This statistic is heavily weighted by suicides and domestic violence. If you don't have cause for concern over those two issues, the numbers are very different.
1,562 karma · joined March 14, 2017
If you have a fixed income _and_ already have a lease somewhere you like and don't foresee any reason to move in the future then (and only then) rent control works in your favor, at the expense of anyone else who is looking to move into or within the area.
And therein lies the problem. The focus is on the platform. It's all about the platform. The "creators" churn out "content" to make the "platform" better. The platform drives the machine; the individuals are reduced to cogs in the machine.
The healthy, sane priorities are inverted: tools should help the artist.
If they're only making $20k per year, no, not really.
Using "better more safe programming languages" generally gets you [some greater level of] memory safety and thread safety. Developing for safety-critical embedded systems with a single thread and no dynamic memory allocation renders those benefits irrelevant. There are still concerns around type safety, but full compiler warnings and strict code review, both of which we need regardless, handle that.
We also need to be able to certify not only that our source code matches our requirements, but that our binaries match our source code. Compiling with --c99 --debug -O0 gives us a highly visible link between each line of source code that goes into the compiler and the assembly instructions that come out of the compiler. We know exactly what the computer is actually doing, not just what we think we've told it to do. The various "better" languages all get "better" via more powerful and clever (read: complex and opaque) compilers, which is a no-go in our field.
With little benefit and impermissible cost to the alternatives, and the breadth and depth and longevity of the resources and support available for it, there's no sane choice for us but C.
And then he makes the leap of presuming that an aesthetic within the enthusiast community is driving a surge in mass murder. Frankly, the opposite seems more likely to me: that the shift in manufacturer focus is meeting a rising demand created by a fracturing society.
Among the few laptops that still include a trackpoint at all, I'm seeing more and more omit the third button, rendering the nub a vestigial ornament, requiring a fallback, as you've said, to the touchpad. I'm very disappointed; should I ever need to buy a new laptop, I expect to find myself up the proverbial creek.
I'm not sure if you've looked around northern New England recently, but there are practically no cheaper homes left.
With each revision of our product spec, we work first to write or modify code to meet the new spec and then, once everybody has tested and merged all their changes, we pause new development to review and verify the code. We tend to end up each working on different modules, so we can maintain complete independence in review by each reviewing others' modules with minimal attention to who authored each individual diff. We just keep a spreadsheet tracking all the different files, their authors, and whether they've changed since the last review; at the start of a new review, we assign a reviewer to each file and then the author and reviewer work the file through review-resolve rounds until there are no further findings.
Since everybody is fully focused on the review, it goes by quickly; since there's no expectation of review during development, we can develop quickly without holdups.
Note also that there are two versions of the third edition: the standard edition (colorfully striped shape on the cover) and the international edition (globe made of circuit boards on the cover) which is quite a bit cheaper. The contents of the chapters are the same, but the exercises at the ends of the chapters have been rewritten, by the publisher's lackeys, not by the original authors, for the international edition, very poorly by all accounts.
I agree, it is completely reprehensible.