cppreference.com is by far the best resource for the language and the standard library. It is also well organized and easy to navigate. "errors creep in" is a well-taken complaint about life in general, not cppreference.
It's too bad that an article about "simple writing" is so hard to read. It has "simple" words, but it's clunky. Two examples:
"That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas."
(Why not: "Simple writing makes it easier to engage your ideas.")
"And remember, if you're writing in English, that a lot of your readers won't be native English speakers. Their understanding of ideas may be way ahead of their understanding of English."
(Why not: "Don't make your ideas difficult to understand.")
Agree on the "evil" part (or maybe "irritating"), but if I recall correctly from a few years ago, Nvidia has done this before with full access to the encoder only being available in the Quadro line.
I get so fatigued by "behavior" advice like this. Why spend time trying to optimize your chat encounters? Is the status-quo that much of an enemy that we have to fight it in every small corner?
I think it's important to point out that "being nice" also involves making room for people that might come across as rude, or that have difficulty expressing themselves in a polite way, or that are just speaking directly. I often get accused of being rude in my writing because I am direct. I've known lots of people (especially devs) that don't really understand that their phrasing might be interpreted as rude. If someone is clearly just lobbing insults, that's one thing, but we also have obligations to be charitable when interpreting others, and that charity often involves couching their expression as an attempt at being "politely informative." I would also say: unless it's flagrant, learn to deal with it. It's important to be able to deal with people, and that involves dealing with unhappy people, people who are stressed or at wits end, and so on. It goes both ways.
It is harmful to the team you're with, but there's no alternative right now. It is substantially easier to find a new position when you are currently employed, even if your stint has been brief. This is common knowledge, and as such self-reinforcing: if you quit, then apply somewhere else, the new place will assume you were forced out, since nobody on their own volition leaves a job before finding another one.
So there's no way around it right now, so here's my advice: unless you are about to have a breakdown, never quit until you find something else.
It probably gets worse than that. Eventually, if you pursue the task with gusto, it has to boil down to just letting people in regardless of merit. And then, if those you just let in aren't doing so well, you have to just let them pass. And so, eventually, you have to just give them degrees. And then, if those people who were just handed degrees can't convince anyone to hire them, you have to just give them the job..
I think your assumption here is that if you were to filter based on those things you'd get an outcome that would be representative of the total population. But I don't see why you think that. Look at relatively poor Asian kids in the NYC public schools system. Even if you were to apply your filter there, they would still likely end up massively over-represented. Similar (but less dramatic) outcomes are likely even with Whites. Even factors like social class and family income don't carve things up in such obvious ways.
Could be, but almost every company I have encountered is desperate to hire good people and none of them cared at all about where I or anyone else I knew went to school.
Weren't many of those kids coming from India, for example, "born into that type of sytem"? Isn't that exactly why they are here and not there? I would dare say that racism/classism in modern day India is much worse than it is here in the contemporary US.
Maybe it's the style of the article but I'm not sure I get the point. Is the complaint that tech is "too white"? If so, that doesn't seem true. Look for example at Google's own internal reporting: Whites are only something like 55-60% of the workforce, with Asians at 35-40%. Once you account for population totals overall, Whites are underrepresented. And I'm sure the same is true at Microsoft.
Is the point then that there just aren't many Blacks? Are Asians in the tech industry not part of the "minority" in the context of this conversation? Sorry but I'm losing track too quickly of what is even being discussed.
You might have an Aristotelian sense of "success" in mind here (meaning that it covers something like the long-term overarching benefit of the person), but I don't. I just mean success as in, anxiety medication actually improves anxiety; depression medication actually improves depression; attention deficit medication actually improves attention. Whether there are better ways for us to achieve long-term outcomes is a different issue.
The author's point is well-taken; but I don't think the problem is simply that psychological problems have become "de-personalized," and I think the move to "chemical" explanations is largely because the "chemical" treatments have been wildly successful (especially in comparison to, what? psychotherapy? talking about it?).
I think the actual crisis is a lack of good judgment in the scientific arena. There are obvious cases we can imagine where a "chemical" explanation is simply bone-headed. Joe's dog dies, his house burns down, he is laid off from his work. His resultant emotional distress surely involves chemistry; he's a person, after all. But it is depersonalizing, naive, and a bit creepy, to suggest that his distress is "just chemical" and should be treated with a drug. That's just gross, and I take it the author's point.
But consider another example. Terry has great friends, rewarding job, engaging hobbies, etc., but spontaneous and overwhelming anxiety over the possibility of being hit by a meteorite. This is now entering the territory of an irrational psychological reason, and it isn't "de-personalizing" or naive for a doctor to suggest that there might be a purely chemical explanation. We seek the chemical explanation when there just isn't any other sufficiently motivating factor.
Your "Just prohibit.. " line sounds like a mandatory sentence to me; just in this case a mandatory sentence of "none." What would be left to the judge's discretion exactly?
I am not replying to disagree with the spirit of your comment. I just think you should be a bit more careful thinking about it. Obviously she was not jailed for a crime she didn't commit and wasn't convicted of; she was jailed for a crime she did commit and was convicted of. The question is psychological though, about whether the sentencing decision, within the in murky realm of discretion, was based purely on facts completely bound by the scope of the conviction, or whether it extended beyond the scope of the conviction. And the answer is, it always extends beyond the scope of the conviction.
I ask you again to just use your imagination; set aside this particular case and imagine a case where there is absolutely compelling grounds for thinking that the mother is a direct harm to her children, but no admissible evidence to establish that in a legal context. So given the legal "room" to hand down a harsher-than-would-otherwise-be sentence for some separate offense, that doesn't strike me as totally inappropriate or out of line with our expectations about what judges should do. This of course requires the legal establishment of the "room" for judges to do such things, but they have that to a large extent.
"What does that have to do with your original assertion, that it's totally fine for a judge to sentence a woman to 496 days in jail for unpaid traffic tickets because she's suspected of being an unfit mother?"
This is an absolutely absurd "reading" of what I said, and it is patently offensive. Please look again.
Again, wildly naive. There is no "rule of law" that is so prescriptive. We basically have a loose confederation of laws, interpreted by courts, and exacted by humans. There is flexibility in various aspects, including sentencing, and things like that are (when they are) left to the discretion of the judge precisely because there is no formula otherwise. There is nothing about this that violates anyone's oath or duty, and nothing about it is inherently wrong. That is precisely the space that judges occupy that no formula can fill.
That's wildly naive and I think with a little bit of imagination you too can envision a scenario where it makes sense. It needn't be "wild guessing" on the judges behalf; there could be even absolutely convictable evidence that would cause any reasonable person to immediately and unquestionably believe in the guilt of the mother, yet might be barred because of a rule governing the admissibility of evidence (that's its own ugly topic). In such a case I find it hard to believe that a judge taking it on himself to "do the right thing" would be seen as "un-American"
1. I don't think the judge has to believe the justice system is flawed. It might just be that the justice system has limits, and that sometimes those limits are not sufficient to bring about the best outcome. Again, consider prosecutorial discretion and how it is used.
2. I don't think the judge has to believe it is flawless. In fact, the judge might believe that it is not flawless, and again exercise in the opposite direction of NOT sentencing someone who would otherwise be correctly sentenced just to keep kids out of a bad foster care system. My point was that, barring a situation where the judge has grounded suspicions about the foster care system, the judge must basically (as a principle of law) endorse the foster care system as a viable caretaker of the children. Judges would otherwise be required to initiate investigations into foster care systems (and the like) whenever they might be utilized in a legal setting. That's an impossible burden.
I agree with you that failure to pay traffic tickets is hardly grounds for that sentence, and that it would in fact be stupid if those were the grounds. And that is exactly why it is a pretty uncharitable initial interpretation of what happened. There are always publicly cited "endorsable" reasons that must conform to the law, and then there are the underlying messy reasons that actually motivate the decision. It fits in a similar murky category as "prosecutorial discretion"