finitemonkey

> Having roommates in late 30s out of necessity rather than choice

1. It's not as bad as you describe it. Not for tech workers, at least. Please go to the lady working at Walmart and ask her about her income and living arrangements before you rany abouy $300k a year.

2. Of course it's by choice. Nobody is forced to live in SF or the bay area. Especially not people in tech.

Tou might want to check what the difference between mean and marginal tax rate is. For somebody with a lifestyle in which $162k a year is considered "barey livable" that should be sth very easy to understand.

>save up money for parental elderly care

Sorry, what? Your parents? I can see that paying for 3 generations on one income can be hard.

Oh yeah. The media. How convenient. Nobody would have an interest in this if it wasn't for "the media" pushing for a story.

He's still busy microchipping everybody in the west, you know..

At age 19, you can disconnect from your parents if they do dumb things you don't agree with and drag yourself down. Quite literally in this case.

It can impact your life financially, i.e., he might have faced foregoing an inheritance and heaving to build wealth himself instead of relying on the billions of his dad. But that's his choice, so don't relieve him from his own responsibility. He wasn't 5.

> It's like climbing Everest,

They died close to the shipwreck. Maybe the Titanic site will slowly fill up with corpses, just like Everest is doing.

> Of course all lives should be regarded as being equal.

Lives sure. But not deaths. Bringing yourself in a confirmed dangerous situation just for the thrill of it, even being so desperate for it as to pay what post people would dream of earning over multiple years, and then dying during this adventure ... in contrast to desperate refugees trying to escape into a better life and then dying because traffickers don't care about their survival.. Idk man, doesn't sound equal to me.

Most of those refugees were trapped to. They were locked in and then the thing capsized.

But they didn't go to watch a shipwreck sunken long ago for some entertainment. They tried to cross over to Europe out of desperation for a better life. Much better to fill the news cycle with the rich dudes.

> likely brains of people in subordinate positions syncing with brains of people in dominate positions might have advantage surviving an organized social structures through human history than not.

"Likely"? It's possible, but do you have any evidence for this? There could easily be other explanations and to determine something as likely needs more than a feeling of it making sense.

In earlier times, people thought it's "likely" that if you have a disease then it would help by getting rid of a lot of blood. That made sense, blood carries lots of things, and making fresh blood surely must help recovering. Turns out, nope, people die quicker from blood letting.

Don't worry, the post-truth age is coming will full speed toward us.

> On the other hand, knowing the complexity of all algorithms and blindly assuming "good complexity = good performance" while never checking is a recipe for desaster.

Exactly. That's the difference between an actual education and having looked up some Big-O notation on Wikipedia.

> They said “basically,” so no need to nitpick.

The inflationary use of "infinite" especially in tech crowds that should know better deserves pushback.

There are models of computation that actually model infinite computation. A well-studied one is Büchi automata, basically a generalization of finite state automata to infinite sequences.

> And I’m not sure about unbounded; surely it is bounded by a suitable exponential function?

Nope. You can nest them and for any function that you give you can produce a RE that takes longer than that function to evaluate. (That's literally what "unbounded" means. There is no bound. Doesn't mean it's "infinite". All those computations terminate, which is literally what "finite" means in this context.)

> Kudos to them for trying, even if they're dead.

A kid jumps from a cliff and dies. Thought it could fly (by some quirk of nature perhaps). Turns out, not true. Died on impact. Kudos for trying? Hardly. It's a bad idea. No matter if the outcome is not a total disaster by sheer luck.

Apollo 1 has been too long ago. Collective memory fades. Each generation seems to need its own disasters to keep its safety standards up.

> and now they are incredibly powerful but can take basically infinite memory and time.

Which is why the "RE" in the article is excrutiatingly slow, given that it needs to perform insane amounts of backtracking. In contrast, "real" regular expression checkers run in linear time.

Also, nitpicking, but they take unbounded time. It's still finite.

> The machine I'm using to type this comment is also a finite state machine, as due to having non-infinite memory, it also cannot count arbitrarily high.

Right. And if you really want to push that argument further then there are numbers for which your machine can't decide whether they are prime or not. Most of them, in fact, i.e., for all but a finite number of primes and non-primes, your machine can't tell.

For the theory of computability, this is not a useful model. Neither for complexity theory. Statements like "My machine can sort in constant time" which is arguably true but not useful either. It only holds up to a certain collection size which in a sense makes it both nonsensical and useless. Even concepts like the Chomsky hierarchy with context free languages being one of the prominent components make little sense as long as your computational model is finite state.

Instead, we model them as unbounded, to be able to differentiate between classes of computation problems as well as reason about complexity. The Turing Machine is one of the simple and elegant models, but there are others for other purposes.

I wish that basic education about the theory of computation would stress more why theory treats things like this, to avoid this kind of confusion. (And then people would need to take those classes as well, and not just claim they can write React apps just fine without a degree.)