cgrealy

Peoples inability to come up with a better alternative doesn’t mean there aren’t issues with capitalism.

Fossil fuels are the easiest and most effective way of powering transport at the moment (and pretty much the only game in town for air travel). Doesn’t mean they aren’t a massive problem.

I can’t remember the source, but there’s a quote that goes “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.

I’ve yet to read any kind of optimistic sci-fi that operates in a capitalist society. The two most obvious (Star Trek and the Culture) both envision a post-scarcity society enabled by technology so advanced it might as well be magic.

The Windows API is no longer the focus for .Net. They are very clearly pushing large scale web apps.

I’d be curious to know what percentage of people are still writing windows clients. I suspect there’s a lot of legacy code still out there, but it’s clearly not the future

Minor correction: Q3 came out in 99, so it was probably written in either VC++ 97 or VC6.

Otherwise, carry on.

Tom Waits did have a point that I think today's content creators need to take onboard. With music it was not always about money for everyone, the love of music was motivating enough, bringing people together for a good time.

The difference is that artists used to be able to earn a decent living from selling their art.

Today, artists (unless they are actually producing physical artifacts) are expected to give their work away for free (or for so little as to be pointless).

Deciding not to do “normal” things is fine. You don’t want to drink or smoke or watch TV? Good for you.

But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can enjoy some really great TV and ignore the reality dreck. You can have a beer with friends or enjoy a wine with a meal without being an alcoholic.

And you can go for a run without feeling the need to look down on people who don’t want to do ultras.

Horses for courses..

If you want to build a shed, go to your local hardware store and buy a kit set.

If you want to build a skyscraper, get an architect, some engineers and a competent building company.

Just don’t generalise about massive groups of people? “Eastern” and “western” culture are not monoblocs.

Whether that's "purely capitalist" or not, it's still not safe to be a leftist in the USA.

I don’t disagree.

Remember that “shocking” scene from the Newsroom years ago where the main character had the audacity to suggest the US wasn’t the freedom-est country in the world?

The rest of the world just nodded and said “yeah, we know”.

Depends on how socialist you want your socialism to be.

Most countries aren’t purely socialist in the same way the US isn’t purely capitalist.

Who would want to live in a purely socialist society? Probably very few people.

Who would want to live in a social democratic society? Most of the developed world.

Yes, unfettered market forces have a fantastic track record in solving problems of wealth disparity.

Btw, I have this amazing bridge for sale….

I have to say I literally laughed when I saw the headline. Housing in NZ is still ridiculous. It’s dropped a bit in the last 6 months, but NZ easily ranks in the top 10 least affordable countries to buy a house, ESPECIALLY in Auckland

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2022/03/new-zealand-ran...

Your software probably won’t be running in 100 years, but in 10 years? 15? Absolutely possible.

In fact, after 20 years writing software with various companies, the only ones that didn’t have code older than 10 years were the startups.

But even then, that doesn’t matter. If you’re code is really complex, you’re going to struggle to come back to it in 6 months, never mind 6 years.

Code should be as complex as it needs to be and no more. Write with maintainability in mind.

I think this is the key point.

Asking how you can get into gamedev is kinda like asking how can you be a professional musician. Sure, you need to know and like music as a base, but becoming a concert pianist, a jazz drummer, a metal guitarist or a hip hop mc are very different paths.

Similarly, there’s a big difference between working on Elden Ring vs a small indie or even one of the millions of match 3 mobile games.

This was a fairly common position when I was programming C++ over a decade ago.

Performance critical code like game engines, etc used to avoid exceptions like the plague. Not entirely surprised to find that’s still the case.

The title is poorly chosen at best and misleading at worst. They’re not abandoning JavaScript, they’re just abandoning client side rendering (angular, etc)

Even if we are to take the propositions in the article at face value (some of those studies are dubious), it still leaves you with a simple equation.

MHLs make it more likely that you will be involved in an accident, but also more likely that you will survive said accident.

It’s a trade off between risk and consequences. If I’m given the choice of getting slapped in the face on a coin toss or playing Russian roulette, I’m going to choose a 50% chance of a slap vs a 16% chance of death.

And honestly, the whole argument that less people will cycle if they have to wear a helmet is colossally dumb. Only an idiot would drive without a seat belt these days, but they also faced resistance when they were first enforced. People just get used it.

Also, NZ has MHLs and cycling is going up.

It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it.

Not really. People fear change. Engineers at Meta almost certainly have good pay, work with people they like, have a generally comfortable life.

Merriam Webster - Indigenous: of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group

Wikipedia - Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original peoples

By what measure are Maori not indigenous to NZ? If another group arrived first, they certainly didn't stay, and even by your own measure of "time of inhabitation", Maori have been here the longest (at least 350 years before Europeans).

Firstly, the article has zero example of the "native knowledge" in question.

You mean apart from this link that specifically talks about use tradition harvesting practices and local knowledge to find the kōura to study?

https://niwa.co.nz/our-science/freshwater/research-projects/...

Maori are not indigenous to New Zealand

Completely untrue. They are absolutely indigenous to NZ.

I'm so tired of this stupid myth being brought up again and again. Yes, Maori arrived in NZ. They were the first people to do so. They are the indigenous people of NZ.

Unless you want to argue that to be "indigenous", you literally need to have evolved in that place, which is a nonsense argument as far as humans are concerned.

And? It's not exactly news that European attitudes and practices don't necessarily work that well when transposed to a different ecosystem.

Look at Australia for example. The indigenous people figured out thousands of years ago how to manage native bush.

I'm not saying we should replace science with traditional knowledge. But indigenous practices are absolutely worthy of study, and can guide science.

it might be a cultural difference: I'd expect all of those to be handled by HR.

Possibly. Generally, I'd only involve HR as a last resort. Go to them for guidance, certainly, but in terms of dealing with an employee, I prefer to talk to them directly.

[abuse of sick leave]

Completely agree that it's a delicate situation and you need to be very careful, or (in some countries depending on employment law) you could be open to a claim of wrongful dismissal.

All of which is why I don't expect an AI to take over people management roles any time soon.

I'm sure they do. But my response to any employer who did that would be to start polishing my CV.

It’s not just about “asking someone to be less sick”, you need to ascertain if there are other factors: are they over worked? is there a serious condition that you might need to support? Or conversely, is the sick leave legitimate? Some employees do abuse sick leave.

Either way, a good manager can work with the employee to get a good outcome for both parties.

While I agree that encouraging a sick employee to work is all kinds of messed up, most countries impose a limit on sick days.

At that point, you need to talk to the employee and figure out a solution.

I think the emissions drop comes from the fact that they are EVs, not that they are autonomous.

Code coverage doesn't tell you much IMO.

I'll take a system with 70% coverage that's focused on the really complex pieces over a system with 99% coverage that's mostly checking that "person.Name" returns the name.

Your engineers should know where be dragons in the code and unit testing appropriately.

I've always suspected that the ideal testing setup would be mostly unit tests, integration tests only to fill those gaps, and selenium-ish tests (hopefully rare!) only to fill in the final remaining gaps.

I would have thought this is pretty standard. You've just described the testing pyramid.

By “abortion”, I don’t mean the act itself, more the attitude and specifically voting preferences of others.

Regardless of your stance on this, how others think and vote will affect other people.

For example, I am pro-choice. I believe people should have a right to access abortion if necessary. I don’t need to change someone’s mind if they don’t personally want to support abortion, but I do need to change their mind if they want to vote for people who will restrict that right.

See also: climate change.

There are many areas where you can and should agree to disagree and there will always be middle ground compromises in the details, but some issues really are black and white. Either you believe other people should have access to abortion or you don’t.

Also, and I hope this is obvious, the point is not whether you think abortion is right or wrong, it’s that other people’s decisions can affect you or your family or the world in general.

People seek to change the minds of others because their opinions (and subsequent actions) often affect the people themselves.

A simple example of this would be abortion.