aphelion

iPhones are being built with slave labor.

Some guy wrote a satire of Silicon Valley in an exaggerated tech bro literary persona.

Guess which one triggered the strenuous denunciations of woke tech activists?

The most striking thing here has got to be that for some people being told they worked at a company riddled with white supremacy and racism would have been a relief.

I know the stock response is that denying the existence of a problem is worse than admitting it, but if the gravamen of the issue is not whether or not the company is built on the most murderous ideology in history but whether or not the founders will affirm that it is publicly seems an excellent indicator the term 'white supremacy' has been hollowed out and is now just another target in woke language games.

The great irony with these terminology changes is that those most tripped up will be learners with access to fewer up to date resources and autodidacts who lack access to the usual educational opportunities afforded to those pursuing a career in tech.

Isn't the sort of person most likely to be tripped up by this the sort of person it is nominally supposed to help? Isn't it much more likely that it proves a stumbling block to the black teenager teaching herself to code from resources a few years old than to the white undergraduate whose new edition textbook will include the change and who has a professor and peers to explain it just in case?

If you want marginalized outsiders to have an easier path into programming isn't a change that makes that just a little bit trickier in order to make those with established tech careers feel better about themselves the wrong sort of change?

What passes for AI ethics research is akin to a "Hiroshima ethics research" that focuses on the carbon footprint of the Enola Gay and the lack of BIPOC representation on the team that assembled the Little Boy bomb.

I don't care if the corporations building a dystopian panopticon are intersectional.

That it is incorrect to say that personal bias or subjective interpretation has never played any role whatsoever in search results is a vacuous truth. It's a meaningless tautology. And it's fallacious to use it to excuse for injecting any sort of political ideology into search results.

In the real world, what's going to make Python less accessible to PoC new to programming(and new programmers generally) is the arbitrary change in well-defined industry-wide terminology. Working from documentation and learning resources that employ master/slave when those terms have been memory-holed in the newest versions of the language is the sort of seemingly minor change that trips up neophytes.

I'm not totally opposed to changing master/slave. But in light of the real cost of this sort of breaking change I'd want to see some evidence of actual harm, rather than some guy(who, I feel compelled to point out, is a white man) insisting that we change it for what are, at best, totally theoretical and speculative harms.

Passing over the politics of this decision, is there any plausible outcome that doesn't involve every organization with any sense at all forking or abandoning Lerna?

Had he denied the application it could just as easily be said to have shown his expertise in the regulatory approval process by detecting and rejecting a dangerous drug.

And yet, I don't think that display of competence would have landed him a job at Purdue.

An algorithm understanding enough about the text to infer the correct emotional inflection to give a speech may edge into the category of strong AI, but I would have guessed that it would be easier to create a neural network that, given a text spoken in one voice, could transform it into another with the correct stress, intonation, etc. Perhaps even that's a more difficult task than I assumed, although speech generation seems to receive a lot less academic and industrial attention than speech recognition and understanding.

Case in point. Social Security is OASDI - old age, survivors, and disability insurance. It's not a guaranteed income for the general population, it's meant to provide support to those incapable of working due to age or disability.

I'm always a little mystified by those who believe there is some vast pool of people receiving something called "welfare" that pays them munificent sums to sit around all day not working.

There is no "welfare". There's SNAP(food stamps) with a princely average payment of $125, which has time limits on eligibility and mostly goes to working households. There's TANF which only goes to households with children and has both time limits on eligibility and work requirements.

What there absolutely is not is some sort of program where millions of people are paid to sit around think of ways to build a better mousetrap. The idea that there is remains one of those pernicious myths that just won't seem to die.

The influence journals like TNR and The New Criterion once had were wholly unrelated to their tiny readership numbers and instead depended upon the fact that they were for a time considered required reading for much of the political and cultural elite.

You say this as if the 20-something libertarian software engineer isn't just as pissed off when he gets screwed over on equity or stock options as is the 50-something manufacturing worker whose job has just been outsourced.

So generate immutable ProductState objects that contain all parts of the domain model that can change over time, and maintain a mapping from SKU to the correct object.

So GET /product/12345 returns UUID_1 at time A, when details of the offered item change at time B a UUID_2 gets generated and a new GET /product/12345 returns UUID_2.

If you want to be really anal retentive, generate the product state objects with timestamps to compare to the Date header in requests and have a list of product states that have been referenced by a given SKU to traverse through to get correct product details even when the catalog changes between sending and receipt of the request.

It's things like this that make me wish Silicon Valley invested less energy and resources in nutty utopian schemes like artificial islands and more in lobbying for liberalization and modernization of U.S. immigration policy.

People who hate Silicon Valley do so because they think it's full of narcissistic social climbers who just want to get rich quick but talk like they've joined up with the Peace Corps or are working on a cure for cancer. Wall Streeters, by comparison, are more honest about their rapacity.

It's a stereotype, and one that I'd argue is mostly unfair but at least occasionally accurate.

I'm very impressed by the technology behind Meteor, I just wish it weren't quite so "opinionated". It relies on standard parts of the node/js web stack, it would be great to have a stand-alone library that supported DDP for front-ends and servers of the developer's choosing.

Low pilot salaries are due partly to the dismal state of the airline industry and mostly due to the fact that while flying a 747 may be an immensely impressive skill it's not one that's in very wide demand.

This seems like a good time to point out that every study of tipping I've come across fails to find this sort of incentive effect.

What happens? They get fired.

I'm all for workplace policies that give a greater amount of discretion to employees as to how, when, and where to work. But "set your own salary" is a bit like "set your own hours". Your decision ends up being highly constrained by existing norms, and by the fear of being terminated if you fail to choose the answer intended by management.

The appropriate analogue here is not literacy, it's carpentry. That everyone makes use of furniture does not imply that everyone would benefit from taking the time to learn to build furniture themselves. It would be a good thing if furniture were made more durable and less expensive(although perhaps not such a good thing for furniture makers) but the solution to that is improving tools and methods used by professional carpenters.

It's not particularly surprising when you think about it. Users of stenography keyboards are far more "productive" than users of QWERTY keyboards. But everyone knows how to use the latter at some level of competence, while the latter requires extensive training in specific skills. And really, do you need to be able to type 200 WPM?

In the same sense, vi or emacs might make you more productive in the limited sense of typing code, but only after you've taken the non-trivial amount of time required to obtain a level of proficiency with them. And even then, being able to type and edit code more quickly than someone using a more traditional text editor is only a small fraction of what constitutes performance for a developer or designer.

It's my fervent hope that developments like source maps and asm.js will eliminate what it basically Javascript's sole competitive advantage; that it's the only language that runs in a browser.

If it's possible to write performant, robust code with good tooling in CoffeeScript/Dart/TypeScript/Python/Clojure/etc., then the peculiarities of Javascript become a lot less important.

This is all rather absurd given that the Western European nations that haven embarked on major infrastructure projects in recent decades tend to have higher rates of unionization as well as stronger labor and environmental regulations than the United States. That Europe has high-speed rail and the United States doesn't can hardly be chalked up to unions.

The worst thing about undefined is not its mutability but that it exists in the first place. Trying to retrieve a non-existent attribute should throw an error by default, not fail silently.

It's not so much that the liberal arts are easier that the sciences, it's that you can be lousy at them without realizing it. It's very hard to be bad at math and not know it.

The thing about risk-seeking ambitious 19 year olds is that they have absolutely no real idea what risk is, or what their real ambitions for their life will be.

Dean Baker proposed "Artistic Freedom Vouchers" as a way to supplant copyright. The basic idea is that every taxpayer would get a refundable tax credit of 75-100 dollars which could be "spent" by buying creative works from anyone who registered to be a recipient. It would be a very low bar to clear, just enough to weed out the obvious scams. Anyone who received AFV money would be barred from placing their works under copyright for the next five years.

It the context of our current IP law paradigm, I will admit it seems radical. Given how wasteful and repressive our current IP laws are, that seems like it would be a good thing.

For me, the big gap between native and web is in UI. Performance is a solvable issue with either Javascript-native bridges or just devices getting faster. Even ignoring the Android/iOS "look", I've yet to come across an HTML5-based framework that can be used to build a complicated user interface with the same usability as native development. Cordova's great for what it is, but it's still a tool designed to wrap web app in a thin native shell, not a framework designed from the ground up to create a strong mobile UI/UX

I'd say that once you've mastered Angular concepts like services and factories, dependency injection, etc., it's far easier to build complex applications in it than in Ember. That's because the abstractions Angular introduces are focused around writing decoupled and reusable code.

If you want to build an app in an hour, I'd suggest knockout instead of either ember or angular.