2
points
blowski
Joined 14,026 karma
Dan Blows
Mostly a PHP developer in London.
Email: d@nblo.ws
Website: https://da.nblo.ws
- I find this a vague, reductionist view. When I have dinner with my family today, there’s more than one nature, while my own nature has changed in the last 10 years. To say most people have had the same nature at least for the last 300 years is only true if you reduce “nature” to something so banal that it means nothing at all.
- > we just have phones now
That’s a huge understatement. We have electricity, refrigeration, medicine, mass transit (including international), human rights, enormous increases in population, fast media, internet, nuclear weapons, universal literacy, factory lines, spaceships, cities of many millions of people. Anyone that’s played Civilisation knows how far the tech tree goes once you hit the Enlightenment.
And you can see how much internet and social media have changed society, so imagine the impact of all those things combined on the human brain.
- If you want ChatGPT to say nice things about you (or bad things about your competitors), then you'll need to give it your version of information - at least that will be the line peddled to us.
I've already received emails from SEO snake oil sellers now advertising themselves as being able to influence ChatGPT output.
- I'd say this is exactly what the interviewers wanted. They're interested in how you break down the problem, the types of solutions you consider, your understanding of the trade-offs involved. For example, I interviewed somebody who was adamant they could prevent double-booking by polling an end-point and storing the state in Redux. Fantastic JavaScript skills, terrible knowledge of databases.
- 3 points
- 5 points
- I agree, it would be nice to make it easy to donate, and then the donations are spread to others within the ecosystem. But perhaps they're worried about a ruckus when they choose to make a donation someone doesn't agree with, so they'd need to have a layer of bureaucracy that they don't want to manage.
- This is true of all famous essays. People remove the nuance included in the body and over-apply the title without really understanding it.
For example "Goto considered harmful". I remember working with a very good programmer who'd used a "goto", and a much less senior one[1] rejected their PR by linking to the article.
[1] I'm ashamed to say it was me, a long time ago.
- Some good previous discussions on this:
- I actually do have a right, very specifically my statutory right under the UK's "Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation, and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013" which requires that vendors provide clear and timely information about automatic renewals, which I assert educative.io failed to do in this case.
Startup or not, I expect vendors to be compliant with regulations.
- One reason I didn't go back and check was that I always turn this off. Of course, I'm fallible and may have made a mistake here, and so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. Either way, I encourage people to check.
The other reason is that they didn't send me any kind of email telling me they were going to charge me.
- In the UK at least, the vendor needs to show that their process was transparent and fair in order to fulfill their side of the contract. One of the examples specifically called out as unfair is "renewing without sufficient notice".
In this case, they didn't send any kind of email before or after payment.
- 92 points
- The closest I've come to being "blown away" by it was a project where I needed to clone the results of an Excel workbook onto the server, without installing Excel. I started with PHP as my normal language, but it ran into the ground when I had to deal with order of operations, new operators, and cell references.
I'd never really used a Lisp-based language before, but I decided to give Clojure a try, and it was the first time I grokked the value of "the program is the data is the program".
In PHP I had different "things" - operators, functions, scalar variables, class variables - and I needed to think about what was assigned and when. But in Clojure, everything was "data" that I could use to construct bigger pieces of data. Maybe that's obvious to better programmers than me, but my mind was blown.
- Yes, I'd be interested to hear that. From initial reports, it sounds like under-investment in QA because of over-confidence in automated QC.
It's an example of a "black swan" or Bertrand Russell's chicken - the same process has worked many times, leading people to make the false conclusion that the risk has become neglible. There's a successful trial period in which the beancounters reduce headcount with no negative consequences. So the trial becomes permanent, people become less careful. And then boom.
They miss that a 1 in 10000 occurence is going to happen eventually, and that "unnecessary expense" which was previously there to mitigate it has now been removed.
On the specific note, I frequently make these mistakes, despite having read his books and knowing the problem to which he’s referring. I say “could you just…” and “we should really do x today”. In the abstract, we can all see the problem, yet it’s easy to forget in reality.