np-

While this seems intuitively true, it seems to me like the opposite is happening. Every advance or increase in technological efficiency creates exponentially _more_ demand for developers. Think about every tool and library that comes out; all the JavaScript front end tooling which made things “easy” has created literal armies of front end engineers. Even going farther back, think about Java, PHP, C++, all these came out to make developers lives’ easier and ended up creating more and more developers. We can even see it in the invention of the concept of high level languages over machine code, that’s also a human simplification.

Personally, I don’t see the train suddenly stopping and going in reverse anytime soon.

The problem is, everyone is in the second category over a long enough time frame. Hong Kongers probably thought the same, but suddenly there were crackdowns, and state actors probably would have loved to have unrestricted access to peoples phones to see if citizens were exercising their “free speech” correctly.

Think about Ukraine today, the Russian government would probably love to have a way to compromise millions of Ukrainian citizens’ phones.

These people all use iPhones.

> one instance of a person who is smart and not happy

This premise does not lead to this conclusion:

> Stupid people are happier then smart people.

Which is your first sentence and seemingly the thesis of the first comment.

> Kids are generally stupider than adults.

Yes, granted this may be true but my point is there are also a lot of differences between kids and adults independent of intelligence. Ones that can quite obviously affect happiness. Such as, say, social pressure or other obligations.

I can rewrite your first comment as: "Loners are happier than social people. Look at kids. Kids have less social obligations than adults. They're also happier. So if anything that proves that social obligations don't make you happy and it hints at the possibility that not having social obligations actually makes you happy."

and this is an equally valid conclusion as the one you came up with (thus both are kind of meaningless).

>So if anything that proves that being smart does not make you happy

That’s because one anecdote doesn’t “prove” anything regardless if one says the word “prove” or not. You got one datapoint and you extrapolated negatively from that—all I am saying is there is an equally valid conclusion that can be drawn from the anecdote. I.e I could also say that since children seem happier, that “proves” that it’s being short and loud makes you happier.

To be pedantic, an equally valid conclusion is that intelligence and happiness are independent variables with no connection, not necessarily that there is an inverse correlation.

I rented a bicycle in Florida a few days ago where the merchant took an imprint of my card (yeah, in February 2022). I'm not even sure how that can possibly be cheaper than one of those Square devices at this point.

> We programmers and data scientists

Instead of semantically correct Python, programmer and data scientists’ jobs will be to work in semantically correct English. Fundamentally the job won’t change (you’ll be programming the AI rather than program the machine directly).

For me I have found that traveling helps break that "tunnel vision" which I occasionally find myself stuck in. And it's very hard to realize you're stuck in it until you break out of it. Traveling helps me realize that there's an entire world out there where people are not just living, but thriving. That always helps stir up my curiosity to dig deeper into things.

Were all these deleted episodes just about COVID misinformation? All 113 of them? I haven't listened to them but the other comments on this thread seem to indicate that is not the case at all.

Pretty sure some people’s brains are just stuck in an infinite dopamine kick loop. I consider it similar to the opioid epidemic, where people’s brains have been re-wired to compulsively do things they might not want to do. Next time try asking someone you see scrolling Facebook if they’re actually enjoying themselves and I guarantee they will express some form of regret (but then will continue doing it).

That's fair, and I'm not saying it's as easy as flipping a switch. We are all social human beings wired to easily get caught up in the day to day panic, especially when someone is breathing down your neck. But you need to consider that somebody breathing down your neck does _not_ have your best interests in mind. You are master of your own career, and any shitty code you deliver will have your signature on it. It's all about setting boundaries and being able to push back when people are unreasonable. This is where the "not caring" is an invaluable skill. You are an immovable mountain in the face of a hurricane.

At the end of the day, YOU are the professional. If an amateur decides that you are going too slow, that doesn't mean anything--they can feel free to hire more engineers or whatever needs to be done, but the onus is on _them_ to ante up. No matter how much you love your job, you're probably going to have multiple throughout your career so you need to focus on yourself first and foremost.

Why not? You can care about delivering beautiful code. You can care about ensuring the workplace is a pleasant place to work for all. You can care about your relationships you’re building. You may even be a huge fan of the product you’re building. That doesn’t mean you need to shit a brick when someone comes running in with their hair on fire—it’s not a binary proposition. Caring about things can be done “a la carte” and you can simply just not care about the bullshit

> When you push yourself to your limits at your profession, a lot of stuff clicks into place and you learn so much.

Maybe a cynical take, but if you’re pushing limits then you’re probably just learning the right corners to cut, shortcuts to take, and how to exploit/manipulate people to get what you want fast. If you didn’t learn any of that, then—well, someone else just learned all that at your expense and you’re setting yourself up to just be exploited again and again.

> there just isn't the time

Yeah, that’s the root cause. Why is there no time? Is someone’s life on the line for this deadline or is it just that the manager is eyeing a sweet bonus for delivering early. 99.9% of the time it’s the latter. So why learn how to get manipulated? Learning to work at a consistent pace is far more sustainable. Tortoise and the hare.

You can care about your career and your self improvement while still maintaining healthy boundaries around the mental effort expended for your job. We’re in it for a long time but jobs come and go

What I’ve found is that you can care about things like craftsmanship, problem solving, and quality while not being bothered by the day to day short term project level thinking.

To be fair to the parent comment, you need to click “By Ethnicity” to see that Asians and White earn similar pay comment (at least on the mobile version), it does not appear without a user interaction. However the general conclusion that Caucasians earn more is viewable by default, so someone who skims the article is going to come to a very different conclusion than someone who read it carefully. And let’s be honest here, most people are probably just going to skim it (and even more honestly, I personally skimmed it and didn’t even realize it was addressed until I read this comment chain).

The reason is that any earnings miss is a signal that Facebook has already peaked and is on its way down and out. Especially considering all the other negative news around it, it might not be able to recover from a tailspin

> What is so good about stupidity that it has to be exposed so free to the public or what is so special about it that it can't be distinguished from intelligence ?

The problem is: who gets to define “stupidity” and “intelligence” and the exact limits of what speech is allowed or not. We already have provable examples of people who were considered some of society’s biggest idiots while alive but ended up having a deep and lasting impact to society in the long term (Socrates is a notable example). It’s also guaranteed that this power would be abused to prevent legitimate political discourse almost immediately after granted. There is no such thing as perfect, consistent enforcement. It’s always subject to the human biases of today.

> "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks that were, generally, arbitrarily designed by some gatekeeper?"

But isn’t this basically every job that doesn’t directly support a human need (like food, clothing, shelter)? Just arbitrarily working to meet some other human’s desires?

Yes because limiting a vice based on what a few people “firmly believe” has always worked so smoothly and successfully in the past and has never caused any major societal issues. Worked so well in America for alcohol and drugs, why not give it a shot with porn too?

> Well, screw the governments, I want to make positive-sum trades

You and what army? And I’m not even being facetious, you’d probably need an army to go against your government and economically aid an enemy like this. And therein lies your answer for who will enforce these contracts: those with the most capability for force.

Maybe it was Halo 3? The one that focused heavily on matchmaking play (I played on Xbox if that makes a difference)

That’s actually interesting—I used to really be into multiplayer games when I was a teenager into my early 20s, and have some great memories of virtual hangs with friends both real and offline. My interest in online gaming basically dropped to zero (or even negative) after that, which seems to coincidence with when matchmaking started becoming a thing. I think it was it Halo 2 that was the first big matchmaking game that I played and I just really couldn’t get into it at all, I just more or less assumed I was just getting older and losing interest in childhood hobbies but never connected it to the loss of community in my head. Thinking about all those multiplayer lobbies from yesteryear gives me pangs of nostalgia.

You can contact your 911 call center through a non emergency line (numbers available here when you enter your state/region: https://www.nasna911.org/contact-911). You can then call and set up a time window for outbound test calls to be placed where they won’t send emergency services.

Can’t seem to reply any deeper on the thread, but also I never specifically mentioned CI. The only rule is that if you release a phone app, 911 has to work 100% of the time, no exceptions. That is the law. Also, this is Google and Microsoft, both of whom have basically unlimited resources. However they figure out how to do it reliably is up to them. Note that no other apps or service providers seem to be out of compliance.

Every app vendor who sells a phone product in the US? Uh, yes? It’s the law. 911 Call centers literally make testing available for this. And all you really need to test is that you’re making the outbound call properly without shit hitting the fan.

What’s the alternative? Just have 911 calls fail every once in a while since everybody is too busy with their feature work to look into it?

To prevent this from happening again. To force their hand to ensure that their incentive structure changes to test and verify emergency calls _first_ regardless of how long it takes even if it slows revenue generation before releasing their products to production. To hold them accountable to society for brazenly ignoring one of our major rules while still selling products pulling in a ton of cash. Lots of reasons to raise an official complaint. So they don’t just get to walk away with an “oops my bad”, much like many of us wouldn’t be able to if we messed up big time.

It’s not like this is some random Joe shop that missed a small feature. This is Google and Microsoft, two of the biggest tech companies out there, making billions while not even caring to follow society’s rules (move fast and break things right? All in the name of scaled super fast profit)

Kind of similar but maybe in a different context—there are a few tools that I’ve written for myself that speed my work up significantly but I haven’t widely disseminated. It’s not because I don’t want my coworkers to succeed, but more that my tools are directly mapped to the way my brain and hands work. Ie, I’m much more of a shell guy who likes to write command line scripts to speed things up while most of my coworkers prefer heavier IDE/tools/plugins to assist (no judgment either way, its just how our brains work). I offered some of my tools a few times but no one took me up so I don’t bother anymore.

Generalizing a solution, becoming a product owner, maintaining it for others, or even worse having some douchy manager take your idea and ruin it, seems like it would be way more work than I can handle and still do my day job.

Not OP, but I think it’s more in context of using websites in ways that weren’t originally intended by the original devs. One small example is using hidden internal APIs to show dislikes on YouTube. Another example might be something like figuring out how to bypass advertising on a website to use it, or reverse engineering a site to get the raw data, etc etc…

If some of these workarounds are published and become popular, then there is a risk the original devs would shut it all down, so the optimal strategy is to fly under the radar and tell no one, thus maximizing benefit for yourself even though it’s clear others could potentially benefit.

> if you can't focus, perhaps you just _don't want to be doing whatever you're doing_

This is the thing that always gets me when reading things about productivity, how to get more done at work, etc. At first glance, the issue seemed to just be compensation—if you just pay us workers a fair wage we will be happy. But as software engineers we are generally fortunate with high salaries. So, what happens when that compensation comes and you still feel extremely unfulfilled? I don’t think the problem is the depressed workers, it seems like the whole entire system is built to slowly drain the life out of us.