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Why Taiwan? 3 years ago

Great post. There is definitely something hard to articulate but absolutely life-changing about my mental state moving from the US to Taiwan. The complete lack of worry about all the things mentioned in this post (physical safety, personal property, transportation, etc) alleviates a burden I never knew was there until it was gone. Here it's completely normal for people to leave their phones or wallets unattended on a cafe table to claim a seat. And I don't worry about whether my front door was locked or about fumbling with cash in public.

For me, I never _consciously_ worried about these things much in the US but in the back of my mind it was always there. Every time I went out. I didn't realize the tension that it built up until I left.

I was specifically trying to contrast programming interfaces against the large universe of applications that don’t expose any. You bring up an interesting point about external dependencies such as db, however I would say the vast majority of these applications I refer to don’t rely on users to set these up.

Hey folks,

I noticed pre-covid that businesses tend to make internal decisions such as spending and hiring, that even when not directly related to my department, ultimately affected the compensation they were available to offer me. Now with the pandemic closing a number of businesses it seems the issue of bad business decisions is even higher.

It's simply a matter of trust. If an employer is not providing the absolute maximum hypothetical compensation then we can all agree that is a truly disgusting and untrustworthy employer. I don't have exact numbers for my employer yet.

First of all, I'd like to figure out how I can identify an employer making business decisions I am unaware of. Generally it would be fine for me what businesses do internally but when it affects my salary, then it's not acceptable.

Secondly, if one has figured out that a business is taking private actions that one doesn't like, how should one handle that? I would need to quit that job the next day, but from a personal finance perspective I cannot easily afford leaving and acquiring new jobs from one day to another.

I'm looking forward to your experiences and ideas.

Everyone derides Apple for not listening to the demands of users and then, when Apple finally does give in they... continue to deride them. I'm just happy with +magsafe -touchbar. Even if the price is Apple saving face and pretending this was their idea the whole time, so be it.

This hardly makes a case at all. Only one section in the middle is actually dedicated to why syntax highlight is bad and it boils down to a baseless assertion about "biasing" the developer's mind toward syntax. I would counter that assisting developers in thinking about how code will be interpreted or compiled rather than bytes of text is closer to the semantic meaning than without.

There's also a comparison to highlight syntax in fiction, which is absurd for many reasons. A simple one being that the _goal_ of fiction can often be to obscure meaning for the sake of ambiguity. I'm offended not by the thesis but by the presumptuous nature of the argument.

in the US it is not true

That is patently false. You can divide Americans into any number of segments which they are born into and reliably determine that segment's success. E.g. white people earn more than black people. Children of rich parents do better in school than children of poor parents. Lawyers who graduated in 2000 are more successful than ones who graduated in 2008. Forces out of their control determined this. Their "conditions" are functions of this. Your statement would imply that the people in these segments just happened to make worse choices unrelated to the circumstances of their segments. That would be quite the coincidence.

I'm just looking for a helpful, actionable response. All I've seen so far is "X is bad" (not actionable) and "Let's ban X" (not helpful).

What good will it do you that there's an international ban on DNA databases when corporations use the impossible-to-stop one anyway to discriminate against and target you or the police use it anyway to throw you in prison.

The most helpful course of action imo is to learn how best to cope with this new reality. How should we set our expectations when our DNA is public and searchable? Are there behaviors that would once be safe but will not be in the future? I think those are the more relevant questions.

I'm a little confused about what exactly the point of debate is here.

* Is your DNA a secret? I think the fact that you leave it everywhere means no.

* Should people be allowed to aggregate that information? It literally cannot be stopped so I think the point is moot.

I guess what I'm missing is any addressing of the reality of the situation. I'm guessing from the content of your reply that you think that the practice of cataloging DNA should be banned. Great. What happens when they do it anyway?

I think this is somewhat analogous to the privacy issues around Google Street View. Almost nobody thought the image of the front of their house was really private, but the idea of it being catalogued and searchable bothered more than a few. Removing the barrier of someone having to physically do the work to get that information at least made them feel more vulnerable.

Has Street View been a problem for the world in that way? I haven't personally experienced that. That's probably why the DNA database idea doesn't scare me. If you want to live in the world it's essentially impossible to keep your DNA a secret. It seems to me that eventually someone will pick it all up and organize it.

Logically, if isolation is keeping the curve flat and you still have patients to "burn" through then won't ending isolation make the curve pop back up potentially back over capacity?

It always seemed to me you needed to continue isolating to keep the curve flat as time went on until you reached a critical number where letting it go couldn't overwhelm health services.

I thought that was the point of the section- that you may be able to tell something is wrong with the example, but the compiler can't. Thus by programming in that fashion you're not taking advantage of the power of the compiler.

The improved way below where the Just a is unwrapped with a case allows the compiler to see whether or not x is valid.

It seems pretty obvious to me in context what the word means. You could play that game with literally every word in the sentence.

What does "achieve" mean? It's that way out of the box? If I invest in a special team of Unity developers it's possible? They'll give it to me if I work hard enough?

What does "beautiful" mean? High poly? Vibrant color? Critics or fans say it looks good? There's an object beauty score that it has high marks in?

ad nauseam

A password isn't a good analogy for a DNA, imo. DNA only identifies you-- it doesn't unlock additional information about what you've done in the past like a password might. So a closer analogy would be a username.

Then given my username was found somewhere, with that public knowledge of us being one character off, publishing your username would identify me as that user. And I'm not sure that would be wrong.

It's also illustrative that a username is "public" information you might share with someone while a password is private. And I think that's why I'm of the opinion that DNA isn't private information.

I really love the concept and I've used it since August, but I frequently return to the app and it starts "reloading" making me concerned that I'm missing notifications. It's also frustrating that my configuration doesn't transfer between computers which I do frequently.