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stiglitz

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It's a Skinner box of productivity. Of course it's polarizing.

My own enthusiasm varies wildly day to day. I've been sick of squinting at punctuation marks and opening sequences of of tabs to trace through annoying abstraction layers for a long time; so I'm really excited to see those activities effectively automated away. But the same tools enable some really bad behavior (in myself and others), which really gets me down.

I think the two concepts are not easy to disentangle. It isn’t the craftsman who decides the chairs should be built in an assembly line- it’s the owner, who wants to maximize the number or consistency of chairs. And the abstraction of that assembly line is what keeps the craftsman from saying, “that is the chair that I built.”

As someone with a EE degree followed by 12 years of SWE work, that pivot is quite daunting. A degree is just a piece of paper to get you an entry level job to do some real learning IMO

Should QA exist? 4 months ago

In the Windows team (back before the test org was decimated) I saw the described "class divide". Anybody who was good enough would switch from SDET to SDE [disclaimer: obviously there were some isolated exceptions]. The test team produced reams of crappy test frameworks, each of which seemed like a "proving project" for its creators to show they could be competent SDEs. After the Great Decimation my dev team took ownership of many such frameworks and it was a total boondoggle; we wasted years trying (and mostly failing) to sort through the crappy test code.

This was all unfortunate, and I agree in principle with having a separate test org, but in Windows the culture unfortunately seemed to be built around testers as second-class software developers.

I've turned in so many things I'm not happy with and gotten a "this is great"

Great if this feedback is from users; not great if it's from somebody who's just been waiting for you to finish it so that they can sell it. Unfortunately in a big-company environment like the one I work in, the initial and dominant feedback is usually from the latter.

Unfortunately missing in the article is any plan for this to actually happen: for stability and quality to be valued by the CEMBI when their boss demands proof of “impact”.

That’s odd- the first film mentioned by this article (Ben-Hur from 1925), which it describes as completely lost, is not lost, at least according to its wikipedia article. Apparently it was (at least) partly considered lost until being found again in the 80’s. Not sure whether to trust TFA on any other claims now.

The age of average 3 years ago

Album sales have become an increasingly obsolete metric for popularity during the last 20 or so of those 40 years.

One time at a coffee shop, I saw a woman carefully highlighting, line by line, essentially an entire page of a book she was reading.

This doesn’t strike me as mindful behavior.

You can always "take an element from each set" over and over, but for this mapping to be shown to be a 1:1, you need to be more specific.

Example: the set of all natural numbers (0, 1, ...) is the same "size" as the set of all even numbers, because you can map any number N to the number 2N. It's obvious that any natural number N is uniquely accounted for by this mapping, since you can double any natural number (with a unique even result), and it's obvious that any even number is uniquely accounted for, because any even number divided by 2 is a (unique) natural number.

But if your mapping is defined as "take an arbitrary rational number and arbitrary irrational number, over and over forever", then there's no guarantee that, given an arbitrary irrational number, your mapping has defined a unique associated rational number.