- kagakuninja parentI was a jurist on a murder trial. The defendant had spent 1.5 years in jail awaiting his trial. Then went back to jail after the hung jury did not deliver a verdict.
- My 40 years of alienation was not about equity, I was pointing out that the optimistic "We are all going to be rich" vibe of the 90s was wishful thinking due to the massive inequality in the tech world.
Few teams other than green-field start-ups have flexibility regarding tools or technology. My first job was COBOL, 'nuff said about that. Even at start-ups the leads / architects choose most of the technology, and many of my ideas were shot down, such as using C++ in the late 90s, and using Scala in 2010.
People seem to think agile has increased alienation, when in fact the pre-agile world was also terrible. What matters is the quality of the team, not the methodology.
- At age 62, I'm wondering which mythical decade did not alienate software developers?
There was a brief ray of hope in the late 90s, with the startup gold-rush idea that we would all be millionaires soon. Then the I realized the founders had 4000x my equity those companies...
- A friend of mine spent some time living in homeless shelters. Even having one room mate was a problem at times, as many of the people there have mental issues (my friend included).
We need tiers of low cost housing. Some people could make a communal space work, they would need to be able to vote to kick people out. People who are difficult to deal with need their own place, maybe a less dystopian form of mental institute. More like a dorm with mental services and security.
- Captain Kirk did that a few times in Star Trek, but with less fanfare.
- Young Padawan, C++ was once a cool language, and I had to battle at multiple companies before I was finally able to make the career switch from C.
The conventional wisdom was "Where will we get C++ programmers?", "We don't have experience with C++", "C++ is too bleeding edge", and so on. The same excuses people give today to not use Rust, or your favorite hyped language.
If we follow the logic of OP, we will almost never develop new languages, because there are already multiple established languages good enough for any task at hand.
- With Trump, assume there will be massive kickbacks and corruption, most likely nothing useful will happen.
- My meditation teacher says what works for him is cannabis.
- That is what traditional US foreign aid was all about. We give money to allies, they buy our military hardware or farm products. Trump of course has shit all over the system, so who knows what we are going to do now.
We also give out tons of subsidies and tax breaks to lure foreign investment to the US.
- I'm 62, I've been a mid-tier engineer all my life, working with tons of H1Bs starting in the '90s. My current employer is 90% Indian contractors now. None of us are working on "The world's hardest problems", we are building bog standard micro services.
- Pranayama is 2000+ years old, and has many warnings that you can fuck yourself up if you do it wrong.
- There are 2500+ years of prior art on "breath work", but group think here is to dismiss it as woo.
The abstract does clearly mention HVB as being similar to hyperventilation, so presumably it is similar to "bellows breathing" from yoga / pranayama. They also name-check Holotropic breath work, which I have not studied, but has been a hot topic for several years now.
As best as I can interpret, "cyclic breathing without pausing" means no pausing after full inhale or exhale.
By contrast, "box breathing" would have typically equal durations of in-breath and out-breath, with equal duration of pauses. This style of breathing would be done typically to calm the mind, with slow, long breaths.
Breath can also be asymmetrical (typically exhales longer than inhales, said to be calming). I find this style to be awkward, I guess the inhale has to be more forceful to move the same amount of air as will be exhaled.
To be sure, when a topic is posted that people have some interest and experience with, then we will tell you about our experiences. Sorry if that harshes your mellow...
- We hoped that the party of law and order, of Christian morality would not re-elect a convicted rapist, convicted financial fraudster, serial adulterer, pathelogical liar and instigator of America's first coup attempt.
Even Liz Cheney was supporting Harris. This wasn't about "charm", it was about saving democracy. And now we are fucked...
- The Republican leaders could have removed Trump from office after Jan 6.
All those traditional conservatives and "lowercase-L libertatians" could speak up now, and do something about the ongoing fascist takeover, but they are not. American democracy is probably doomed, we will find out in 2026 whether we can have fair mid-term elections.
- Republicans could, and should have removed Trump from office after the Jan 6 attack. They are the real cowards.
- You might say "PHP is a fractal of bad design"...
- I am 61, and have been working for almost 40 years. I don't really have a lot of personal connections, because I am on the autistic spectrum. Yes, I have many former co-workers linked on LinkedIn, but to most of those people, I'm just an old acquaintance, not someone they are going to phone up with a hot new job opportunity.
The exception is one college friend who did help me get multiple jobs at startups, but he retired several years ago.
Establishing and maintaining relationships is hard, and many of us are simply not good at it.
Now I did make sure to stay in touch with a couple ex-managers who I knew would be good references. One of them even helped me get an interview. But even when I had a connection on the inside of a company, all that really does is move me to the head of the line, past the HR screen. I still have to interview, something I still suck at despite decades of practice.
- And it is the same cut that console companies take from developers. And then when we point this out, people respond with some bullshit that consoles are not "general purpose computers"...
- In the Foundation books, he revealed that robots were involved behind the scenes, and were operating outside of the strict 3 laws after developing the concept of the 0th law.
>A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm
Therefore a robot could allow some humans to die, if the 0th law took precedence.
- In the late '80s, I was in the Air Force. Directive from the top was that all military projects should standardize on Oracle DB, "because it is portable", and projects should use AT&T mini computers (wat?)
They set up a test computer in our building, so me and a buddy go down to play around with it. The AT&T computer is slow as shit even though we are the only users. We are messing around with Oracle Forms, we press a hot key, for something important, like enabling triggers on a field. Forms crashes.
We call our friendly on-base Oracle rep, his advice is to not press that key. We also asked for a quote on the cost of an Oracle DB license, and it was something like 5x the cost of the DEC DB we were using on our mini-VAX. We decided to not use Oracle.
- Our US mega corp is having us hire all remote contractors, in person is completely out of the question.
- No. Using AI requires a depth of knowledge to spot the mistakes in the generated. code, and to know how to fit all the snippets of code in to something that works.
We need to know that the developer actually has skills and isn't just secretly copying the answer off of a hidden screen. We are interviewing now, and some cantidates are obviously cheating. Our interview process is not leet code based, and reasonably chill, but we will probably have to completely rethink the process.
Since we are hiring contractors, in theory we can let them go after a couple months if they suck, but we haven't tested out how this will work in practice.
- We have been interviewing people who are obviously using covert AI helper tools. Ask them a question and they respond with coherent response, but they are just reading off of a window we can't see.
In some cases it is obvious they are blathering a stream of words they don't understand. But others are able to hold something resembling a coherent conversation. We also have to allow for the fact that most people we interview aren't native English speakers, and are talking over Teams. It can be very hard to tell if they are cheating.
Asking questions to probe their technical skills is essential, otherwise you are just selecting for people who are good at talking and self promotion. We aren't just asking trivia questions.
We also give a simple code challenge, nothing difficult. If they have a working knowledge of the language, they should be able to work through the problem in 30 minutes, and we let them use an IDE and google for things like regex syntax.
Some of them are obviously using an AI, since they just start typing in a working solution. But in theory they could be a Scala expert who remembers how to use map plus a simple regex...
- Might as well use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-meter
- Elon / Trump will ignore court orders they don't like, they are basically doing that already. The only remedy will be impeachment. It is extremely unlikely that Republicans will remove Trump from office, and so the coup will continue.
- Fundamentalist Christians were the original prigs. It is amusing to see pg try and shoehorn the word on to the social justice movement.
- I can remember my mother giving me carob 50 years ago, because it is "healthier than chocolate". Never forget.
- The band originally was The Pink Floyd (after changing their name from The Tea Set)
- Gary Numan and the PolyMoog. It was his core sound.
- And yet people continue to blame Biden for high energy prices. Boggles the mind.