blindwatchmaker

Mutable internal state is problematic with or without inheritance.

> The turnaround of restaurants and bars here is amazingly fast. When one fails, another one springs up. The same street will have very different storefronts each year.

Is that supposed to be a positive thing? Sounds pretty unstable and a terrible detriment to developing an actual neighbourhood.

People have been able to build successful organizations without being abrasive dickheads to their colleagues and subordinates all the time. I think it's a false dichotomy.

Could you provide examples?

It's not even the going ballistic part that gets me, but the sequence of events. Management refused to allocate the time to fix tech debt/bugs, this decision comes back to bite them in the ass, GP takes the typical tack that tries to deflect blame away from shitty management decisions.

"Could you, the devs, have fixed this bug under severe time pressure just before a critical sales period instead of when you first identified it?" -> if yes, no problem. Spiritus sancti, management is absolved of their sins.

> When Bezos went ballistic the day before Thanksgiving, did you still fix the bug in time?

This is the kind of line of thinking often pursued by poor managers.

It's time for a debt jubilee.

They are making vehicles, not apps.

seems to be here:

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=36...

Prison labor is the natural next step in the race to the bottom for wages.

> I'm not sure why blockchain has become a perennial 'love to hate' favorite on a forum dedicated to 'disruptive' startups. The cynic in me would say the people complaining are the ones who sold their bitcoin for $100 back in the day and cannot stand the fact that they're out millions for not being forward-looking enough.

I would say this attitude says more about you, and many others, in that you view bitcoin as a speculative asset rather than a stable currency to be used for the exchange of goods and services as initially advertised. This is not a positive argument for cryptocurrencies.

This is a really bizarre statement. Could you deign to back it up in any way?

> Many of us understand very well that the climate is changing and that humans might have something to do with it, we just don't know to what extent.

Could you elaborate? I was under the impression that even conservative estimates by reputable climatologists showed some pretty drastic changes.

I care, it's useful to gain insights into the lives of the extremely powerful and politically inclined and see where their thoughts are going; for example seeing that "predictive policing" is a theme they felt important enough to include in their politics larping is something I found interesting.

50 million? What the hell, that's multiple cities worth of depopulation. There's no way that could be true

This part of the article stuck out:

> “As we have known from the start, we are in the middle of a civil war with the Guptas and allies on one side, and Johann Rupert and others on the other side. More mud will inevitably be thrown. However, it is difficult to turn down such a large retainer.”

I feel like the blowback the Guptas and their PR flunkies got was more because of the fact that this was a power struggle between different obligarch factions than because of wrongdoing (although obviously they are guilty of that as well).

If the Guptas/Pottinger had targeted people without massive wealth and clout among global and European elite circles we might not be getting behind the scenes exposures like these.

I think we live in era where ordinary people and interests that don't represent the wealthy have no ability to hit back against character assasination and PR campaigns, and with no one left to go after the future is going to be obligarchs targetting each other, a bit like the late stage Roman republic.

Meanwhile in the real world, many corporations get away with doing all these things, abusing labour, regulatory capture and the people running them get rich as Croesus doing it.

A bug that seems to pop up again and again, here's an article about a crusader against land speculators who found it more profitable to leave land unused all the way back in the 1800s:

https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/06/04/Tax-To-Solve-Housing...

Something similar happened from Linus Torvalds just recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17242103

Is being a dick pretty common in open source discussion?

Having to deal with UI developed by Microsoft is the only thing that could ever make me feel sorry for drone operators.

Hop onto using products based on pseudoscience instead of stuff that's actually clinically tested?

It seems pretty dangerous too:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755247/

The number of people from India who fall for this nonsense is astonishing; it would make more sense if it was just targeted at the poor and uneducated, but it seems to encompass everyone. I guess education doesn't cure stupid.

I found your explanation a lot more weird and a lot less simpler than the parent.

Really enjoyed this book. Once you get currying, and using curried functions to pipe/compose, everything clicks into place. I found the examples of using Nothing/Maybe monads for error handling pretty neat as well - is that a common pattern, because I don't remember native support for those types when I briefly dabbled in elixir.

Also is his explanation of monads as 'functors that can flatten' a simplification for the purposes of teaching, or is that more or less what they are?

> Universal telecommuting does not need to be the next step in our evolution as a society, and that's okay.

To be honest, given the rising costs of living in most cities, I'm kind of hoping it will be.

Has Messenger caught up to (or aiming to catch up to) wechat in terms of functionality and scope yet? I remember a lot of hubub about bots and conversational commerce.

The fundamental problem I have with reddit is that it seems extremely easy to game and astroturf. Things like /r/politics felt like a Democratic party propaganda platform around the 2016 election for example.

A cursory glance at the history of the industrial revolution, or even conditions today in several places including Amazon, will tell you what happens when labor's right to organize is crushed.

> The "Fasci" "workers" became the Fascist government that went on a murderous rampage across Europe

I googled this and couldn't find any relations between them. Could you provide a link? Also, why did you put workers in scare quotes, were they something else?

Economic shocks, espescially those on the scale of 2008, affect far more people than the ones involved in the bubble.

That's a very odd view. The bankers did ruin the economy, because an economy with a bubble + the ensuing shock is far worse by most metrics than one where the bubble never happened in the first place.