johnsmth

Do new workflows help? As we might imagine doing with alien technology, perhaps reverse engineering is the engineering (etc) of the future. One can still envisage a meaningful livelihood even if we are "merely" trying to understand the implications of A.I. discoveries..

I was just reading a detective novel set in Michigan..apparently in that state at least, private investigators can look up plates just by calling the Sec of State's office and giving their badge number. Seems like it wouldn't take much to get a company designated in a similar way.

A philosophy professor required us to make "charitable interpretations" of the arguments we critiqued. His advice has served me well for many years.

Hey man, wishing you a good early morning. Hope the responses haven't got you too down. If it's any consolation, your post must have resonated to garner 400+ upvotes. Personally I found it to be refreshing and real. Best of luck in your search and future endeavors.

It sounds to me like you are describing Linux desktops.

Thank you, we need to be outraged right now. Spot on.

"Lionel even claimed the tender had the correct number of rivets on the tender. Although a collector later informed the company that the model tender was three short of the prototype's 1,402 rivets."

Tidbits like this are why I love these kinds of articles.

HamstOS is just the microcontroller for the power supply. Pros: it is voice activated and fault tolerant. Cons: only responds to voice prompts beginning "Hey Mr. Binky". Also, it secretly hates you.

Yeah I'm like, you know who's good at hanging out on the stoop, poor people (Southern US). It's a little funny that's all.

If you were a red-blooded progressive maker-type of person in 2010, and you read Born to Run and didn't immediately go out and buy a pair of Vibram 5 Fingers, I really have to wonder if we're going to get along.

Never use the shoes anymore but that book has made me a healthier human for sure.

Would have been easier too, just to send a car to the kid's house to knock on the door. Here in the US cops would do it for the PR, sometimes.

A lot of EVs have big 19" or 20" wheels, which get damaged easily on bad roads. I would think people who can afford a Lucid or whatever would also appreciate having surfaces to drive on that don't bend their rims. Just a small counter-vailing factor.

Surprised that Coders at Work hasn't been mentioned yet. Reminds me of Gigs a bit if anyone remembers that one - just long form interviews without the filler.

I can definitely relate to the author's viewpoint. The dynamic he refers to is felt by talented developers who have an independent streak that runs to contrarianism. Not to toot my own horn but to speak up a bit in solidarity, I started programming on a TI-81 and then was lucky enough to attend high school where you could learn Pascal, so I got recursion early, then C++-based curriculum in college and also several semesters of AI in Lisp. So I'm not an absolute idiot at least.

My first real job was with PHP5 and it seemed fine to me then as now - of course I never used it as some do, with code and markup intertangled. My typical response to folks who denigrate PHP is similar to PG's discussion of Lisp as a competitive advantage (wonder what Zuckerberg might write if he were similarly inclined) - if you don't get it, fine with me. Except the author is right, developers are more trend-conscious than we would like to think, and without possessing a unique deep goodness such as Lisp's there's a real risk of PHP becoming redundant.

For my own projects, I've decided I will ride the PHP train as long as possible while spending a lot of time on the javascript side (so I have resume bullet points that are respectable to unenlightened folks) and then if/when the stars move too far out of alignment just switch to whatever looks best. I've got a framework (which I've been working on for a long time before it was trendy and then un-trendy) with the server components written in PHP but I seriously think it could be converted to Python in a few days. Clean code is clean.