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agigao

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Around 10 years ago, in college, in Calculus class I had a very ambitious classmate, wanted to go to DARPA and work on Robotics. I asked if he was thinking it through solely from technical perspective or considering ethics side as well. Clearly, he didn't understand the question and I directly inquired - what if the code you write or autonomous machine you contribute to used for killing? His response - that's not my problem.

After spending couple of years studying in the US, I came to conclusion that executives and board members in industry doesn't care about society or humans, even universities don't push students towards critical thinking and ethics, and all has turned into a vocational training, turning humans into crafting tools.

The same time, at Harvard, I attended VR innovation week and the last panel discussion of the day was Ethics and Law, which was discussed by Law Professor, a journalist and a moderator and was attended a handful of people. I inquired why founders, CEOs or developers weren't in part of the discussion or in attendance? Moderator responded that they couldn't find them qualified enough to take part in the discussion. The discussion basically was - how product companies build affects the society? Laws aren't founders problem, that's what lawyers are for, and ethics - who cares, right?

This frenzy, this rat race towards next billion dollar company at any cost, has tore down the fabric of the society to the individual thinking level; or more like not thinking, just wanting and needing.

Addiction Markets 9 months ago

Personal choice is when it just exists, like Las Vegas in Nevada.

If you really really want to gamble then go, travel to Nevada and do it.

The problem is sticking their filthy ads and purchased propagandists into the faces of vulnerable people and society at large.

Preying on victims over the phone, soc. media ads, bought manipulators so called influencers with no morale.

Such a great idea and product!

Thanks for all the hard work.

However, please get rid of micro-transactions...

I'm fine paying full price of the product for my kid, but not micro-transactions.

This is why I never bought anything Amazon owned, other than Kindles; and I have dropped the latter, too.

I was always suspicious of Ring and never understood the people using it.

Notion 3.0 10 months ago

I was forced to use Notion for a couple of months at work. One Big Mess.

I prefer one tool for one job approach.

Could someone please explain benefits of using one-does-all tools?

- The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann

- The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil

- The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - Jose Saramago

- Moby Dick - Herman Melville

- The War of the End of the World - Mario Vargas Llosa

- The War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

etc.

I can't do "The" xD

I don't necessarily have opinions on ML languages. Haven't used any of it to the extent of writing more or less complex production system.

Perhaps we can try to do it in a proper functional language?

  (ns restaurant.pizza
    (:require [restaurant.oven :as oven]
              [restaurant.package :as pack]))

  (defn make-order [size sauce cheese kind]
    {:size size
     :sauce sauce
     :cheese cheese
     :kind kind})

  (def toppings-map
    {"Veg" "Veg toppings"
     "Meat" "Meat toppings"})

  (defn prepare [order]
    (assoc order :toppings (:kind order)))

  (defn bake [prepared-order]
    (oven/bake prepared-order :pizza))

  (defn box [baked-pizza]
    (pack/box baked-pizza :pizza))

  (defn pizza [order]
    (-> order
        prepare
        bake
        box))

  (comment 
    (def order (make-order 26 "Tomato" "Mozzarella" "Meat"))
    (pizza order))


It's short and overwhelmingly granular, but for the sake of illustration. Large and complex codebases sliced up this way has not alternative in terms of ease of testing and reasoning about the code.

Only paradigm isn’t enough. Language design, ecosystem and pragmatism is essential as well and Clojure has all that.

After a couple of years of writing Java in my late teen, early 20s, I observed considerable overhead and inefficiency while working on large Java projects.

I thought we shouldn’t have to recompile the whole project upon every single change.

Classes and private public fields, methods felt like they were solving the wrong problem.

Other fancy words, that contained fairly simple ideas, felt like the output of clever language designers who enjoy the sound of their voice.

Those were the issues I observed as a newbie, but still I started looking for alternatives and found Clojure fairly soon. Sense of satisfaction steadily grew as I dug deep into the language, it was addressing so many design decisions I questioned before. At some point I started re-writing core library and it was joy to see how simple a programming language can be.

I wrote software in many different programming languages over the years but writing Clojure at work is fun, multiplied.