mikebenfield

Having worked at two big tech companies, I’d say one was the most laid-back, stress free environment I’ve ever worked in, and the other was pretty middle of the road.

I'm all in favor of talking about drawbacks of AI coding and potential future problems. No problem. But at this point just the blanket statement that you'll never use it is not reasonable. It's the equivalent of a master car mechanic seeing a robot that can pretty reliably rebuild a transmission in a few minutes saying "I'll never use that; I'll always do it myself." Okay, sure buddy. You keep taking 8 hours to do what now takes everyone else 5 minutes. Knock yourself out.

What is hard about it? Young children seem to pick it up with ease. It cannot be that hard?

They do? I've known plenty of kids and young adults who utterly failed to become even borderline competent at programming.

artificial deadlines preventing me from writing proper unit tests, or the requirement for code review from people on my team who don't even work on the same codebase as I do on a daily basis

I have never experienced this, and it sounds remarkably dysfunctional to me.

You've missed the point. The point is that the women in question demand it. There is no shortage of women on social media ranting about how lazy or cheap men are who want to do coffee or drinks for a first date. Or especially a walk. If you suggest a walk for a first date there's a strong chance you'll never hear from her again.

Practically that would be very likely to be the case to the reader, but grammatically no, it's still ambiguous.

They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid and a cook.

Betty could be both a maid and a cook. So there is still ambiguity.

What's much more sensible than taking an IQ test is looking at your experience with math to date.

Or more. Actually some of them seem inverted. Simple compiler takes 3 months but a GameBoy emulator takes 2 weeks? That’s not my experience at all.

C++ has indeed added many features that help with memory safety, at the cost of getting increasingly more complicated and harder to work with.

I think the idea that Lisp was so much more productive than other languages originates from a much earlier time. But now the most important features of Lisp - like garbage collection - are commonly available in most languages.

I always thought calling it Xbox One was the most bizarre choice in the history of branding and marketing. Given how common it is to retroactively refer to the first item in a series as "One" (Rambo 1, Rocky 1, Playstation 1, etc), it seems intentionally designed to cause confusion.

I tried to use a CPAP machine for a while. I honestly could never figure out how I was supposed to breathe with it. At all. It seemed to be physically impossible. I'd try for a while each night, then get frustrated and stop so I could get some sleep. Completely useless to me.

Fortunately I was able to just return it, but if I hadn't been able to, why should that mean insurance wouldn't cover it? I was prescribed this device and it didn't work for me.

Big O notation deals with asymptotic behavior of a function - in other words, as N goes to infinity. If we're accepting the premise that N has an upper bound, the rest of the discussion is meaningless.

Presumably the argument is an abstract one, not applying to any particular machine that actually exists.

Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there}

Working at an office sucks because it is a massive constraint on where you can live, even if you can tolerate a long commute. If you live with a partner who also has a career your options are even more constrained. I find it miraculous such a situation works out for anyone.

I think I'll grant that there are more educated and competent people than there used to be.

But broadly the gap between scholars and "the public" is as massive at it's ever been. Meet a few members of "the public" socially, outside of tech or academic circles or however you usually meet people. Go to some random bar or club or whatever and make some friends. I think you'll find, like I do, that most people basically don't know anything. They can sort of do 3rd grade arithmetic, but struggle to apply it, and don't know anything else about mathematics - most people don't understand how to use negative numbers or what they're for, for instance. They don't know anything about history - they don't really know what the Renaissance was, or when the Roman Empire was, or when and where human civilization began, or anything else. They absolutely know nothing about physics - they are completely unaware of the idea that acceleration due to gravity is not dependent on mass, which I see as the starting point of teaching physics.

driving through mostly forested areas

Yeah, well that's just not the case at all here. The drive from Stallings to downtown Charlotte is almost entirely on Independence Boulevard, which is very much a stroad ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad ), very much developed with lots of pointless strip malls and office parks and little visible nature, and certainly not a foresty experience. The fact that you can see green nearby on satellite view has little to do with people's actual experience driving on these roads.

The only additional point I’ll make is that places like Stallings (the first link I posted) are absolutely considered suburbs. For instance the Wikipedia article on Stallings calls it a “suburban town” ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stallings,_North_Carolina ).

That’s another thing I found a bit odd - it would never have occurred to me that anyone would not have considered that area a suburb.

So there's a pretty big push for urbanism the last few years. There's lots of YouTube channels and other social media stuff dedicated to the idea that the US needs more walkable neighborhoods, more bike infrastructure, less car dependence, etc.

In your view then... what in the world is this about? If suburbs are perfectly walkable, why does anyone care about urbanism? Why does this channel https://www.youtube.com/c/notjustbikes have over a million subscribers?

Moreover, why is the suburb such a post-automobile phenomenon? If it's viable to get everywhere from a suburb without a car, why were people in 1000 BCE or 1000 CE or 1800 CE not living in suburbs?

I just find this perspective so weird... I've definitely met plenty of people who are very pro-suburb, but it's because they consider it natural and acceptable to need a car for any trip, not because they think they can get places without a car.

To be honest this is one of those Internet comments where I feel like the commenter is in a different reality than me. None of the dozens of suburban US people I've known has ever found it feasible to walk to much of anything - yes, maybe a neighborhood playground if they're lucky. They definitely don't walk to the grocery store, to a restaurant, to a bar, to the gym, to work, etc.

Here's a suburb: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.107277,-80.6508196,3a,75y,25...

Here's another: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3137771,-121.9844666,3a,75y,...

In the latter it _may_ be theoretically feasible to walk to a couple restaurants, if you don't mind a fairly unpleasant trip. In practice I guarantee you almost no one does this.

But those are just a couple arbitrary choices; in my experience they're pretty much all like that.

On the other hand, by being selective about where I live (walkable neighborhoods are scarce in the US), I've been able to live in several places where a great grocery store, a gym, multiple great restaurants, a bar or two, and other interesting destinations were within a 5 minute walk - in some cases literally right next door. If most of the land around you is taken up by single family homes with pointlessly large lots, it's completely infeasible for anything more than a tiny percentage of people to live close to these things, short of building a grocery store for every 100 people or something absurd.

There are sometimes apartments spotted around in a suburby area, but due to the nature of US suburbs they don't really get many of the advantages density should bring - everything you might want to go to is still at least a moderate car ride away, there's no people out and about because there's no reason for them to be there, etc. Any time you leave your apartment you go straight to the parking lot and get in your car. It's pathetic really.

I don't really see how you can choose one without at least a rough idea of the other. How do you know what data structure to use if you have no idea how you'll be accessing the data?

Is this deep deep flaw endemic to humanity across cultural lines?

Yes, almost certainly.

Are millennials/ Gen Z the first generation where men anre (perhaps?) allowed to be almost as emotional as women?

This does not appear to be the case in my experience (as an elder millennial with Gen Z acquaintances). Although it surely varies by subculture and individual, in my experience women in the dating market still pretty strongly enforce pretty traditional gender roles for men. You can also see this in social media, notably TikTok - if you're familiar with the trend of young women talking about their "icks" (things that turn them off in men), you'll notice that the "icks" are usually about men being emotional, or being affected by their environment, or showing weakness in some (often trivial) way.

Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option.

Lots of people have been trying to get decent public transit in US cities for decades. There is so much resistance it often seems impossible.

So, yes, obviously public transit would be great. But right now, and for the foreseeable future, it's just not an option for most people. "Talk to your local politicians about fixing service" sounds delusional to be honest.

I don't know, but I see unnecessary all caps in other words too - it's not infrequent that I see JAVA and sometimes RUST (for the programming languages). Kind of irks me, but obviously doesn't really matter. Ultimately I think it's just a weird niche cultural holdover from the very early days of computing when lots of random stuff was arbitrarily capitalized, like FORTRAN was originally all caps, maybe related to early character sets that only had capital letters.

building more housing doesn’t reduce the demand for housing

This is so obviously contrary to experience and common sense I'd characterize it as delusional.

in scripting languages, a statement does not depend on the following ones to be executed, meaning that the code can just be read through

I'm pretty sure this is nonsense and is not a consistent way to distinguish languages that are considered scripting languages and languages considered compiled languages.

Compile litterally means "group together".

Maybe so, but as a technical term in computer science, it means translate from one language to another.

That said, I definitely agree that compile times matter.

plus 8 bytes for the tag

The tag can often be stored inline in the data, so doesn't necessarily require extra space.

because they always take up as much space as the largest wrapped type

Yeah... but what's the alternative?

People have to make judgments about which experts in which fields to trust. Should I believe a Catholic priest (or a Muslim imam, or a Jewish rabbi) when it comes to questions about the nature of the universe? What about when it comes to questions of ethics? They are experts, after all.

What about psychology? I am by no means an expert in psychology, but I'm also well aware that there is a big crisis in that field, where apparently most results can't be replicated, and there seems to be a lot of both outright data manipulation and just sheer incompetence with statistics on the part of researchers. But should I just uncritically accept results in that field? Again, I'm not an expert, so apparently I'm not allowed to be skeptical.

And Go has succeeded despite these condescending diatribes on how a language needs to have a Hindley-Milner type system with ADTs and type classes to be useful

Fine. But it's beside your parent comment's point. The article claims that everyone thought Go's type system was an advance on the state of the art. This isn't even close to true.

Well you're not going to be much of a Rust user if you don't learn the basics of lifetimes anyway. I don't mean to get all gatekeepy, but if someone's not comfortable with &str and &[T], they're missing half the point of the language and won't be able to use much library code anyway.