open_bear

I very strongly connected with a single idea from the book, that trying to decode random bits of information requires one to waste resources and therefore can be considered an attack. Every time I try to read a message that comes from an LLM, my brain hurts almost physically, trying to detemine whether it was posted by a human or a meatproxy.

He uses Racket.

And if you cannot afford PICO-8, there is a free TIC-80 alternative.

> "you're lucky you even have a job; shut up and stop complaining"

You probably have seen the dotcom crash yourself - there were a lot of developers feeling lucky to even have a job. There probably will be another IT bubble burst, and a lot of people will regret they did not form a union when they had at least some say in the matter.

> I wish there was a way that we could apply our skills toward fixing this injustice.

Educate yourself on why does that happen. Main purpose of every company is to make money. As long as IT is making a lot of money programmers will be paid a lot. As soon as industry starts to cool down - our salaries will drop as well.

Parinfer is another good attempt at making editing Lisp code easier: https://github.com/shaunlebron/parinfer

Imperialism is the final stage of capitalism.

> but the extreme poverty has been shrinking

Indonesian 12 y.o. who makes Nike sneakers for 1$ a day will probably disagree. Humanity as a whole have made tremendous advancements in medicine, engineering and agriculture, technology as a whole have been advancing in giant leaps, yet benefits of those advancements are largely felt by 10-20 countries and 3-5% of the population. Even in the US some people cannot afford insulin and other types of basic healthcare. Workers's wages are stagnant for the past 50 years, while their productivity was steadily rising (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the...).

> And now we have the mechanisms for almost anybody to get out of it. I grew up very poor

Survivorship bias, "if I've made it, then anyone can".

> nearly feral generation of children that almost collapsed the country

Care to provide a source? We have kindergartens that accept children as young as 1.5 y.o, older kids (3+) typically stay at kindergarten for 8 hours a day.

It helps a lot. My C and Python code have improved significantly since I've started learning Clojure.

Because you don't write a lot of code on paper? Working with text (for notes or prose) is very different than working with code. You don't think "I need to correct that thing located 23 words forward so I use 23w or press w 23 times" - you position your hand and make a correction.

It's not just raw input speed - writing on paper allows you to quickly jump around the text, making small corrections, adding notes/symbols/drawings, etc.

* US spreads propaganda and lies around the globe (Voice of America) but doesn't like it when RT does the same.

Worker productivity has been steadily increasing for the past century, but wages stopped growing in the 70s-80s. No amount of corporate compensation can compensate for that.

Some tabloid is already writing an article "First alien nudes from outer space discovered".

I've seen similar statements before, and it is a major point in Lockhart's Lament. I wonder if only people who are both good mathematicians and good teachers can pull off teaching mathematics as a language.

What do you think about clojure.spec approach?

Capitalism is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (people, who control the wealth and means of production - factories, companies, banks). They dictate their will to the proletariat (people working for wage who have no control over how business is run and how profits of their labor are sold), via press/TV/government/police-military actions/lobbying/family ties; many are directly working for the government.

Socialism happens when proletariat becomes the ruling class and distributes the wealth upon all the citizens of the country, providing healthcare, education, housing, enough wage to feed everyone. As proletariat are the majority, socialism becomes a proper democracy, where people can control their own livelihood, not some fat senator who received a 100k 'lobbying gift'.

Communism happens when all the signs of the capitalism vanish (no exploitation of people by other people, no money - goods are produced based on needs and distributed to everyone). It happens when people get rid of bourgeoisie thinking via education and personal experience of having society without hungry, homeless, uneducated people. This happened before (we see slave-owning societies of the past with disgust and feudal states with horror), it just took over several hundred years each time.

The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem.

KGB, obviously.

> This is in part because the risk was not shared equally.

Developer joining a startup risks almost as much as a founder. He leaves his existing job for a promise of a salary, and if this startup fails - is left without a job, and possibly, without a salary either. This happened to me, and I was paid for first 2 months out of 6 I worked there.

> The investors and others who put in money or time and energy for little or not pay

Investors still have most of their money, I am left without a job, unable to pay my mortgage and possibly buy food.

Imagine this: I put $X, you put $Y into an investment. If investment is successful, I get a 100$, you get $Y+$X-$100. If it is not, we both get nothing. Would you consider this investment fair? No sane person would put a money into an investment fund, expecting a fixed value in return, but employer-employee relations are exactly that.

This reminds me of an article where people tried to reverse-engineer a rocket engine from the Saturn V rocket, whose manufacturing process was also lost: https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...

There is a joke: Couple walks into a photo exhibit, and compliments the photographer "these are very nice photos, you camera must be pretty expensive". After an exhibit they invite the photographer to their house for a dinner. Photographer finishes the dinner and says "food tasted great, your kitchenware must be pretty expensive too".

There is a dedicated site: https://darkpatterns.org/

Totally agree.

> (which go way beyond mere bit-twiddling, btw)

I was fascinated by optimizations people come up for Game of Life by reading Michael Abrash's Black Book.

> a programmer who "merely" plugs frontends into backends with databases"

I am such a programmer: never have used bit manipulation in my job, and while it is kinda boring, it is a job, and someone has to do it.

Conway's Game of Life can be implemented naively in C/C++/Java/etc, using a boolean for every cell's state (on/off). This will require at least n*m bytes (probably more in Java). Using bits to store that data will require 8 times less, which will most likely greatly increase the performance because of the data locality and the amount of data that will fit into a CPU cache.

"Hammock driven development" is the modern application to the software engineering (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc)

> No matter how good your environment, you do not beat the collective effort and productivity of file-system based tools.

I bet people said the same about trains and ships. There was a lot of work put into horse-powered infrastructure and first cars and trains were very slow and bad. Same with boats: at the time steam-powered ships were created wind-powered clippers were 5 times faster and much more reliable.

There is a modern book called "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" by Peter C. Brown that I quite liked.

I remember reading Arnold Shwarzenegger's autobiography, and hist amusement on the difference in body perception between Austria and USA (as in Austria it is a norm for mixed-sex groups to go to a beach or a sauna completely nude).

Upgraded 15.10 to 17.04 on my laptop. Went from working stable system to slower, less stable system - Firefox causes full system lockdown every hour.