techopoly

But not immune to missiles. Russia's already threatened to target Starlink satellites. Maybe they're bluffing, or not, but it does offer a reminder that these are just floating computers in the sky.

OBE?

Simple answer: work for a bank.

Can confirm, these are legit. Make sure you're aware of any outlets on the outside of your building though, as these could be plugged into with malicious intent.

One obvious example of that is when Dropbox was presented here as a startup and was shot down in glorious fashion.

Nice. Mine's not so impressive, but when I was green and in college, I was casually job shadowing an older friend for a day at a major tech company, and was asked to take a look at some code that had an issue.

I spotted the bug in 30 seconds.

It was then I realized that even at the top of our profession, everyone is still human beings with their own sets of strengths and weaknesses, and I have just as much potential as anyone else.

That's an awesome experience. And the sword part may not be true, but it might as well be.

"A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth." -- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Perhaps they got there sooner, but at what cost to their health, relationships, and sanity?

I dislike this philosophy, that a person in one field of expertise can have nothing constructive to say about another, or can't learn it.

Reminds me of "don't roll your own cryptography." Well, all the standard cryptographic algorithms were rolled by someone, and they had to have thrown out their first pancake too.

Agreed. As much as we talk about how programming is manipulation of ideas...at the end of the day it is a very physical process too. You are manipulating actual physical things in this world. This is a fascinating concept to think about. Programming is physics.

That's a really good point. Nothing is perfect, and frameworks are no different, so after awhile the friction points come to the fore.

Also, I have a theory that with the more common languages, you obviously find a much broader user base of beginner-level programmers, or, worse, programmers who just don't care about quality, which translates to more dysfunctional code in the community in general. My coworker at one company did not have good things to say about PHP, but when he had to take over a PHP project of mine when I left the company, he said it was some of the most well-written PHP he's ever seen -- organized, easy to follow and modify, etc. He didn't even realize PHP could be written in an eloquent fashion. (Not to brag, I've written plenty of bad code too.) Point being that if all you see in a certain language is jumbled spaghetti code, it's easy to think of it as a bad language.

A good programmer should be able to create eloquent code in any language.

Edit: Realized after posting I may have sounded like I thought you were not a good programmer -- that's not what I was saying at all! You can write eloquent code and still be frustrated with what the framework or community forces upon you.

I wonder how many developers hate PHP because one is just supposed to hate PHP.

I'm sure there are many with well-thought-out reasoning though, like seen in this thread.

It's useful to keep an open mind about things though. I'm probably more a PHP fan, but I can't say that I'm a huge fan of its programming style. It's much more enjoyable to me to churn out applications in .NET or in Ruby, but it's hard to argue with the speed at which I can develop in PHP or with the level of support online for doing so.

Ha, that's a good name for it. We can go so far in trying to compensate for biases and fallacies that we introduce whole new ones!

Or a restaurant with a smoking section. Right next to the non-smoking section.

This is probably why rabbits have been getting abnormally bold in my yard lately...

Virtual Desktop already has many customizable features that allow you to work the way you're describing. I've worked in it before, and it was very immersive, though there was of course some fatigue.

You can have just one window at a time, and with a good headset, the wiggle is not significant. You can even adjust it so that your workspace follows you when your head turns.

Just because there's possibly some survivorship bias in their viewpoint doesn't mean their statement is automatically false.

My place of work didn't have a soft-phone connection to our computers until this COVID-19 mess started. I imagine we weren't alone.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Sounds like most companies. Which is even more concerning

Thank you.

Yes, nobody has a crystal ball. It always feels like other people do though.

It's good to make decisions with a sober view of risk and reward. I feel so much market advice that filters down to us laypeople is whether we should or should not buy or sell, when really it is all based on our level of risk tolerance, how much in terms of assets we have, what our time horizons are, what our expertise is. I would say a healthy young person with plenty of cash to burn might well look at buying stocks now. But a person nearing retirement, perhaps with health issues, they should probably board up and get ready for the storm. Most people below retirement age should probably just stop freaking out and keep contributing to their retirement plan as they (hopefully) have been doing, and make sure to have some cash on hand.

Our society does not do well with self-control or with gray areas. We want easy answers, which, unfortunately, don't usually exist.

I think most doctors make it a point to instill calm in their patients. And, the nature of their work is that they have likely dealt with emergency situations and dying patients, so they have seen the worst and have to have a way to handle these things. So they are coming from a different position than you, perhaps (maybe, maybe not).

Symptom-wise, as far as I can tell, COVID-19 can be similar to the flu. Especially for most people, who may not have much in the way of symptoms. So your doctor isn't wrong per se. But yes, the deadliness of the virus is much higher, unfortunately. So it is not quite similar in intensity, and it is a serious thing.

In my opinion, Stephen King might be the best English language novelist since the mid 1950s or so. I think people mostly look down on him because he's generally identified with horror, which is of course his typical genre -- but his work transcends the genre and is deeply literary.

Carrie should be on the bookshelf next to other somewhat recent masterpieces like the Grapes of Wrath, Invisible Man (Ellison's), Lord of the Flies, the Great Gatsby, and Ulysses.

And books are not all the same. No matter who you are, it's going to take you longer to read Ulysses than it will take you to read Hank the Cowdog.

According to my understanding, you will possibly not gain immunity after your first infection.

Not sure why you're being downvoted -- I think your comment is a perfectly reasonable statement to make.

I can relate to this, and I wonder if it has to do with the unscheduled nature of staying awake through sleep hours. Our adult lives become so regulated and scheduled, which is arguably a good thing for health, relationships, and business. But, for me, during the recent times when I could not sleep at night, or had an unexpected pocket of time with no obligation -- I was unbelievably motivated, creative, and productive. Happy, even.

Something about the nature of constantly being "on", whether that means online, or simply fulfilling some sort of obligation to others or even yourself, seems to sap away at what really makes us human. Of course, if you take away those obligations, you're left with nothing. So I imagine there is a balance to be found. And our society is very bad at finding it.

Reminds me of this article about a student whose property was seized because he had computer expertise:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/boston-college-prompt-...

That's the problem, isn't it? How can we decode a theoretical alien transmission without transposing our own sense of meaning onto it?

It's like the X-Files episodes where they find the aliens are using encodings that were designed in modern history by humans. Binary (as if there is one standard binary), bar codes... These scenes are supposed to be huge revelations, but for any sort of programmer or engineer, they seem silly. Which wouldn't be so if they made a point about how the aliens are intentionally using our encoding systems, but that's not how it's presented.

Not hating on the X-Files though, that show is awesome.