5,069 karma · joined February 8, 2012
Feel free to contact me:
jd@jdpressman.com
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Can be found here:
http://softholmsyndrome.com/jd-key.gpg
https://keyserver.pgp.com/
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Key Fingerprint:
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Can be found here:
http://truth-and-cybercrud.neocities.org/index.html
https://keyserver.pgp.com/vkd/GetWelcomeScreen.event
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation...
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-al...
I definitely find the OP's perspective a little obnoxious. Being less-wrong is actually fairly easy (in the grand scheme of things), the problem is that nobody cares about being right.
Unless they just steal a credit card. Not unlikely, given who we're talking about here.
AKA the plausible end of open source. Once writing any program and sharing it can get you sued, people will stop doing that.
At this point you should just use spaced repetition. It's what I did, it has the same effects for a lot less work.
Which is a pretty well formed solution in this vein, unfortunately written in Perl.
'Open Source' was/is a rebranding of the term 'Free Software' to make it easier to sell to suits. Eric Raymond has said as much about his invention of the phrase. The idea that it's just about "being able to read the source" is wrong. It's not vague at all, you just didn't do your research.
You are not the target market for this product. "A few more dollars than my self hosted solution..." is a sentence that typically takes you way outside the target audience of most products in this vein.
How would you know if it were?
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Python, Django, Basic Machine Learning, Java, Rust, Lisp, Linux, HTML, CSS, GraphQL
(Note: Programming Languages presented in order of skill level/experience, other stuff presented in order of importance)
Resume/CV: http://www.jdpressman.com/jdp_resume.pdf
Email: jd@jdpressman.com
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A few fun projects I did recently too small for my resume:
Rust-based substitution cipher solver: https://github.com/JD-P/ctool/blob/master/src/main.rs
Non-Rigorous K-Means Cluster Analysis of Effective Altruism cause area priorities, with spatial table: http://www.jdpressman.com/public/ea/ea_cluster_spatial_table...
Fresh out of college, so I'm especially interested in opportunities that will grow my skillset or present tough technical challenges.
That we don't seem to have made much progress in 50 years is pretty disappointing.
I still write my website by hand. I use a static site generator to do things like make a blog index and stuff, but I don't use any templates. Everything you see is designed by me.
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We thought it was going to be helpful. We never realized it was going to be the linchpin to generating investment in social media. We envisioned that the law would be both a sword and a shield. A shield so that you could have this opportunity, for particularly small and enterprising operations to secure capital, and then a sword [by allowing them to moderate without facing liability over the practice], which said you’ve got to police your platforms. And what was clear during the 2016 election and the succeeding events surrounding Facebook, is that technology companies used one part of what we envisioned, the shield, but really sat on their hands with respect to the sword, and wouldn’t police their platforms."
- Ron Wyden on Section 230
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/24/17606974/oregon-senator-r...
I see a lot of people in this thread expressing the view that by moderating their content Facebook is becoming responsible for it. To the extent that's true under the law, it's not necessarily a great idea. Certainly the intent from a lawmaking perspective when some of the underlying framework was written is that this wouldn't be the case. You could moderate and remove bad actors from your platform without fearing legal persecution for it.
Well, one thing to consider is that you can structure things so that you avoid all the hard classes until the end, and then leave without taking them. I found myself in this situation and had to 'boss rush' all the hard STEM classes at once, which wasn't fun and probably usually results in someone just dropping out.
Confirming this isn't what's happening might be one explanation for the sheepskin effect. (Of course, just because it might be doesn't mean it is, I think Occam's Razor favors Caplan here).
I think if you pick a concrete example of this phenomena (say, Java applets vs. WebAssembly) and you ask "so why didn't someone take Java Applets and update them, why do we need WebAssembly?", the answers to why this happens start to become more apparent. It's not so much that Java applets were good and then we decided they were unfashionable, as that Java applets were always kind of ugly and we eventually stopped tolerating them.
For examples from before say, 2000, say Turbo Pascal a lot of the answer is because the thing in question was a proprietary product so once the financially backed dev team stopped working on it users were forced to move on to something else. Other times it's because the thing was written for an 80's computer platform that no longer exists outside of emulation and retrocomputing collections. Sometimes it's that the graphical standards the original used were for hardware with very different capabilities and making the thing usefully work on a newer system would almost require a total rewrite anyway.
Even beyond all that, there's another problem: Software is fairly hard to do literature review for. If I want to know if a particular research idea has been done before, I can hop on Google Scholar and figure it out with a few hours of carefully constructed search queries. Doing the same thing for software is very difficult, especially because most products for the majority of the fields history were proprietary. As a consequence, we don't have our history available to analyze in any easily accessed form. The Internet Archive has been doing what they can to rectify this situation. (See: https://archive.org/details/BeyondCyberpunkMacintosh) Nonetheless, there are still serious problems in this area.
I'm a younger person (23) who shares your frustrations, but I don't think that you can really wag your finger at people when there are real barriers to what you're proposing.