np-

But isn’t it actually better for the world if Hitler was to spend all his time fixing plumbing rather than shun people like him from society entirely and give him all the free time and reasons to take action on his vile opinions? After all, a common theory is that if he simply got accepted into art school, the entire world would be different.

I am like 99% sure that quote is referring to self discipline and rigor in study and has absolutely nothing at all to do with your parents slapping you.

That’s still only temporary overwhelming violence, presumably over small children who are entirely subjugated by their parents and have no effective way to fight back. Would it still apply if your child was an 18 year old football player made of 200 pounds of solid muscle and could slap you back 10x harder? Would they still be following your violence instilled rules the second they get independence from you? The rebel child is quite a common trope. It still only holds when the violence is overwhelming, which is at best a temporary thing, until the tables turn and the one who was subjugated has power.

Violence is an effective temporary behavior modification tool, people will in fact change their behavior in order to not get beaten by the stick. But the flip side is as soon as they get a bigger stick, the old behavior will be back with a vengeance. So the solution here is overwhelming violence. But then there’s clearly limits to that modifying behavior too (look at the Middle East for example).

Domestically, even with the threat of state violence (imprisonment), most offenders are repeat offenders, so how effective is violence really?

But this is just your own personal value judgment, of which clearly you don't like motorcycles. Not everybody shares the same opinion. I.e. there are plenty of people who ride motorcycles safely and legally, you just never hear about them because they never have any incidents. You have just instilled your own value into the tool, one that is not universally shared, the tool itself is still neutral and can even be seen as a positive by somebody else.

What about men, are they allowed to play single player video games with bots in it when they have an option to play with humans? ...or are we only judging women in here?

Border Patrol is doing an operation in Charlotte, NC right now. That is well over 100 miles from any border or coast. So 100 miles itself is fiction, they can just do whatever they want. Who’s gonna stop them?

Isn’t it a feature that people are vocally dissatisfied with what the media reports? To just accept it quietly in silence seems in fact the worse outcome. Even if everyone knows the media reporting is wrong, keeping quiet about it creates a strange meta state where the reporting is true enough that no one wants to publicly question it, because nobody else is questioning it, so it’s unclear whether your fellow citizens accept it as true or not, so you need to assume they believe it’s true.

Someone Else’s Code was understood by at least one human at some point in time before it was committed. That means that another equally skilled human is likely to be able to get the gist of it, if not understand it perfectly.

Code reviews with a human are a two way street. When I find code that is ambiguous I can ask the developer to clarify and either explain their justification or ask them to fix it before the code is approved. I don’t have to write it myself, and if the developer is simply talking in circles then I’d be able to escalate or reject—and this is a far less likely failure case to happen with a real trusted human than an LLM. “Write the code yourself” at that point is not viable for any non-trivial team project, as people have their own contexts to maintain and commitments/projects to deliver. It’s not the typing of the code that is the hard part which is the only real benefit of LLMs that they can type super fast, it’s fully understanding the problem space. Working with another trusted human is far far different from working with an LLM.

It doesn’t seem open and shut at all, why not just deny her entry if they’re so sure at the border? It’s popping up on HN because apparently she’s been detained for over a month… well after her scheduled return flight. why would this ever be necessary?

If your vehicle is ever fully stopped past the line, and the light is red, that would be considered a “blocking the box” traffic violation in most jurisdictions. You technically should not have entered the intersection at all without the ability to fully clear it.

Think of the congestion charge as a charge on the vehicle, rather than on the person, as the stated policy goal is to reduce the number of vehicles in the CBD, not the number of people overall. The Uber is very likely going to continue to be used to service other passengers after dropping you off within the same calendar day, so one potential "fair" solution is to split the congestion charge among the many passengers using that one vehicle. That is your reduced Uber toll charge. But even in this case, it's not really an even split, taxis are going to generate a much higher congestion charge revenue than a single passenger car.

If juniors are being cut out and seniors are being increasingly relied upon to do more and more, that seems to be unsustainable in the long term

Er, this is already the law right? Every job I’ve held in the US, I needed to prove I’m eligible to legally work. Obviously this doesn’t work to resolve the issue at all.

I’m always deeply uncomfortable with this argument. It sounds like justification for a “slave” class to do undesirable jobs with no legal protections and sub minimum wage, just so Americans can save a few bucks at the supermarket. But at what moral cost? We can’t have it both ways—if they’re here working, then it needs to be at full American wage with full American regulation/oversight. But that itself defeats the purpose of hiring undocumented workers.

Because it’s functionally impossible to deport all “illegals” without massively disrupting legal immigrant communities? How exactly do you propose the illegal immigrant gestapo determine someone is here legally? Race? Accent? Stop every brown person on the street and ask for papers…? What don’t republicans understand by this

But that is my point - you can make it unviable to go after _everybody_. But if the state is targeting one person in particular, and has a super strong motivation to break the wall, like specifically in this case of domestic terrorism/attempted political assassination, there is no technology that is gonna stop them.

In those cases that people get way with crimes, it is much more likely that there is no political motivation to go after them for whatever reason du jour. I don't think it's because the technology is so strong that they can't.

It’s a bit of a futile strategy though, kind of like trying to build a wall thick enough that a state actor can’t bust through. That is impossible because the state has access to nuclear weapons, gigantic drills, thousands of intelligent people whose sole mission in life is to break down that wall, nearly infinite budget, etc.

The only strategy that might work is to make it expensive or unviable to crack every single device. But in the case of something like this, an assassination attempt, then it’s a given that all stops are going to be pulled to crack it.

I can’t imagine the merchant gets that extra currency conversion money, nor why they’d care, they are still getting the exact same amount in their local currency while it’s their bank who profits on the arbitrage.

The CTO certainly seems not the most competent.

Viewed from another angle, the CTO successfully psychologically manipulated his team and almost literally beat a working, cheap solution out of them, and will almost certainly get full credit for this victory done on the backs of others. SO, was he truly not competent? Or was he extremely, dangerously competent?

Not only that, but while the CTO is busy counting his bonus money and accepting his new shares of equity from a satisfied performance condition, he managed to get the rest of the team to simply be proud of doing it for a pat on the back and the feeling of doing "live theater" or whatever.

Ventless driers typically use a condenser to pull out the humidity, condense it into water, and drain it into the same drain your washer uses. If it's working correctly, the humidity shouldn't be going into the air.

So… in conclusion, it could be worse. That’s some valuable insight. Obviously somebody out there always has it worse. How can doctors even complain when there exist 3rd world subsistence farmers?

A startup that is firing engineers on the spot who dare to disagree probably won't last much longer anyway. Best of luck with their "critical" deadline then...?

While software engineers have definitely had a few good recent years (especially during the work from home boom during COVID times), I would say it was equally dire around 2009-2012 post-financial crash. And 20 years ago was 2004 - just off the heels of the dot com bust, where the job market was much much worse than today. Anecdotally, from what I hear, I would agree it's not a cake walk anymore like it was in ~2021 but it's also not quite a hopeless situation either.

Agreed. Even if by some miracle you do deliver, and are considered a superstar, then what? What do superstars get? Probably just even more crunch work, since you've proven you're willing to do it.

I fail to imagine a scenario where "getting married fast" is a requirement.

This rubs me the wrong way a bit, and it’s because it’s clearly quite obvious there are many reasons you’d want to get married fast (emergency health issues, unplanned pregnancies, visa issues, etc etc. can come up with a million reasons easily).

You are really asking in a very ungracious way why doesn’t everyone just simply live like an ideal German.

As a counterpoint, most people use their phones daily while sitting on the toilet and very rarely sanitize it. You may be diligent in keeping it sanitary but the past 50 people who kept their phones on the table while reading the menu probably didn’t (and the wet rag the bus person wipes the table down with probably doesn’t do much either).

There is this weird market where you want the purist diamond you can find, but not too pure. So you want some imperfections, just the perfect number of imperfections.

Another "weird" market where this holds true is the dating market. In general it seems similar to how we evaluate other humans or forms of life in general. If another person is too perfect they either seem fake or trigger a weird uncanny valley effect.

Maybe, but why would you want to own other people’s junk? All you really “own” now is the responsibility to dispose of it. It’s not like they’re sending PS5s through the mail to random recipients, it’s usually just old shoes