gerbilly

You know @dang, I appreciate what you're trying to foster here, but despite that I think that some of the commenters on this site are keeping people away.

My friend—who is much more restrained in speech than I am—and I were saying that we don't like to come to the 'orange site' as much as before, despite the sometimes excellent discussions, and though it's hard to say precisely why, the reason we came up with is the libertarian slant.

You are doing a great job keeping the tone civil, but I think in the end it just leaves us with a community made up of say 33% of people politely saying impolite things.

By controlling the tone, could it be that our trolls have just learned to deliver their absolutist, unfeeling and insensitive comments in polite language?

We can detect tone but not intent, right? So we control the tone, but the trolls here (and no doubt about it we have them like anywhere else) have just learned to sealion people.

And I stand by the provocative nature of the parent post.

What if he/she had said 'The difference between a Russian and a Ukrainian is just a line on a map?' That is a politely stated idea. Would a Ukrainian have to take that with restraint too?

Are you seriously suggesting that the indigenous were practising controlled burns over millions of hectares of boreal forest?

I find this 'sweep your floors' meme a bit of an oddity:

1. It involves conservatives casting native americans in a good light. Who's going to argue with that?

2. It contains a false epiphany which just feels right (the solution to forest fires is...fires)

3. It contains a grain of truth. Native americans did perform controlled burns, and in the NW they did take care of salmon streams etc, but not on a scale that would prevent today's wildfires.

It's a classic diversion from climate change, and our terrible 'foresty' practices of cutting down forests and planting monocrops of high resin species all packed together and calling it reforestation and finally, spraying entire valleys with roundup (often where indigenous people live of course)

> the only difference between a canadian and an american is a line on a map

Kindly keep this kind of ignorant viewpoint to yourself.

There are a lot of differences, and if you can't or won't see them that not our problem.

As a Canadian, I don't want your two party political structure (soon to be one maybe?) and your supreme court of mostly old clerics making decisions based on their religious views in my country thanks. Or shall we talk about your daily mass shootings?

If you guys think that is working for you, so much the better for you.

> You definitely don't speak for us all, whatever the case.

Yeah OP doesn't speak for me either. While this might not be implemented in the best way, Canadian culture is a real thing, but only because we are active in trying to protect it.

And it goes double for French Canadian culture! I don't want my province to become another Louisiana, i.e.: a once French speaking region that is now nearly 100% anglophone, but hey there's this great French influence!

Also FB puts news orgs in a bind because in order to compete, they need to give their content away for free on Facebook.

This has put the squeeze on an industry that was already bleeding money from all the ads moving online.

Because we are a small news market, this has been especially damaging to our journalism industry. If we lose it then it will be foreigners telling us what the 'facts' are in our own country, no thanks.

Noted, companies have convinced governments to help protect their pricing structure.

What I find disquieting are all the long comments discussing the intricacies of these 'grey market' tactics. To even discuss it lends this kind of bad faith dealing a legitimacy it does not deserve.

It's like fan fiction.

Maybe it's just me, but when powerful people conspire to screw me over, I'm not that interested in hearing their venal arguments about why it was reasonable and for my own good.

Here's my falsifiable predictions:

1. We won't be able to evolve these systems such that they become 100% accurate.

2. Despite this, because they are so convenient, we will lower our standards to accept some falsehoods as acceptable in areas where we previously did not.

3. Real human expertise will become a 'premium product' across multiple industries.

I myself never liked agile or this idea of "iterating" towards a better solution.

Every time I've designed a software system that ended staying in production for years, it was a system that I'd thought about a lot up front before implementing it.

I think we could benefit a _lot_ from doing a bit more design up front. Nowadays it's almost as if people think it's impossible to get it right the first try.

It's not. Professionals can do it if you let them.

When I'm on vacation my stress is reduced to the point where my 'appetite' drops, and this is despite the fact that I'm increasing my exercise load enormously (surfing, hiking, etc...)

I've noticed that stress causes me mild stomach pain, which can register as hunger. It also causes dry mouth which registers as thirst. If you're satisfying that thirst with sugary drinks long term, then you're going to be in trouble.

There is also so much novelty and more interesting stuff going on while on vacation that I don't find myself poking through the fridge out of boredom.

'Dog Strangling Vine' is a nasty invasive in north america.

https://www.invadingspecies.com/invaders/plants/dog-strangli...

Whats to stop people from just taping black construction paper over the 'special ads screen?'

Unpopular opinion:

Life was better before smartphones. I wish they'd never been invented.

> I think this is interesting too. To me it seems the attitude stems from conflating gratitude with weakness.

More examples I thought of:

* Extreme opposition to mask wearing, perhaps due to conflating nurturing/protecting with weakness.

* Stand your ground laws. Backing down from a fight, even when it is neither strategically or tactically logical perhaps is perceived as weakness.

* Vehement opposition to environmental laws... (again nurturing/protection).

* Fart cars with noisy exhausts and Harleys. Used a s a tool to project aggression, i.e.: the perceived opposite of weakness.

* Victim blaming. Sympathy/empathy conflated with weakness?

I think this is a rich vein which might yield some insights into aspects of human behaviour.

A similar concept has also been discussed in the article "The World's Most Toxic Value System¹.

[1]: https://stevedutch.net/pseudosc/toxicval.htm"

See also:

> Where are the L5 cars after 14 years of research?

Uber and Lyft.

Turning humans into automatons works better right now that trying to turn computers into humans.

> It seems to me the vaccine industry should be put in a severe category of "distrusted entities"

It [feels] to me the vaccine industry should be ...

FTFY

I hate being controlled by 'the man' just as much as anybody, but I think you have to ask yourself why you are so fixated on this issue?

What's your position on gun ownership? If you really want to keep mothers of two, or their children for that matter, from dying; then maybe focusing your outrage there would save more lives.

> the ability to write song lyrics does not make Bruce Springsteen unique.

Springsteen is fact very good at writing lyrics.

Some of his lines draw beautiful character portraits, very economically:

> Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack

> I went out for a ride and I never went back

> It’s 2023 - if a VPN is how you’re doing your privacy you’re probably doing it wrong.

I'm honestly interested, how could one 'do privacy' the right way then?

I wanted to chime in here and mention the concept of "Email Apnea"¹.

The idea is that we hold our breaths when anticipating an outcome.

The term was coined in relation to email, but I believe that programmers probably have it even worse, because we basically spend our entire day in a a loop where we, try something, anticipate the results try again, repeat...

I personally find myself doing it. I guess the best analogy for it is that we "wait with bated breath" to see the results of our last command or compilation. I think it's a problem inherent in all disembodied work.

We are supposed to move the body and the mind as a unit, instead, we are increasingly making ourselves into brains in a jar, and I think our breathing patterns reflect it.

1: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/email-apnea-is-a-re...

> if you had walked in a year previously with exactly the same plan would you have gotten any traction?

Nope, most of the time it wouldn't and my experience bears that out ("Let's not boil the ocean...").

Thinking simple, and avoiding premature optimisation, are so often the right thing that we can forget that they don't always work.

Teams and people often prefer to learn the hard way. Mind you _I_ haven't built any companies or startups, and my up approach probably would lend itself to do that either.

There's an adage, by Fred Brooks: "Plan to throw one [implementation] away." I come in when they are ready to throw one away, but aren't sure what to replace it with yet.

As far as it being fun, sort of. First of all I have a more 'normal' job now, second of all it's a rush, and an ego boost, but ultimately exhausting.

Literacy is a good way of putting it.

Another example I can give is when a client had some process represented by a graph, with boxes and arrows, but the structure of it was really ad hoc. It was _mostly_ a DAG except with some extra back edges they'd added to solve specific problems.

I suggested modifications to their structure, their algorithms and their DB storage for this thing so that it _did_ become a DAG, being careful to explain how to keep their functionality working.

After that the graph could be topologically sorted, and the upside was that instead of loading the whole graph at once as they were doing, we could load a single topological 'level' at a time.

Added an index for topological level in the DB and we were able to make it efficient.

They did have to do some work on the calling side, because they used to load it all at once, and now they had to load it in pieces, but we gained an order of magnitude or more in load time, so it was deemed worth the effort.

> 10 times programmers don't exist.

Maybe not, but I _can_ say that for me the problems I unstuck for customers _were_ about programming, not requirements gathering or process.

It usually was some small kernel of a larger codebase that was ill thought out (usually under-engineered, or solved with a naive approach that wouldn't scale/perform) and hadn't been thought out right.

The solution usually involved recasting the entire approach and solving it some other way.

You are right that I didn't have to deal with town halls, or scrums or any of that, and that was definitely part of the upside.

But what I _did_ have to deal with as a 'fixer' was that I never know what specific skills would be required at this particular customer site. It required thinking on your feet and was frankly exhilarating to pull of.

Oh it payed good! But it cost me plenty in burnouts too.

Don't worry about asking me to be humble, it's _taught_ me to be humble, believe me.

I also understand what you say about alternating between being the hero and being the problem.

There is a tightrope to be walked so that you leave your client with code that works for them. I mean some tiny little kernel of code that only you understand isn't going to serve them in the long run.

I'm not claiming to have always gotten that balance right.

Ok one specific example. I'd say the 10x part isn't about productivity but insight into the problem. Most people solve the problem as given, but the times when I've been 10x I managed to change the definition of the problem to something simpler, and easier to solve.

Here's an example: At one company they had a 'financial calculator,' i.e. a program to help visualise how some financial math played out over time and it was giving incorrect results. When I looked at the code I saw that it had been written by composing a lot of those functions you see on actual financial calculators, (1/V, PV, PMT, etc...).

This may have seemed simpler to approach it this way, but because there were so many compositions and there was a root finding algorithm involved, it quickly got out of hand. I started from the problem definition, defined a recurrence relation for what we are trying to calculate, found a closed form formula for the recurrence relation. This part was the hard part.

Now those 3000 lines of FV1P(XYZ(ABC())) turned into like 20 lines of simple math, _and_ the formula could now be solved for the other variables, so no more root finding. I just solved for the other variables, wrote functions for them and that was it. It ended up being faster, correct, numerically more stable, and the code was smaller.

I wrote up a white-paper on how the math worked, included a proof and that was it. It took two weeks.

The value to the customer was that this bug in this one part of their 'suite' of applications was holding up a sale to major prospective customer of their's. So fixing this had an outsized valued compared to the severity of the bug.

I know 10x programmers exist cause I am one. I guess you'll have to take my word for it.

For years I worked as a contract consultant. I'd usually only get called in when projects were in crisis. I'd get into town, solve the problem, explain the problem and get out of town. I've worked in more than 20 workplaces so far in this way.

But... It requires incredible focus and being constantly in crisis mode led me to burn out more than once.

So now I work as a 1 or 2x and just take it easier and no one complains. You could say that I'm retired from my 10x life.

I do sometimes fall back into the 10x mode, cos honestly the rush was exciting and it fed my ego, but I'm trying to no let my ego lead me down the path to burnout anymore.

I worked at a startup where 'staying late' was expected. The best analogy I can give for it is that the technical staff were asked to work on a transport truck's engine as it drove down the highway at 150km/h, no stopping allowed, while the sales team airdropped (from a helicopter?) more and more load on the back of the truck.

I used to get texts at all hours of the night and day and learned to start to ignore them, then I eventually left.

A coworker who stayed a few years after I left told me that I did the right thing. Until you implement 'flow control' the demand side will _never_ get the signal that their incident coverage is not sufficient.

This was a particularly abusive situation, but this kind of experience always makes me suspicious of people who look down on others for not staying late.

All this 'staying late' moralizing indicates management that wants seamless incident coverage but is unwilling to pay for it.

Having said this, I am usually willing to stay a little bit late on occasion, because no one's planning is perfect. But when it becomes habitual, I take it as warning sign to look for another project or job.

To me Fight club is a boy meets girl story.

The whole Fight Club and later Project Mayhem id a complex digression he invents to avoid facing the fact that he wants to get close to Marla.

I remember writing what I felt was thoughtful essay for a history class I took in first year UNI. I did a lot of research, and being a CS major, I Think I crafted a solid logical argument.

The week after the TA started complaining about people's grammar, specifically saying that you can't communicate you ideas if you can't form grammatically correct sentences. She specifically called out the difference between 'it's' and 'its.'

At that point I knew she was talking about my paper, so I chimed in: "Oh you're talking about my paper!" Sorry about that!

I think this is where CS hurt me, cos we are used to consistent rules. When used like this 's denotes possession: "Dave's car." So I sometimes still over-apply this rule to "it" i.e.: "It's car."

I found the whole exchange peevish, which is why I decided to lean into the critique with the TA in front of everybody. I told her to scan the room and look at all the faces assembled.

I told her that if she only was going to consider an argument valid if the grammar was perfect¹, then she wasn't likely to be pleased. Almost everybody in the room had a different mother language than English, including myself.

1. This was in an era before spellchecking became common.

Think of all the coworkers you've ever had and see if you can imagine them writing RFCs and debating back and forth and revising them?

I have worked at a lot of companies and I find the kind of people who can or are willing and able to do that is decreasing. It's nearly zero today.

If the Internet was invented today, it would work only for the happy path and fail with a million different error modes, each handled differently depending on the specific implementation.

And you know what? People would accept it's unreliability probably, the way we accepted the 'all computers crash' from the DOS era till about NT 40. Everybody knew that computers just crash like that. :shrug:

Today ChatGPT makes up facts and gets things wrong. But it's OK cos it's newer than Google, or printed books.

Ok, I never said there weren't smart people still around.

But I stand behind what I claim. A large collaborative, and disinterested project like DARPANET could not get off the ground today.

Are you seriously arguing that the generation who used pocket protectors and HP calculators didn't have an advantage in concentration over the one who's been shown to distractedly check their phones every 15sec in case a cat might be doing something interesting?

But really the argument behind your argument seems to be that there is a monotone increasing function to 'progress'. I'm arguing that it's not and that sometimes we regress.

We can't even agree on what is real anymore, isn't that a serious disadvantage?

> This simply reads to me like a "kids these days" type of old-man argument, which has, as we know, existed since time immemorial.

And this counterargument has existed since time immemorial + 1. It proves nothing.

Yeah sure. ChatGPT confabulates constantly and has no understanding of what it's saying. I think it fails the 'I' part of 'AI.'

I've had it confidently invent URLs when challenged to show the sources for an obviously false claim. It invented a URL which has never existed.

I mean it's impressive, but it has a long way to go to become intelligent.