Verdex_3

Yeah, some of the explanation of benefits I've received are insane. Insurance is apparently able to negotiate ~50% bill reductions for multi 10K bills.

I think pregnancy and labor is what's going to finally break the camel's back.

Having children is a pretty basic part of being human. And the costs are such that even millionaires are going to feel it. When basically nobody can afford to participate in reproduction, something is going to go sideways.

With my "good" insurance, I still ended up with a multi-thousand dollar deductible. Which I thought was problematic until I started hearing about people who have high deductible plans that only make you pay 20% after hitting your deductible.

For a 100K bill, 20% is still absurd and especially after you've already paid $2-10K out of pocket.

I was wondering the same thing. I feel my time playing various role playing games has helped the issues that I've had with social anxiety.

I really like it when people become concerned about cognitive complexity. I think it's one of the significantly ignored concepts in our industry and if we ever find a way to address the issue (either with some sort of cognitive complexity solution or some sort of big oh like math framework that describes how things are complex) then the future generations of software engineers will look at what we're currently doing now the same way we look at how people used to do alchemy for our lack of being able to handle cognitive complexity.

Personally, I want a mathematical structure of "problems" such that we can track when we're actually making things more complex or less complex. In the article, removing boilerplate was a problem because internal domain models were being exposed publicly. But what I really want to know is "what are we actually gaining by removing the boiler plate and what are we losing by exposing domain models". In like a general mathematical sense such that if everyone about programming changes (maybe suddenly we switch to APL or something), the lessons we learned are still valid.

So far the best I've managed is [1]. I've done a bunch of refinement in the last year and a half, but the general structure is about the same. I'm not suggesting that what I have is complete or even necessarily the right direction to go for this sort of thing. But what I am saying is that in order to make definite statements about how the problem and/or code you're dealing with is complex (that don't rely on appeals to authority) then you probably need to have done at least as much "work" as I have (if that makes any sense).

[1] - https://www.sep.com/sep-blog/2017/04/25/objective-code-quali...

I remember trying to sleep in between classes. Like, I would close my eyes and touch the wall in the hallway so that I could "sleep" while I was walking to my next class.

Well, I don't know about that. For example, back when I was at university, my graphics professor mentioned that there were hundreds of algorithms for mapping a texture to a sphere going back hundreds of years because map makers had been coming up with them so that they could place maps on globes.

There are old books, but you have to be a bit more creative to find them.

Not utilitarian calculus. It's closer to spider-man's Great power comes great responsibility.

For example, if I figured out the secret to creating strong AI with respect to writing software such that I could replace the entire software engineering industry with one large computer (note: this isn't something I believe will be possible for centuries if it is ever possible), then I would feel compelled to use the billions of dollars this would undoubtedly get me to help retrain all of the software engineers I just permanently put out of a job.

It's also stated as 'if it is within your power to do good, then you should do it'. My contention is that a powerful company should hire more people to cover additional work instead of finding creative ways to get additional work out of currently employed people for the same amount of money because hiring more people is a good that they are able to do and getting more work for less money isn't.

I'm fine with us not agreeing. But I'm also fine with me being right, which is why I'm still typing.

Bad things can work out for your own personal good. Or even the good of the whole of society. However, that doesn't make them not bad.

I'm glad that your situation worked out for your own personal good. Nice things happening to people make me happy. Things working out for people make me happy. However, the situation you describe is the latter not the former. That your bad situation, which ultimately worked out for you, did not personally bother you enough to be problematic (for you personally) doesn't make it a good situation. I'm glad that it didn't bother you. However, it may have bothered someone else.

Your situation was objectively bad not because it bothered or didn't bother you or another person. Your situation was bad because it was the result of a powerful entity externalizing their failures onto weak entities.

A manufacturing plant that has the ability to setup logistics to keep a plant running 24/7 is a powerful entity. A manufacturing plant that is able to support jobs for at least three different engineering disciplines (chemical, mechanical, electrical) is a powerful entity.

A powerful entity is able to hire additional staff to handle non-working-hour emergencies. That they didn't hire this staff was their failure.

But that's okay, they don't have to pay for this failure because they can force their employees to pick up their failure by working extra hours. The employees are weak entities because they do not have the ability to decline an encroachment of their working lives into their personal lives.

They could be sleeping, or eating, or spending time with their families, or spending time on hobbies, or spending time innovating with their discipline. All things which help society and the economy. But instead that time has been stolen to make money for something that already has plenty.

They should be free to live their life. If it turns out that the company doesn't actually have enough money to hire enough people to perform all of the duties that it needs to continue to exist, then that company should cease to exist. Which is desirable over the alternative of having rich company owners externalize their failure to run their company adequately by stealing the lives of employees who don't have the ability to say no to an unethical violation of their right to live their life.

If the interview makes sure that potential employees are okay with being on call, then there are no problems.

However, my employer has moral agency above me only insofar as I'm not committing a crime against them (ie fraud or embezzling company funds, etc). This does not include me not performing duties I'm paid for. If I don't do my work, then they don't pay me. This is a civil matter. This certainly doesn't include the reason why I'm deciding not to do optional work. My employer doesn't get to decide that I'm somehow a bad person because they don't agree with why I'm not doing extra non-required work.

Eventually, I'm going to be a corpse in the ground. I'm not missing out on my other life goals because you weren't satisfied with my priorities and it turns out that the money you were offering didn't help me accomplish what I want to accomplish.

You are right. It isn't cool. But I assert that the not cool party is the employer who sprung an on call job requirement without any warning.

Additionally, if this job duty was actually important, then the employer would actually react with some criticism when they discovered that an employee was not performing this duty adequately. The fact that the employer isn't upset about having the on call employee ignoring messages means that it isn't important. Making employees being on call when the employer doesn't actually care about anyone being on call is also not cool.

Division of labor is a thing. I'm good at transforming customer interactions into requirements and then transforming requirements into working code.

I'm not good with dealing with issues with a deployed product while I should be busy living my life.

Hear hear. Give me actual autonomy and I'll happily be responsible for my code. Make me implement a crappy design and then deploy before it's functional and I'll happily send out resumes while other people work nights and weekends trying to fix garbage that was never going to work in the first place.

Like, I can appreciate that things can always be worse. But the other perspective is that what you're describing is objectively bad. And less of a bad thing is still bad.

If I have to option to not do a bad thing (even if it is only minimally bad), then why shouldn't I pursue that option?

If you don't mind doing the bad thing, then you should definitely take advantage of that. But probably shouldn't try to convince other people that the bad thing isn't bad. 1) It reduces your own advantage of willing to do the bad thing which you are hopefully converting into money. And 2) its end game is making people do something they don't enjoy without reason or compensation, which seems bad.

This isn't quite what I was going to say, but it's close enough.

I think parts of an OS can and should be written in something rust like, however the whole thing should probably not be written in rust.

My personal thought is that C and C++ 98 era are bad, but they were what we needed at the time. Part of this badness was that you could do anything but exact facilities for specialized tasks had to be rolled from scratch. Libraries are possible, but not ideal (no namespaces for C and crazy header + recompile issues for both).

In order to replace C and C++ we need more than just one language, we need an entire family of languages that all have the specific features implemented to support their domain. Rust can probably be used in game programming, but Zig (or in theory eventually Jai) is being specifically made with that goal in mind so they will probably be better. Rust itself will be much more useful for applications that cant stomach managed languages (ie web browsers, etc) because that's what they are specifically building it to do. It's got high level features in a form factor that you would expect from C#/Java with low runtime and no GC.

We can probably write OSes in Rust or Zig, but ideally someone who really likes thinking about OSes will create a language specifically geared towards writing OSes that will be able to replace C.

The GURPS role playing system uses the term indefatigable as part of its game mechanics. Additionally, the Film Reroll Podcast uses GURPS as their game system. My guess is that OP either has played GURPS or listened to the Film Reroll.

Also OP could just be really well read.

Personally, I'm glad to see indefatigable in the wild (at least more in the wild than a game system and a pod cast). I think the word is really cool and I haven't found an opportunity to use it myself.

There is a series of talks by Yuri Gurevich on Channel 9 where he talks about algorithms. While I haven't watched this particular video (yet), I did watch the other series a few times (3 videos IIRC). Anyway, in those videos Yuri seems to basically be saying that he doesn't think all algorithms from now to eternity will always be representable with turing machines. Which seems a bit more reasonable than the title here (Church-Turing cannot be true). It's a different way of saying when an old scientist says something is possible he's probably right and if he says something is impossible then he's probably wrong (only inverted ... ie saying church turing will never be irrelevant is hedging your bets against human progress).

All that being said, I don't buy what Yuri is selling. Even quantum computing can be simulated with a classical computer (with exponential slowdown), so I'm not seeing what's going to turn out to be more fundamental at least in a theoretical sense. Practically people might not care (yes technically you can simulate that graphics card in lambda calculus, but practically you would never do that and the guys building these things probably don't care about the church turing thesis), but the effective computability definition feels pretty effective. Either way, I'm not going to loose too much sleep over it. At the end of the day I'm more interested in looking for ways to be more effective and I'm not really interested in whether or not what I'm doing fits into the current definition of effective computability.

We as an industry?

Look friend. If I lose my job, you aren't going to do anything to augment my lack of income. You're not going to do anything to provide health insurance. And you're not going to do anything to help me find new employment.

There is no "We".

Here's an idea. If this topic is something that you feel is important, then perhaps you can set aside half your income to a general fund to help provide benefits for employees who leave facebook for morality reasons. Maybe if it gets enough momentum others will also provide funds. Given enough time perhaps this will help the "industry" to become more ethical.

You know what's not going to convince anyone to leave facebook now? Trying to setup some sort of ad hoc lynch mob to "deal" with people who are trying to pay a mortgage.

I wonder which is worse. If they were arguing that way for no reason OR if they were arguing that way because their livelihoods were dependent on it.

My plan is that you settle and then pay their licensing fee. At which point you've got the right to show the tattoos so you use that right. Create a new basketball player called LeBron Jame's Solid Oak Sketches LLC tattoos. It's just LeBron Jame's tattoos on an invisible person. It's the worst player and gets constant heckling from the audience.

LeBron doesn't seem to like where the whole thing is going, so that means he's also likely to play ball if you bring him some more interesting ideas. Create a LeBron James with a different set of tattoos by a tattoo artist you explicitly hire for this purpose. Advertise this artist a lot. Make sure the new artist has the staff to be able to completely consume all of Solid Oak Sketches LLC business.

Make a campaign mode where LeBron James has all of his tattoos stolen by a wizard. You have to win a bunch of games to get them back, but they come back slightly altered such that they are no longer legally Solid Oak Sketches LLC IP.

Wait, so the conservatives want less censorship and the liberals want more censorship?

Is this one of those mirror universe things?

With respect to the call stack, a dynamically scoped variable is like the dual of an exception. That is to say, an exception is a way for a method to communicate with methods that are above it in the call stack. And a dynamically scoped variable is a way for a method to communicate with methods below it in the call stack.

Of the two the dynamically scoped variable is more powerful than the exception because an exception can only propagate upwards. A dynamically scoped variable can propagate downward, upward, or sideways (ie sibling methods in the call graph can access the values that you placed into the dynamically scoped variable).

In terms of how much trouble you can get into by misusing it, the dynamically scoped variable is more problematic than the exception (all things being equal). A dynamically scoped variable is basically just a global variable that isn't quite 100% global. So you can get into all the same problems that a global can get you into with the added benefit (or sometimes problem) that any two instances of a dynamically scoped variable might actually be different because they are coming from a different caller.

Finally, there are some really good usages of a dynamically scoped variable. Consider reference counting. If you're doing reference counting every time you increase/decrease your reference count, you are going to need to modify a counter. This is fine if you only have one thread, but with multiple threads it means that every time you modifying the counter you'll need to lock. Not something you want to do if you're worried about speed. However, if you stuck your reference counting framework into dynamic variables that get populated in the thread spin up method, then you could guarantee that each reference counting instance is inside of it's own thread. Now you don't have to lock anymore when you modify the ref count (as long as you don't otherwise cross the thread barrier).

All in all, I suspect that it's better that we have lexical scoping as a standard. Most of the things that I want to do with dynamic scoping, I feel like should live in a language feature or library. Additionally, dynamic scoping is more likely to break other abstractions like object oriented programming (ie we can't think of the object as an encapsulated unit if the way that it functions is determined by the methods above it in the call stack).

Is there a prose explanation or justification for Algorithm Information Theory. I think I first heard of it when I saw your IOCCC entry, but I was never able to get my mind wrapped around what the goal of the whole field was.

Is this what your meant to write?

I've worked on diabetes medical devices for about 8 years, did some research on diabetes to augment my ability to work on said diabetes medical devices, and personally know several people with type 1 diabetes and as well type 2 diabetes.

Did you mean instead to write: Sugar causes type 2 diabetes, not fat?

Additionally, if you don't train Steve and instead just quit, that's not going to stop the Employer from asking Steve to do the unethical thing without training. Now the unethical thing is not only unethical, but it is also filled to the brim with bugs that cause unsafe situations for end users.

Hear hear. When building a bridge it's obvious when they're building a test bridge or a real life bridge for people to drive over.

"So you want to spend 100 million dollars on a bridge that you're only using for testing purposes. And you want to put this bridge right where it would be really useful to put a real bridge to handle rush hour traffic. And you have a deal with the city to collect toll payments for this 'test' bridge for the next 50 years. Yeah, I don't think we're going to be cutting any corners for the 'test' bridge."

VS

"You want me to take 2 hours to add in a test feature that can be conditionally compiled in for testing purposes? Also I talked to John in testing and they actually want this feature for testing. Seems legit."

Two months later. "Hey, I found this test feature that would allow us to cheat on the regulations. All we have to do is set this compile flag to true. The programmers even made this neat UI that allows us to change the build configurations without having to talk to them."

No, he's saying that if he raises an objection, then his boss will fire him and find someone less competent to do the job. Then after he's fired for standing up for the good of society, society will tell him to starve to death because he doesn't have a job. Finally, his replacement will do a significantly worse job and the result will be greater damage to society.

There are no more coral snake antivenom manufacturers anymore because the regulations became more stringent and the company that made the only antivenom that was grandfathered in under the old rules decided it wasn't worth it anymore.

Realistic regulations are good because they prevent resource rich companies from externalizing their failures onto others.

Unrealistic regulations cause industries to give up on things that our population needs to survive.

For example, in the past if you got bit by a coral snake you could get antivenom. In the present, over ambitious regulation says that you die when you get bit by a coral snake. Because the alternative to death (using under regulated antivenom) is apparently worse?

If you want to you could regulate that cars run off of happiness and that their exhaust contains no pollutants. But the result would be that either everyone cheats on the tests OR that there would be no more cars. Including the trucks that bring us food and other useful products.

Here's a thought experiment. What if corporations hired a bunch of people whose job it was to be genuinely happy that it was your birthday. Maybe they divide their user group into days such that each day one of these employees would only be responsible for feeling happy about one or two users' birthdays. This employee would send you the email. And they would be happy about it and truly glad that it is your birthday.

Is this situation more or less dystopian?

Or you could just skip the middle man and hack the target's last pass account.

Anything can be exploited if the criteria for exploiting it is somehow breaking into an arbitrarily secured network/facility.