rturben

I know that in things like games and other highly concurrent applications that object pooling is a must, otherwise you inevitably run in to the problem of attempting to update or render some game object that's died and been deleted. Maybe it's less common in other types of application development?

In an age where communication platforms are so readily abundant and (relatively) easily accessible, people aren't forced to write economically. Contrast this with even fifty years ago when in order to get more than a handful of people to read your work, it had to be published in some way.

I guess it's just concerning that the people who would say this kind of stuff online don't think about what they're doing. They wouldn't say it to someone's face, isn't it common sense that saying it over a tweet isn't that different?

The intent of the sentence was to point out that her article is important because it speaks out about something that's outrageous, regardless of if the reader knows who is writing it.

I did google both of them, and read some of her other blog posts. I'm not going to proclaim though that I really understand what's happening after 25 minutes on google. It's irrelevant to her deeper point.

This was a very well-written article. Though I haven't followed any of this person's journey that she's recounting and can't simply trust her retelling of what happened (based on the fact that I really don't know anything about weev or Kathy or their online presences), she hits on something important. It's shocking how numb a lot of internet culture is toward "trolling" or otherwise hateful statements.

Nobody goes around in public threatening to rape or murder strangers. This might seem naive, but honestly, why is this tolerable by so many people if the words are said on the internet rather than on the streets?

It's not pretend. These are REAL people that are being subjected to threats that at least aren't innocent and at worst are also real. People's intuition of "free speech" seems to be warped here. Should it be okay to type these things to someone? Would it be okay if you called them and said it over the phone? What if you said it to their face? Mailed it to them in a letter? Does the medium change the message?

I'm just tired of the "nut up or shut up" attitude that a lot of the internet seems to overflow with.

I'm someone graduating from college in a few months, and this is one of the most striking things to me about a programmer's expected outlook on jobs. The career path of going and getting an internship, then becoming a junior developer, etc etc at some corporation is something that seems like it would suck the soul out of anyone that is even moderately creative.

During my first internship at a "normal" corporation, I felt exactly like septerr does now. I can't imagine following the career path most programmers go down, even if it is going to pay well. How did you avoid (or is it even possible to avoid) going through that corporate phase and skipping right to working on something that you may love but may harbor more intrinsic risk?

A lot of people in this thread are questioning how this adds any new information about time or how it is different/better than a classical explanation of systems (coffee cup reaching equilibrium based on thermodynamic laws).

One way that this result makes sense to me is by considering the properties of light speed and "spooky action at a distance." Particles become entangled with one another at the speed of light -- photons or fields carrying the information between the two. Looking at this from the perspective of light speed, there has been an instantaneous change between the two particles. State A has led directly to a more complicated, entangled State B. Still looking at this from light speed, there is no time between the transition from one state to the next and from that one to the next and so on. The universe has already worked itself out from the initial disentangled state to all the states that are increasingly more entangled.

Thanks to Einstein, we know that all objects try to move at light speed, but that the more massive they are the slower they become. Because we are massive objects, we don't experience time instantaneously like the photons do. We see the propagation of entanglement and see the state transitions. Our massiveness has given rise to a direction of time, the order that we understand the states of the universe to be proceeding in. Unlike light, we have to experience all the intermediate states in the order of less entangled -> more entangled. Thus an arrow of time.

This is already subtly bundled up in the classical explanations. Coffee cools off because it reaches equilibrium. Classical physics says this is because the particles in the coffee are hotter than the surrounding air, so it is more likely for those particles to break free of the coffee, thereby reducing its average kinetic motion. Consider though how those particles are interacting with one another. They don't just "know" the direction they're supposed to go, they bump into each other's fields and communicate at light speed. Each particle informs the next and as they become more entangled and learn more about where they are, they progress from state to state.

This got very dark very quickly.

It does make me wonder though, to what extent are we responsible for the repercussions of our actions? Where along that chain did it stop becoming the fault of the businessman, if ever?

Yeah, I appreciate that. It's really easy to get tunnel vision on parts of a job that you don't like and forget the things that are good about it.

My elders all do the same flavor of tasks that I do, just more entrenched with knowledge because they've been there for a while. It looks like the two career paths for me there if I stick around are either going to be management or the same thing I'm doing now, plus some experiential knowledge.

Thanks for the advice. I should have been more specific with my complaint. Programming is a lot of fun, and I'm majoring in CS. The problem I'm running in to is that my job is boring, plain and simple. The work is uninteresting and I haven't made any close friends yet there. Most of that is probably my fault, but at the same time I can't imagine myself working there in ten years, much less next year. Mostly because I feel like I'm wasting my life there and could potentially be doing something more valuable and interesting.

I'll keep this in mind though, it strikes me as really good advice.

"Maybe loren quit because he wasn't being fulfilled."

This is the thing that strikes me the most. I'm fairly young still and have begun working at a company as a programmer. I've been there for about five months and can already say that this isn't where my passion lies. There's nothing wrong with trying to figure out where you really want to go in life and trying to achieve it. Not everyone gets it right on the first try, so to try and admonish people who quit when they "get bored" isn't the best attitude in my opinion. I don't think that's what this article was trying to say, but the author comes across as thinking that the only reason people quit a job after a year or two is because of boredom/lack of dedication when in reality it could simply be a part of the trial and error that is life.