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Yeah it really comes down to online gameplay. The _only_ thing keeping me in microsoft's orbit is online gaming.

Exactly this, and occasionally you'd have multiple words come up for the same number combo, but in a consistent manner where the user could learn how many times you needed to hit the 'next' button to get the word you wanted.

I don't think using dependencies or frameworks is any different than using a word processor for writing. They're tools that get you to the real work of writing original code.

The US House of Representatives passed a measure on Tuesday which "clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism"[1]; so at least 311 congress members are saying it.

1. https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hres894/BILLS-118hres894i...

I thought it was just light? Light bounces off of different molecules differently?

I think mislabeling something as a duplication is where most of these issues stem from.

Humans love to pattern match, we find patterns in things that often have no real pattern. It is not uncommon in my experience to see patterns in code, label the code as not DRY, and attempt to DRY it up. If the "duplication" detected was, in fact, not a duplication but rather code that just happens to be similar, the abstraction will often go awry.

My rule-of-thumb is to prioritize maintenance over authorship. Am I writing this code in a way that makes it easier for future me or another programmer to change it, or am I optimizing for a sleek diff in my code review? I think our code can look like breadboards instead of a bespoke printed circuit board, we have compilers for that.

Because producing an image of Muhammad is an explicit prohibition in Islam. Providing services to same-sex couples is not a prohibition in Christianity.

Building a wedding website for same-sex couples is not a prohibition in Christianity. In fact, it's closer to a tenet of the faith than a prohibition.

Perhaps if she was asked to make a website called www.thebibleisfake.com you might have a case for infringement of speech.

This would also protect a Muslim artist from being forced to produce a drawing of Muhammad if requested by a client.

I think there is a difference here. It is not a prohibition in Christianity to create a website for a same sex couple, whereas producing an image of Muhammad is a prohibition in Islam.

I'd also argue that a wedding website for same-sex couples is not something that "contradicts biblical truth"; there is plenty of homosexuality in the bible.

I'd argue interval training is more valuable than absolute pitch in improvisation. It's rare you find yourself in a scenario where key is unknown and unknowable, especially playing with other musicians. Being able to hear and distinguish a minor 3rd from major 3rd is much more valuable.

My whole team woke up removed from Slack so...

Nah you're right, intervals ear training will always give you more bang for your buck than absolute pitch, and even though absolute pitch is trainable, I don't know any serious musicians who have put effort into it. This is why I think folks think absolute pitch is innate (it isn't): some folks just have a knack for it, and those who don't quickly learn that the effort to build the skill isn't worth the payoff.

Yea, absolute pitch is not very valuable for musicians. Interval training is much more common, where you train on the differences between notes (maj 3rd, minor 6th etc.). Good interval skills make improvisation and composition much easier. If you know the key you're in having absolute pitch doesn't really add anything, and if you're lacking in understanding intervals it won't make up for it.

There are tools you can use that will play a note like C and then another note, and you listen and guess what the 2nd note is. It just takes a bit of consistent trial and error learning, after a bit you get the hang of it and kind of create a mapping of what notes sound like in your head. I use a app called Tenuto for it, but I am sure there are others out there.

Sure, there can be cultural hurdles there, but those exist in the office as well. "Jane has headphones on, she's heads down and will be upset if I bother her now" "I want to ask Steve for help, but he rolls his eyes any time I approach him" "Sam said they'd give me a hand this afternoon, but I can't seem to find them anywhere in the building"

Most mid-level and senior people have not learned the skills to mentor while working remotely.

I cannot think of a scenario where if I needed help with something I couldn't have a 5-minute conversation with someone.

Slack conversations I have several times a week: "Hey do you have a sec to help me? I can't seem to reproduce X bug" "Yea, wanna huddle?" "Sure!"

I don't know what new skills someone would have to learn in order to do that.

Going a bit against the grain here I think but: I think tools like GPT-4 and beyond will increase the value of software engineers for companies as time goes on.

Folks building software can be more ambitious with the things they create, and it can become easier to plug in another software engineer to your team if tooling can make them more predictable in their output.

I see people here saying that increased efficiency is going to reduce their team's headcount which makes zero sense to me. I've never been on a team where there wasn't enough work to be done, it's usually a problem of too much work and needing to choose which is most important.

That being said, as someone who's been heavily using GPT-4 in their work and personal projects I feel like the gains are minimal. It's really great when I'm exploring an API I was unfamiliar with before, but for stuff I've been doing daily for years it's really not much help at all. Even places where ChatGPT shines, it takes some discernment to sift through the bullshit.

Sure, but in my experience US lawmakers act much more hostile towards me as a US citizen than China ever has or will.

I've seen it use non existent APIs a lot. Working on a project that uses a dialect of python it told me it knew (Starlark) was like pulling teeth. It would tell me to use a python feature Starlark didn't have, I'd ask it to rewrite it without using that specific feature and it would with another feature Starlark didn't have access to, so I'd ask it to write the solution using neither and it would just give me the first solution again.

Anecdotally, I am traveling to a beach town in the off season (east coast US) next week to see family. A lot of Airbnb's were showing rates competitive with local hotels, ~$120/night. Staying 3 nights, I expected to checkout seeing ~$400, but upon checkout I see a bill for $800! Needless to say, I am staying at a hotel for $400. At least I won't be given a list of chores to complete upon checkout ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I can't tell if the joke is the man is foolish or wise for not being interested in politics.

Why waste brain cells and time on mundane things when my time and attention is better spent thinking about the problem at hand.

This just sounds like a thought-terminating cliché; what mundane things are you spending your attention on while writing code? Sure, there are times where you might be generating boilerplate, cool, you're paying for a fancy snippet library, except the snippets are potentially malformed so you should check them every time.

Is that really faster than just reading the docs and editing some example code? You have to prompt an AI for what you need, have it generate the code for you, then read the code and validate it. That does not seem like a labor saving process to me.

I think the debate on misgendering being a "hate crime" is a bit pedantic. A lot of normal things between friends, lovers, acquaintances, colleagues pr strangers can be considered criminal or normal depending on circumstances / context. The idea that you're going to be jailed by accidentally misgendering your buddy is just moral panic at the expense of trans folks.

If I walked around the office calling my male co-worker by some random female name as a form of ridicule I'd end up on those cheesy videos they make you watch for sexual harassment training.

Do first sale protections apply to physical things? I thought first sale was an intellectual property / copyright thing.

Something I have come to feel myself but haven't found a good way to articulate is asking "is what I am doing favoring authorship over maintenance?". I find that a lot of times the way DRY or other programming principles are used tend to be done to optimize authorship. This optimization sometimes happens at the expense of maintainability.

Anticipating maintenance is tricky; I had a scenario where a developer on my team created a utility function to abstract away some code that was being repeated multiple times in the same file. As an author that made sense because he was writing the same code over and over again, but down the line when we wanted a specific instance of this copied code to work in a slightly different way we ended up making the utility function handle the edge case.

Over time this utility became extremely hard to work with, because you weren't always sure if you made a change it wouldn't create a regression in other places it was used.

When we sat down and asked ourselves "Is this utility assisting in authorship at the expense of maintenance", the answer was clear. We removed it and put back the repetitive code. We felt good about it because in reality, 90% of the time we were interacting with this code we were doing it in maintenance mode, tweaks and small updates. When in maintenance mode I don't feel the strain of a specific part of my code being repeated, I'm only looking at a small subset of the code. Sure, if I need to author a new case in this code it might be a bit more wordy, but I think the tradeoff is worth it.

I am sure there are perhaps better ways to abstract things, or that we were doing DRY wrong, and our utility function could have been smarter, but I've seen this same thing play out over and over again and usually trying to make my abstraction better hasn't helped.

Which is what I hear from the YIMBY crowd a lot, that if you're not pro de-regulate home builders and landlords then you're automatically a NIMBY. I think building more is good but I am not convinced pure market supply/demand economics is the main way to get people into affordable and safe housing. The way you describe it sounds like it will solve for a very specific group of people: folks who are _almost_ able to buy homes but priced out by market forces. Maybe my concern is outside the YIMBY / NIMBY dichotomy if it's just a fight for middle-class folks.

I think this comment pretty much sums up my issue with these movements.

I'm a part-time Real Estate investor, and I would never invest in a city that had a rental cap, since the point of investments is to make money, not start a charity.

This mindset is where these issues come from in the first place. Housing as become more and more an investment, and groups of people (immigrants, disabled folks, poor people) are not as good of investments, so they're avoided by private investors.

At the same time, private investors and builders are pushing back on tools that make the lives of these less profitably people easier (rent control, public housing).

From what you're saying, if I want to promote more affordable housing, I keep you away from it. Where's a profit in cheap housing/low rents?

Sorry, by residents I mean the general population of a given area, not homeowners specifically. When the issue is people finding an affordable and safe home to live in my mind doesn't automatically go to "how will this affect house prices in this area".

What I mean by being concerned with deregulation that could hurt residents I mean things like gentrification, legislative reduction in rent-controls / tenants rights, relaxing safety laws / codes around what is considered a livable space. If that's NIMBYism then I am all sorts of confused :P

I'm very much anti-NIMBY, but I've had a hard time getting involved with YIMBY organizations. It feels like a lot of YIMBY stuff is good but it always feels like there's a side of it driven by real estate developers wanting to deregulate in ways that hurt residents. Am I wrong, or would it just be better to create more housing in ways that created affordable housing (rent control, public housing, and so forth) instead of trying to see if "market" forces of supply / demand fix the issue?

Also please correct me if I am wrong, I haven't dug too deep into YIMBY aside from surface level digging.