cashewchoo

I think it's very fair and valid for you to feel however you want with regards to shelter-in-place/wfh/lockdown, but to me it seems somewhat unconscionable to be smug like enjoying your time alone is a huge win against extroverts.

I feel like it's a pretty ridiculous over-statement to say that introverts feel like they're in a pandemic normally. I'm an introvert and don't feel like that. I suspect the only people who could reasonably feel like that are people with anxiety disorders or phobias.

I don't know, I'm not saying you can't express your opinion or feel how you feel. But I want to express I'm a bit grossed out reading your post, as you seem just a bit too gleeful and smug at this whole situation.

A federal reserve police force would open some interesting additional avenues for affecting interest rates outside of open market operations...

(this is a joke)

Maybe I'll change my tune when I hit 30, but we had Aerons at my $lastjob and while I liked it well enough, I now work from home in what is essentially a Lazy Boy welded onto rolling wheels, and it cost rather less.

I do have a sit/stand desk now too though, so whenever I feel like I've been sitting for too long I switch to standing for about 30 minutes. Maybe that helps too?

I'm not, your ellipses abbreviate too much. I'm seeing, among a group of people who would theoretically be predisposed to not want to stay at home, people still electing to stay at home. This contradicts the OP's glib remark that less women nowadays want to stay at home.

I know this is bait, but I want to provide my experience as counter-example.

I went to a STEM college where anyone who graduates could quite reasonably expect to be able to build themselves a middle-class career, live comfortably, and perhaps even have some economic mobility (moving from middle-class to upper-middle, mainly...).

There weren't a lot of women there, and you would expect that what women were there would be disproportionately the kind of woman who would be interested in having a life-long career.

Just anecdotally, looking at peers who graduated with me, that is not the case. Many are married, and many have chosen to end their careers (where finances allow) to stay at home.

If anything, I would argue the main failing we've committed upon the young generation (regardless of gender) is to provide them an economic framework wherein more than a single-digit percent of wage earners can hope to raise a family on a single income.

In my experience, there are a growing number of men who wish they could be stay-at-home dads if finances permitted.

But instead, most households are dual-income out of necessity.

And beyond that, we've also demonized living with your parents pretty thoroughly, so people are hesitant to save money and get free childcare by living with their extended family.

Something else I want to mention is how poorly we've tailored the current world to making raising a family easier. Letting your kids go further than your lawn unsupervised is tantamount to child abuse now. Childcare is absurdly expensive, low-quality, low-availability (enrollment is headcount-capacity-limited in most places) and low-flexibility (many places either want your full-time enrollment or not at all. You can't just pick some days).

And we've also demonstrated that we're, as a system, willing to totally f** over parents when disasters strike. Covid has been a total disaster for dual-income families with children. I've heard it was not uncommon for it to be "lucky" a partner was laid off because otherwise they would've had to quit, without unemployment benefits, to care for kids full-time.

Anyway, my point is, we've made it really fucking inconvenient to have kids and now there's all this overly-simplistic sexist whinging from a certain segment of the population about how it's somehow all the fault of young women. It's disgusting both from a moral standpoint and in how intellectually lazy it is.

The thing is, if you didn't integrate Stripe, you'd either be:

1. integrating someone else who does roughly the same thing as Stripe 2. integrating with and maintaining 100's of individual payment methods and countries, and dealing with tons of entities and managing relationships with them.

You might be able to cheat if you just do visa cards and only in the US, or something. But that is dramatically less than what you're getting when you integrate Stripe.

It punishes smaller transactions unfairly, which doesn't make a lot of sense since the size of the dollar amount probably doesn't have anything to do with the incremental cost to stripe to compute the tax bill.

It's worth noting that there's the interchange fees that come along with using a credit card in the US aren't just a pure profit rake for the credit card companies.

It obviously pays for computing resources and staffing and such, but beyond that it also, roughly, pays for all the fraud that happens with any credit card. In many cases, when someone does a fraud, it's someone "in the middle" (i.e. not the fraudster, the card holder, or the merchant) who ends up holding the bag.

It's also paying for some aggregate amount of credit risk that card users pose to their banks.

Credit card fees are high because fraud is such a colossal problem, and at various levels it's better for institutions to just eat costs (and thus slightly raise the minimum viable price they can charge for processing) than make it harder for people to buy things.

Ah, so nothing technical.

[I don't do Android, but, ] isn't Google trying to kinda pivot to Kotlin?

I did a 6 to 8 migration at $lastjob. The upgrade was smooth except for 2 issues:

* It exposed a kernel panic bug in our Linux kernel when Hadoop applications de-allocated huge amounts of RAM at once (e.g. a Spark program with a 100GB heap exiting suddenly would panic the system)

* It introduced a weird UI behavior change in Swing in one of our desktop apps. In fairness, whoever wrote the app first did some weird unnecessary shit with JComboBoxes, but it was still somewhat odd to me that the behavior changed. The bug was like, when previously if you clicked a box it'd swap it out for a JComboBox that had the previous content of the non-combobox-view-thingy that was in its place. On 8, for some reason it would always be blank and discard the old content. Don't quote me on this description, though. It was a while ago and it was a weird interaction regardless.

So, idk. It's always something. Software, eh?

Where does the article mention a website-blocking system? I'm curious as to the technical details. I'm sure it'll work this time.

"For Canada to have an innovative and flourishing digital economy, we must protect copyright online"

Hrmph. Citation required.

Anyway, I'm not sure why businesses are so concerned about copyright still. Maybe this is specific to Canada? But country-specific things aside:

* The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I've seen to a good tracker going mainstream.

* Steam has already shown how to "best" piracy to the extent that a business can. It's not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won't work in Russia. That aged well.

* Actually combating piracy on a technical level suffers greatly from the 80/20 rule. You can eliminate 80% of the piracy with 20% of the effort. But getting that last 20% is going to take 1000% of the remaining 80% of the work. (Sorry, yes, that was an attempt at a joke). It's basically not going to happen. Look at how well things like optical media DRM have gone. Look at how streaming DRM is going. Look at how hard it is for even *China* to stop its people from accessing free information online, much less normal countries with normal amounts of human rights abuses stop people from getting downloads of whatever Disney's latest remake is.

Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it's hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint.

Confession: For a long time I didn't really think movements like these were necessary. "Why does it have to be for group X? Why not just have it open to everyone?" I still see a lot of sentiment like that on the internet. I felt like they were themselves racist.

I've slowly come around. I understand now why things like this program aren't racist, why they exist, and why the people they target can uniquely benefit from outreach. Moreover, I don't think I understand enough the struggles that underrepresented groups go through, and the fact that I'm oblivious to them is part of my own privileged upbringing (white, male, middle class, suburbs, nuclear family, single income, etc).

I think I still have a long ways to go, and one thing I've been thinking about is how I can try to capture the worldview that I used to have while I was in the "this isn't a problem, stop posting about it/i'm tired of reading about it" camp and thus use it to explain to people who are still stuck in it. The only reason I think I came to understand is because a dear friend of mine gradually explained it to me in a way that I understood.

Anyway, while I was writing this, lots of low-quality comments have come and been deleted, so I feel like it's worth hitting post. I can't eloquently and convincingly articulate why things like this are needed yet, especially to an already-convinced-otherwise audience, but maybe someone else can.

Legacy uses and a smattering of personal preference.

Perl was hugely productive in its day, when alternatives were either non-existent or extremely nascent (Python and Ruby) or things like C, C++, Java, or Bash. You can probably imagine how writing Perl was fun for script-y tasks when compared to doing it in those languages. So, it has a large legacy presence and isn't going anywhere.

Plus there's a few people for whom it is muscle memory, and IME muscle memory can easily beat out language niceness/appropriateness for productivity in personal things.

Disclaimer: I was born in the early 90's so I was learning long division during Perl's glory days. My perspective is mostly from working in a large Perl codebase that was born in those years and talking with the people who chose Perl for said codebase.

I think the difference is that he's directing his question to us, and not to the person in question?

I think it's fair, in this day and age, to ask if there's corroborating evidence for the contents of a tweet/article.

Sea Lioning, I think, is a lot more about antagonizing/bullying a victim who is speaking up about about whatever act victimized them, while disguising your bullying as being a good-faith investigation into their claims. When it's actually in bad faith, and your intent is primarily to increase the "cost" to victims of bringing forth their complaints.

That's probably fair. I was in high school during that period. I've mostly only ever known the Java owned by Oracle, where it seemed... reasonably kept? Java 8 happened under Oracle, after all.

I worked with Java from 2009 until now. I can't account for the 01-09 timespan, but I'd say the big gap between say java 1.5 and 1.8 was less about stagnation and more about letting other languages feel things out. I like that Java is never too far ahead or too far behind.

I do think the "hip" side of tech has started to warm back up to Java, both as the language adopts some of the niceties that python/ruby/kotlin/scala/etc have shown are quite ergonomic and also as the community, I think, warms back up to the idea that static typing can be net helpful and that maybe a good JIT compiler is nice too.

I've had good results with the react-rails gem, basically letting me plop bits of react into a rails view. It's not like, the best the in the world from a pure design standpoint? But it does a really, really good job of not having react step on the toes of all the super nice things that Rails will do for you.

I'd argue that options trading is worse than gambling. At least the one-armed bandit only gives the house a slight statistical edge.

Option traders - real ones, mind you - are sophisticated armies of statistics PhD's. I suspect their statistical advantage over Robinhood option warriors is probably a lot more than "slight".

I don't get why this is specifically directed at gratis/free software, though. It's not like commercial software is much better. I spent a lot of time in the beginning of my career punching extremely expensive proprietary software into submission. Things like Solidworks, Autocad, Windows itself, nvidia drivers, various scientific/engineering programs, circuit designing programs, etc.

Tons of extremely expensive licensed software, with expensive support contracts, and we still spent a ton of time and wrote a ton of Perl to punch them into a shape that worked on our very vanilla installs of Windows 7 enterprise. Contacting anyone's support was invariably an absolute fucking joke of an endeavor. We literally only ever did it when we were sick and tired of bashing our heads against their shitty software and wanted to shelf the project for a week or two to recover our sanity while their support "looked into it" and "escalated our ticket" or whatever.

My experience with whether software was more like Stripe or more like a piano sitting on the sidewalk is that it completely depends on the company's attitude. Either they care that people be able to actually use their software, or they don't. I've seen both huge corporate products and small free software projects that both clearly do not care much about whether someone can get their program working easily.

And I've also seen both paid software and free software that care immensely about getting you started and keeping you going.

I think I've seen people I'd describe similar to the way you describe yourself.

Disclaimer: I think you sound to be quite a bit better than the 2 people I'm about to describe. Just to be clear.

Both people, lots of experience: 30+ years (while me and peers are not even 30 years old) and yet we look at their code (when asked to make changes, or we find a bug, etc) and it's like... We couldn't even write code like that if we tried for, e.g., an April Fool's joke. There's just way too much commitment to doing things dreadfully for it to be possible to be a joke. 1-3 character variable names, huge blocks of code copy/pasted, redundant hard-coded constants, bizarre abuse of scope, resistance to using functions and classes to split up code, god-classes and 5000-line functions when they do get used, etc etc.

And I never felt like their main issue was that they're "bad engineers" or "too old" or anything. It was that they were:

1. completely unapologetic 2. showed absolutely no interest in changing 3. extremely resistant to any process changes that would hold them accountable for code quality (like doing code reviews or using a linter or CI build process)

I think they'd mainly gotten away with just writing crap code for so long that they didn't want to have to change, or had internalized it as "I just write the code plainly, without using tons of layers of functions and classes and stuff". And don't mistake this as someone being woke in a herd of people building big towering oop abstraction factories. That job never got anywhere close to having too much abstraction in the code. People were always way over at the "low abstraction" side of the spectrum. There was no ORM use, no dependency injection frameworks, no unit testing and nothing was testable (because making code testable requires encapsulating and abstracting things into units, yknow), etc.

So I'd say the fact that you understand, have the humility to admit it, and want to do something to change are the biggest issues out of the way.

If they're thinking pure CPU benchmarking, prime95/mprime has several options, such as:

[this is from my recollection]

* completely in-register only, no caches. they warn an organic workload will never ever do this and not to do it if you're not confident in your cooling * somewhat more normal math-heavy workloads that don't do any IO but also do access the caches like a normal person * etc

The python benchmark might be fair, though? I wouldn't be surprised if the ARM chip on the pi is like, fast, but then when it came to doing something more holistic - like a bunch of python vm operations - something about the mac is more robust than the pi in a significant way.

I became a software engineer because CS was the only class in school that has ever, ever genuinely interested me at a deep, fundamental curiosity level. It's definitely something about the fact that the work is about the closest you can get to getting paid to be a logician. My second favorite class in school was of course the Symbolic Logic class I took in college, which was extremely amusing to me since I was the only CS major in the class, yet by the end of it I think all the other students had a better grasp of programming than like 50% of CS majors.

(This was a philosophy credit that was completely elective - people only really had 1-2 slots for these "Elective: Any" kinds of classes since most of your electives were like "Elective: Chemistry" or something like that. So people in these kinds of classes purely self-selected. Most people just took one of the well-known blow-off classes, which honestly I don't fault them for, this wasn't an easy school).

Unfortunately for us, nature and evolution "solving problems" frequently involves us all just dying and/or Earth spending a long period of time as a magma ocean and then several aeons as a hot rock.

Ah I missed that he was selling calls for stocks he owns. That makes it even less interesting IMO? The premiums on these options are small enough and now you're also capping upside on stocks you already own. And remember that black swan events happen once a month in finance, so I think people would be surprised how far OTM they need to go to actually get to a "minimal" risk of them being ITM.

OTM options is one of those things where it works great until it doesn't and then when it doesn't it REALLY doesn't. This is almost literally how we ended up with the inverse volatility trade collapse in 2018. Look up "XIV blow up".

Betting against volatility will *never* not be "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller".

Retail investors should not touch options under any circumstances, anyway. They're hedging tools for institutions and cannon fodder for day traders.

EDIT: I missed that the OP was saying to sell options for stocks already in your portfolio. I'll address that now:

I feel like this makes it even less worthwhile? Remember, black swan events happen once a month in trading. I think people would be really surprised at how far OTM they need to go to truly get to a "minimal" risk of their options being assigned. At which point the premiums are going to truly be pennies. If you're making any interesting amount of money off of a covered trade like this, it's because you're taking on an interesting amount of risk.

I dunno, I see where they're coming from. Someone once asked me what it's like being me, and my off-the-cuff semi-joke response was "sometimes coding isn't fun and I have to play video games to have fun, and other times video games aren't fun and I have to code to have fun."

So there's definitely a tide-goes-in, tide-goes-out flow to this for some people. I've learned to embrace it. When coding makes the serotonin flow, I get a lot done. And when video games gets the job done, I experience a lot of new stories and ideas.

Right now we're in the video game part of the phase. Valheim. It got me good.

I think it's a combination of:

* extremely, extremely thin margins

* in general, users are pretty low-discretion, which makes it hard to meaningfully differentiate your product

* deeply entrenched competition (what % of laptops are sold at best buy/etc?)

* the users who are high-discretion are going to be extremely demanding users. They're going to nitpick over small details in both hardware and software. And they're probably going to be installing their own OS (or at least reinstalling the existing one) and will generally be more demanding of both product design and support. Also, they probably have the tech skills to correctly point the finger at you when it's your fault. Whereas less discerning users might just go "Ugh bill gates!"

Doesn't help that the "linux laptop" niche was probably a big part of this "niche laptop" market segment and Dell and Lenovo are both kinda warming back up to that niche. e.g. the newest XPS's all work great on (latest kernel) linux.

A penny a stream is honestly way more than "a play" of music has cost. I'll admit I'm off the beaten path with how I do music but this is my setup:

1. I buy the CD release of music because I like to collect them, and the art is cool (I listen to folk metal and they usually do some cool stuff with album art and the front of the CD).

2. I rip them to FLACs and store them on my plex server

3. I stream them to my phone/etc.

So I'm really used to paying something like... {cost of cd} / {lifetime play count}. Which honestly is probably a lot higher than what a single stream of music earns the artists but a lot lower than 1c per play.

Just as an example, let's take Sonic Firestorm by Dragonforce. I probably started listening in 2007 or so. 14 years. I listened to the entire CD probably at least 3 times a week for the entirety of high school. So 4 years of high school times 52 weeks a year times 3 plays a week times 9 tracks per play is 5616. I'd guess I paid 12 bucks for the CD (it's 10 on amazon right now). So that's 0.00214 dollars per play. And that's just high school. Though admittedly that's one of my favorite albums, but I do think Alestorm and Ensiferum and several other bands are up in that play count too for my 4 years of college.

And I don't think many bands want to make the argument of "yeah but we're one of those bands you're gonna buy our CD for 12 bucks and listen to 3 times and then we end up in the back of your CD holder because every time you flip through you're like 'nah not really feeling them right now' for weeks on end".

So... I dunno. I'm all for paying artists more. But I would really prefer the way we do that is decrease the (massive) cut that goes to the labels and send more to the artists.

I've been buying my CDs on bandcamp as much as I can recently because as I understand it, bands capture a lot more of that sticker price that way. At least it seems like they do. I get CDs from residential addresses in Norway, anyway.

No, I think this is the same way in much of the US. Millionaires are just skilled labor around age 35-40 (depending on a lot ofc). And you're going to need about 4x that to retire, depending on the kind of lifestyle you want.

It's expensive as hell to do the whole "2.5 kids, a house, and 2.5 college tuitions" thing while still having a life of your own.

I also realize this comes from a place of privilege (many people can't even really expect to ever retire, much less retire comfortably or lavishly).

The middle class has really eroded away to basically not having any lower or middle segment. You're either working poor (whether you self-identify that way or not) or you're upper-middle-class (where you might start to externally seem "rich" but if you lose your job you still have to find another one pretty fast.)