maria_weber23

Wow, the author must be a bit depressed or something. I don't even know where to start.

> If I’m going to cease to exist, it doesn’t matter what would be in a world without me.

Oh yeah, egoism at its best lol. If I die, why shouldn't everyone else?

> children make a human a slave of circumstances for at least 15 years. For what? For nothing, just because.

Okay... He is also realizing that children are not his "helper bots". I am assuming he is a he, because a women would never say these things... I don't know in what world you live in to think of children this way. Have you ever played with a child or seen it grow up? This is atrocious. Seriously man, get help or something, this almost borders on psychopath level of apathy.

> (Children, again) It’s like a new branch in a version control system, if you know what I mean.

Okay I am out. You really should get help. Definitely.

> So no, children are not our immortality. They are the best way to kill time (and eventually yourself).

Yep... Totally get it. Obviously children are not our immortality. Are they the best way to kill time? I mean if you are a robot, that's probably true.

> We’ve already superseded the evolution, so we don’t actually need it any more.

We are far away from that. Right now our gene pool is actively deteriorating because we managed to eliminate natural selection. And yet, we still can't live forever and we can't fix the common cold. Good luck to our species.

> The nature isn’t our friend. It’s our enemy.

Okay :D. Just dig yourself a concrete hole and live in there from bottles of Soylent and see what happens. There are tons of studies who show you how important a connection to nature is for the human body and mind, but well...

> The meaning of life is to keep on living.

Yeah, that's maybe the only thing I can agree with in this "text" or whatever it is. But it definitely doesn't follow from the brainfarts that came before.

I am now actually pitying the coworkers of this person and actually anybody he interacts with, if any.

Look, there is only one thing that differentiates humans from robots. It is that humans are nothing like you want to make them in your article. If humans were like you, I would wish this race would get replaced by actual robots asap, because at least then, there is an excuse for behaving the way you do.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle should probably be put the rest at this point. From the beginning it was more "capturing" our inability to move beyond the physics as we know it. It's like tying your shoe laces. I always found it fascinating how firmly most physicists believe in the equations someone came up with, just because it agree with measurements. I mean that's real nice and all, but just because something agrees with measurements, doesn't make it a fact. There are literally infinite ways to create equations that satisfy measurements. But sure, a few decades of research in the early 20th century and that's it. This is all we can do. Let's just accept that lol.

Yeah this model sucks, unless they give you A LOT more of these options than they would give you RSUs. Then it could work out, if you believe in the company.

Cool, so whats the point here? These are not screenshots from developers. These are screenshots from a minimal possible subset that prove some contrived point. Nobody who wants to develop software productively would show you screenshots like this. Just because you can develop software successfully like this, doesn't mean its a good approach. The tooling has developed insanely since 2002, it's not even a competition. The dev tools in 2015 just are mind blowing compared to 2002. People who are not using them may still be able to code but it really doesn't prove anything.

> it can also be emotionally draining to reject candidate after candidate.

How so? I mean I can certainly see why interviewing is not for everyone, but this really never crossed my mind. It's not like you know the candidate. Also you want to keep a good standard in your company, don't you? So why would this ever matter to you.

> FLoC is an engineering solution to a political problem.

Yes.

> the problem with targeted advertising is the targeting

Is it? The problem with advertisement is the advertisement. I don't like to see ads at all, but one thing I know for sure, I'd take targeted ads at all time over random ads.

> People don't like seeing their web history funnel into their advertising.

No. This is the problem YOU have with it. Most of the non-tech people I know have no idea what you are even talking about.

I second that. It's not only that you make yourself completely intertwined with a Cloud by using more than fundamental services.

The costs of lambda or even DDB are IMMENSE. These only pay off for services that have a high return per request. I.e. if you get a lot of value out of lambda calls, sure, use them. But for anything high-frequency that earns you little to nothing on its own, forget about it.

Generally all your critical infrastructure should be Cloud independent. That narrows your choices largely to EC2, SQS, perhaps Kinesis, Rout53, and the like. And even there you should implement all your features with two clouds, i.e. Azure and AWS, just to be sure.

The good news is also the bad news. There are effectively only two options: Azure or AWS. Google Cloud is a joke. They arbitrary change their prices, terminate existing products, offer zero support. It's just like we have come to love Google. They just don't give a shit about customers. Google only cares about "architecture", i.e. how cool do I feel as engineer having built that service. Customer service is something that Google doesn't seem to understand. So think carefully if you want to buy into their "product". Google, literally, only develops products for their own benefit.

Yup, seconded 100%. I started programming on my own when I was 7 years old with a learning computer for children that supported BASIC. Until I reached work-life, everything centered around exploring everything and digging deep into whatever was interesting...

Then work happened. Right now I just can't stand it anymore. My brain is rebelling against even coding. I am still really good at it and enjoy it, but I realize that I just lack the drive I had. Some people might say that's bad. IT IS NOT. I spent almost 25 years of my life filled with coding. I am done. I want to have other people code things for me and focus on building awesome products instead. This is what drives me now. I don't care about low-level anymore. I don't care about bugs or why this stupid dependency won't work in a deployed environment. I want to ship awesome things to customers and I keep realizing that this is at the core what always drove me. I never coded for the sake of coding. It was always to build something cool, except there was no one else around to do it for me.

This is a very familiar story for many engineering managers I know.

Tracking your time spent has nothing to do with productivity. It is simply data you may chose to act on or not.

If this person was out for optimizing income, tye6 would not have studied a PhD in the first place, because that's 6 years wasted, plus tuition on top of it.

You can your tracking to optimize for whatever variable you want to optimize. You could realize that you work too much and aim for working less. You could realize that you do social media too much and aim to do less of it, etc. It's up to you.

As for not making money. The world is, sadly highly biased towards rich people. If you are poor and happy (which is totally possible) you are still highly at risk that this state won't last. Without money, you are f*ed in this world. It's just the way it is. If you are dependent on income you are dependent on A LOT of things. The best you can generally do for your happiness is become income independent as fast as possible, which usually means to earn as much as possible as early as possible and then live from investments while focusing on everything that's not work.

ECC memory can't eliminate the chances of these failures entirely. They can still happen. Making software resilient against bitflips in memory seems very difficult though, since it not only affects data, but also code. So in theory the behavior of software under random bit flips is well... Random. You probably would have to use multiple computers doing the same calculation and then take the answer from the quorum. I could imagine that doing so would still be cheaper than using ECC ram, at least around 2000.

Generally this goes against software engineering principles. You don't try to eliminate the chances of failure and hope for the best. You need to create these failures constantly (within reasonable bounds) and make sure your software is able to handle them. Using ECC ram is the opposite. You just make it so unlikely to happen, that you will generally not encounter these errors at scale anymore, but nontheless they can still happen and now you will be completely unprepared to deal with them, since you chose to ignore this class of errors and move it under the rug.

Another intersting side effect of quorum is that it also makes certain attacks more difficult to pull off, since now you have to make sure that a quorum of machines gives the same "wrong" answer for an attack to work.

That would be a death sentence for the current administration. It's always the same game. Whoever is in power does EVERYTHING imaginable to make themselves look good and unload all the fallout into the next term(s), which is often held by the opposing party, and if not, the game of deferring will simply continue... Until at some point it simply can't and we get a big bang.

Why are people still thinking that taxing high earners is an option? The world is ruled by rich people, why would they tax themselves? Doesn't make any sense. Democracy is nice, until all the choices you have, exhibit the same underlying core values that you disagree with.

Normally all successful parties will aim for the middle, where there are most voters. The ones that don't, are marginalized and perhaps have some chance at succeeding during times where voters go astray and just vote some extremists out of sheer frustration (like it happened in Germany a couple of times). But that never lasts. This seriously limits democracy, as you can be sure that some values will never change, because there is no party with enough votes to make these changes.

Instead, what we need is Democracy 2.0, where the people vote on individual packages, not parties. Switzerland may be the only country where that works out quite well.

Well for one, natural sweeteners interfere with the bodies insulin response. I.e. it will overproduce in anticipation, but then your blood sugar drops into oblivion, because well, you didn't actually eat sugar. Is this bad? Probably not if you don't overuse them.

Besides that? I can tell you my body is very sensitive and artificial sweeteners (I literally tried all different kinds) make hell break lose in it, much worse than sugar could ever be. So perhaps they aren't such a great replacement after all? This usually applies to everything humans try to lazily swap out in foods. Oh so I am vegan? Keep these meat replicas coming, only they are like 100 times worse for your health than the real thing...

Last part from the article: "But maybe I’m imaging things. Maybe the reason progress stopped in 1996 is that we invented everything. Maybe there are no more radical breakthroughs possible, and all that’s left is to tinker around the edges. This is as good as it gets: a 50 year old OS, 30 year old text editors, and 25 year old languages. Bullshit. No technology has ever been permanent. We’ve just lost the will to improve."

Yeah, that's obviously bullshit. But we also didn't lose the will to improve. The leap from where we were 20 years ago, to where we are now, isn't mind-boggling. I still remember my Turbo Pascal days, my Delphi days. Sure things to improve... But overall this experience was sufficient. I wouldn't really have trouble implementing any of the projects I worked on in the past 10 years with Delphi, or even Turbo Pascal. It would sure suck, and take longer, but it wouldn't be a dealbreaker... This is the raw definition of a non-revolutionary progress.

The problem is that the next step of software engineering is incredibly difficult to achieve. It's like saying "Uh math/physics didn't change a whole lot since 1900". Well it did, but very incrementally. There is nothing revolutionary about it. Einstein would still find himself right at home today. That doesn't mean progress was stalling per se.

It means that to get "to the next level" we need a massive breakthrough, a herculean effort. Problem also is that nobody really knows what that will be... For me, the next step of software engineering is to only specify high-level designs and have systems like Pluscal, etc. in place that automatically verify the design and another AI system that code the low-level implementation. We would potentially have a "cloud compiler" that continuously recompiles high level specs and improves over time with us doing absolutely nothing. I.e. "software development as a service". You specify what you want to build, and AI builds it for you, profiting from continuous updates to this AI engine world-wide.