, there's something I'm still failing to understand here.

No shame putting down a book you're having a hard time getting into. That's something it took me longer than it should have to realize. There's a lot of books out there, and if one's not working out, no one's keeping score on how many you finish. I'd recommend following your gut and trying the Mars books first. If it turns out you like KSR, maybe you might find yourself coming back to Ministry, and in a different frame of mind. Or you might find you actually don't care for KSR even after trying Mars, and then you can move on to other books without worrying you're missing something.

You're far more optimistic than I about

1) how quickly agriculture can adapt to large shifts in rain and wind patterns -- for instance, what if "more rain" includes torrential downpours with massive flooding, at unpredictable intervals? 2) how quickly the world economy can adapt to most of its major cities becoming uninhabitable (even where temps stay reasonable, sea levels won't) 3) how adaptable political systems will be to unprecedented climate-driven mass migrations, both within and between states, and in the face of collapsing states?

I don't think it'll be a gradual change at all -- more a series of rolling crises, where places spared a particular crisis either are at risk of being hit directly by the next one, or have to deal with the social, political, and economic upheaval as people die or flee areas directly impacted.

I have the app and do like it, but my phone's camera quality doesn't seem good enough for this to work properly (iPhone 6). I have to get pretty lucky and be able to be super close to the bird so that very little zooming or image enlargement is needed.

Still, nice app as a field guide.

Currently reading Ministry for the Future, which in some ways is a very optimistic book, but is still quite grim. Also, I'm thinking perhaps next time I'm tempted to read a book with climate change as the subject, I'll wait until winter to do it, rather than in the summer when the described scenes are a bit too easy to imagine by simply stepping outside.

Read the mars trilogy and Rice and Salt as well. I like his optimism in humans' ability to actually make radical political change. I suppose this is what I mean by his being both optimistic and grim -- severe outcomes aren't avoided in his books, but in the end societies do change before the absolute worst comes to pass. A "hard optimism" I suppose, which I find valuable.

Maybe a better analogy -- when I'm on call and get paged, my first response is not to immediately restart the servers. The immediate response should be to assess the situation, not jump straight to the most extreme approach.

Now you may quite reasonably point out that a page on a software system is seldom of the same weight as an emergency call to the police (true in my case -- money, not lives, have always been at stake in the systems I work on), but this ignores the reality that the "swarming with guns" approach _also_ can, and has, cost lives. So if anything, the higher stakes involved for police involvement is an even _stronger_ argument to take the extra time to properly assess the proportional response.

I think you're right that pretty much any approach to Native Americans by non-Native Americans is going to end up being problematic -- but is that really so surprising, given the immensity of what happened? How to even begin making amends for a multi-century campaign that literally erased a continent's worth of civilizations off the face of the earth? Massive reparations maybe? Massive land reform? If we're not talking about actions at that scale, then isn't any monument, memorial, or other form of honor little more than a sop and, arguably, more about assuaging the feelings of non-Natives?

If you stay in NYC and have kids, I'll be interested in your perspective then. I lived in NYC for a long time, and now live in the NYC suburbs. All your criticisms of suburbs are spot-on, IMO, even here in the NYC metro, but at the same time I don't think living IN the city with kids really would have worked out either. NYC is great because it's a true city, but it's very large, very loud, and still part of the broader American culture where you need to pay for what are arguably essential services such as good schools, physical safety, etc. We don't have a lot of in between options in the US though -- only here on the east coast do we have much urbanism, with NYC being the biggest and most intense by far, but pretty much everything else is suburban or exurban. I suspect this will be different within, say, 150 years, though of course that's a prediction I won't be able to check.

Ah, and looks like it's been submitted in the past, which I should have searched for first: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=carbon+coin

I'm reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future[1], where one of the major plot elements is the introduction of a "carbon coin" -- a complementary currency issued for reducing carbon, backed by central banks. It's essentially a targeted form of quantitative easing.

This idea is inspired by the Global Carbon Reward here in the submitted link. Given the numerous threads discussing whether blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies are or can be overall socially beneficial, thought the HN crowd might be interested, and a link to the original idea seemed the most relevant link.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future

Yes, but the tricky part here is that "those in power" is far more than just those in government. As this very thread topic itself demonstrates, there are plenty of people and organizations that are not the government that have a large amount of power.

In a democracy, we have a way to limit the power of our government -- but what's the way to do that for those in power who are not in government? The traditional approach has been to use government power to check non-government power, but this seems to run counter to the whole "limiting the power we give to those in power." But if we don't use government power to check outsize private power, then we are again ceding too much power.

My own view is that the answer is less about how much power we grant than about how much accountability there is -- ie, broader and deeper democracy. But that seems to work mostly in theory; in practice this often gets circumvented by those with power and we get shallow democracy with limited accountability and thus unsatisfactory restrictions on both governmental and non-governmental power.

This makes sense to me. I feel we're in a small room peeking through a tiny hole in the wall and asking why the outside world is so empty.

Where you can build more $1M houses? Not many, if any. Where houses can cost $1M and there's plenty of room to build more housing? NYC metro for one, and I'd guess other major metro's as well. Though I've noticed plenty of anti-apartment and other anti-development signs here in my NYC-area suburb. We're not the SF bay area yet, but seem to be aiming for that.

I think copilot is solving the wrong problem. A future of programming where we're higher up the abstraction tree is absolutely something I want to see. I am taking advantage of that right now -- I'm a decently good programmer, in the sense that I can write useful, robust, reliable software, but I'm pretty high up the stack, working in languages like Java or even higher up the stack that free me from worrying about the fine details of memory allocation or the particular architecture of the hardware my code is running on.

Copilot is NOT a shift up the abstraction tree. Over the last few years, though, I've realized the the concept of typing is. Typed programming is becoming more popular and prominent beyond just traditional "typed" languages -- see TypeScript in JS land, Sorbet in Ruby, type hinting in Python, etc. This is where I can see the future of programming being realized. An expressive type system lets you encode valid data and even valid logic so that the "building blocks" of your program are now bigger and more abstract and reliable. Declarative "parse don't validate"[1] is where we're eventually headed, IMO.

An AI that can help us to both _create_ new, useful types, and then help us _choose_ the best type, would be super helpful. I believe that's beyond the current abilities of AI, but can imagine that in the future. And that would be amazing, as it would then truly be moving us up the abstraction tree in the same way that, for instance, garbage collection has done.

[1] https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-va...

> I wonder how long it will be until someone sets up the rest of the feedback loop and starts putting up github projects made of nothing but code from this tool, and it can start to feed on itself.

This is my actual hoped-for endgame for the ad based internet. At some point Twitter, FB, etc will be exclusively populated by bots that post ads, and bots that simulate engagement with those ads to drive up perceived value of advertising. They'll use AI to post comments that are really just ads or inflammatory keyword strings to drive further "engagement." The tech companies will rake in billions and billions of dollars in ad revenue, we'll tax all of it and use it to create flying cars, high speed rail, and an ad-free internet closed off to all non-humans. Occasionally a brave ML researcher may venture out into the "internet" to take field notes on the evolution of the adbot and spambot ecosystem.

Roblox. I had my kids on linux originally, but there's no linux version of Roblox, and the proposed workarounds I found were unreliable, out of date, or more work than I was willing to invest in.

And if there were a small door over the hole, that opened only to allow fast moving flies to go through it from one direction and slow moving flies to go through it in the other...

This, to me, seems like it could deliver many of the actual promises of digital currencies without the bits that don't make them useful as currency. In many bitcoin threads, one pro-bitcoin argument I see people make is that it can be very helpful for people in under-banked or no-banked situations. I think that's actually a decent argument.

For a large number of digital currency enthusiasts, the "decentralization" argument has been a big seller, and obviously this is the exact opposite of that, but for those of us who don't buy into the decentralization argument but still find the tech behind digital currencies interesting, this seems like it could be a useful step forward.

My biggest takeaway from the pandemic: social science is way harder than biological science.

Well to use magit, first it's "ah, how do I open magit again?" Then it's "crap, now my org-mode buffer has been replaced by magit when I really wanted it in a separate tab but forgot to do the right key combo for that", then 5 minutes of googling "how to go back to previous screen in emacs doom", then remembering it's called a "buffer" That kind of stuff. I still get thrown off a surprising number of time by fat-fingering something and my emacs doing something surprising that I don't understand and am not sure what keys I touched to make it do that, and being unable to go back easily.

So it's really 100% on me for not being an emacs native rather than any shortcoming of magit per se, and as I said at some point I'll probably invest the time, but I _already_ have muscle memory for working in my terminal.

I've had the same experience. I've been using org-mode as my primary note-taking tool for several months now and am getting more comfortable with emacs as a result, but while I can see the appeal of magit, the "spend time learning how emacs git" vs "use the CLI to do what I want in 3 s" hasn't balanced out yet in magit's favor. At some point I'll probably sit down and take like a half day or so to actually learn magit, but git CLI isn't really broken for me so the drive to learn an alternative git tool hasn't been all that strong. Still, magit seems nice, so one of these days I'll probably make the effort.

Maybe someone can help me with this -- what if for round two, you flipped a coin: heads you pick the door you picked previously, tails you pick the other door. Does that change things at all, since you're "switching" each time?

--

Edited -- Actually @haberman's comment that "By opening a door, Monty lets you cover 100% of the "everything else" makes the most sense to me as I think about this. Imagine there is no Monty hall, just three doors, and I say "you can choose one door and you win if there's a car behind it, or choose two doors and see if there's a car behind it." Clearly you're better off choosing two doors. And that's in fact, functionally what happens by switching after a door is eliminated.

IME more "mechanical" means definitely promote code familiarity. For some languages I use vim as my primary editor -- generally anything frontend. OTOH, at least for me, I'm definitely a lot slower with pure vim when working with java. I use intellij for that. However, i use IdeaVim to get the vim key bindings, so 80% of the time I'm actually still using my IDE very similarly to how I use vim, so I think your point regarding "mechanical" means still holds. My biggest complaint is mainly that I wish I could access more of my IDE's features with just vim key bindings.

Sometimes when I'm really and truly stuck, I will open up a java file in vim. In those situations, the forced slow-down is actually an advantage, and I get a much deeper understanding of what I'm looking at. I can't code well this way (perhaps that's on me), but it can be a powerful aid in debugging at times.

I'm a big fan of sequence diagrams, especially those that can be generated from markdown-like syntax. I use Lucidchart at work, but there are a few free options as well -- in this comment I'm trying to advocate for the concept rather than a specific tool.

Sequence diagrams, to me, give the benefits of a flow chart, but with a much tighter explanation of the actual flow and relationships. You can read them from the upper left corner to the lower right, just like (western) writing. You get not just the entities involved, and not just the way they are connected, but the _ordering_ of those connections, which I find super helpful. The concept is simple enough that I can hand draw it on a whiteboard or scrap of paper, and for electronic formats, if you generate these from markdown you now have the same data in both a visual and textual format (handy for folks who have a harder time accessing pure visual presentations), and auto-generation from text makes it easy to update and so more likely to maintain as the system changes.

I think the early return pattern makes the most sense when it's less "logic" and more "validation." Eg in the example, the code isn't really _doing_ anything if there's no user or no first name, it's running a bunch of checks _before_ trying to do anything. Those validation checks are implemented with if/early return, but the actual pattern is more "validate first and only proceed if everything checks out."

In typed languages a lot of those checks get implemented in your actual types, but you still might have various business logic/data integrity checks you might implement in early return.

Seen in this light, this pattern's really not so much in tension with the idea of having a single return variable. It's just a way to implement the idea that invalid states should not be possible, which you accomplish in your type system when and if possible, and fall back to runtime checks for the gaps where it's not.