Yes, this is essentially because mathematics is such an old science and goes very deep into branches. That's btw also why getting a certain degree is much harder there than in any other fields I've seen (did a bunch of courses at university in various fields, and the diff between e.g. pure math and psychology is almost comical).
Only tangenially relevant, but the exagerrated differentiation of universities, and levels of education (e.g. PhD vs. not) has always been bothering me. I only have experience in a different field (CS), and yes, those things can be indicators, but I've experienced so many outliers in both directions to know that degrees need to be taken with more than just a grain of salt.
> if you are on vacation, you are simply not available. You are dead to the world until you return. Emails do not get read, and devices get left at the office.
It's funny because that's kind of the definition of a vacation in my book. I find it weird that some places in the world handle it differently.
Note that it's also much better for the company in the long run: It's a test of resilience and redundany, the famous bus factor. It simulates what happens if someone is not available, and forces the organization around to have a backup plan. Having those is important for cases where employees leave the company or team (switching jobs/teams, accidents, sickness, parental leave, death, burnout, layoffs etc.). It's mind-boggling how many leads at various levels just don't understand that.
1. What if the browser gets closed/killed?
2. Error messages around syncing issues are notoriously worse than those of a sync request to the backend that failed. So the UX in the end is worse.
More generally: You can't circument the trade-offs of a distributed database, which such products are, conceptually.
TL;DR: Background syncing instead of synchronous updates to the cloud.
This is basically a thick client, and comes with according trade-offs. It's interesting and there are some best practices, but I can't help but feeling that either the author is a huge fan or the post is an ad (or "sponsored").
I was wondering if the author is joking, but after reading a bit more about the attribution drama, it seems rather a lack of reality check and reflection. If you plagiarize work, get called out on it, and then call this "harrassment", I don't know...
Programming competitions are not the same as real-world engineering, plus these countries have way more people trying to use these competitions as a gateway to good jobs.
Also, many good engineers emigrate to higher-income countries given the chance, and almost none will imigrate to low-income regions. The consequence is some sort of brain drain.
Many of the "teams" laws are BS, especially the ones about promotions and management. I've never been a manager or high-level executive, but it's not that all of them are either non-technical or bad managers. It's just that the combination of both skills is rare.
That's... Normal. Technology has always been moving towards higher-level abstractions. In terms of software, many engineers nowadays know how to code in high-level languages like JS or Java, while maybe 30-40 years ago many folks probably knew C, assembly, and all the low-level stuff like e.g. explicit memory management that most modern devs never deal with.
It's the same in Europe. There are many car drivers who would never admit that, but they just don't want to leave their comfort zone and learn how to use public transport. But when asked they will say stuff like "well, we live a bit outside the city", or "now with kids you basically need a car".
Not sure of it's a class thing, but rather the fact that software engineers often make good money, especially at places like Meta. It'st the same for me: If I lost my job tomorrow, I'd have enough savings to take some time before needing another job. Not sure if this would have been true for my parents.
Software folks love over-engineering things. If you look at the web coding craze of a few years ago, people started piling up tooling on top of tooling (frameworks, build pipelines, linting, generators etc.) for something that could also be zero-config, and just a handful of files for simple projects.
I guess this happens when you're too deep in a topic and forget that eventually the overhead of maintaining the tooling outweights the benefits. It's a curse of our profession. We build and automate things, so we naturally want to build and automate tooling for doing the things we do.
The SO copy-pasting is actually quite accurate. The same folks are now just blindly generating code. That's why most software in the world is shit, and will continue to be in the future. There might just be more of it.
Completely disagree. That's like saying that user manuals and driving assistances (e.g. alerts about approaching an object) in cars are only for bad drivers.
I can't help but keep finding it ridiculous how everyone now discovers basic best practices (linting, documentation, small incremental changes) that have been known for ages. It's not needed because of AI, you should have been doing it like this before as well.
The Kessler syndrome is mentioned, satellites colliding, causing a cascade of follow-up collisions. This gets brought up a lot, but people have a poor intuition on how large the orbit space is. Think of it this way: It's obviously larger that Earth's surface, and placing, say, a million objects on Earth still leaves a lot of space between them (there are thousands as many humans). Yes, satellites move in certain orbits, not in random places, but space is large, and humans are bad with imagining large numbers and things. The illustrations with fat dots on tiny earth images are misleading too IMO.
Apart of that, I do agree that space data centers are probably just a marketing stunt at this point, although some things could obviously be done to increase their chances, like more lightweight designs on GPUs, something that was never a big topic before.
What hotkey-driven and fast-paced workflows are you referring to? I used to be an Office user, now G Docs, and I hardly miss anything. Hotkeys do exist, and more complex stuff can be automated quite well with AppsScript.
Maybe I'm not enough of a power user, but these things often sound to me like the 0.1% productivity boosts that are nice to have, but often hardly relevant in the grand scheme of things.
Not sure if that's a serious question, but your driveway might lack a proper foundation, so the surface is moving and cracks. Also, it's likely not concrete, but tarmac (which is much softer).
Note that your memories might not be accurate, as your brain may have skightly altered them over the years, over and over. There is generally no way for yourself to know (except for some external proof).
This is not just the case for early childhood memories, but for anything - the more time passes, the less accurate. It's even possible to have completely "made-up" memories, perceived as 100% real, e.g. through suggestive questioning in therapy.
The bright side of this is that there is at least some sort of competition, since they operate on very different infrastucture. This is the free market premise on how quality and price should improve. Reality is often different though, because most customers are not really comparing and/or voting with their feet.