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I searched for Operation Safe Pilot, and it looks like they matched up aviation medical clearances with social security disability claims, not with general medical records. If you're claiming for a disability, there's something seriously wrong and you shouldn't be flying, or you're lying about the disability and committing social security fraud. Am I missing anything?

FWIW, I've seen a lot of material promoting heat pumps in colder climates.

The pretentious tone seemed to gently mock the readers and the perceived elitist nature of the New Yorker, rather than the monster truck enthusiasts, so more like the show Frasier, rather than the self-awareness lacking titular character within the show.

The idea that React 10 years ago is the same as React today seems to be highly oversimplified. React was simple, then hooks were added, and state management fads that turned something simple and intuitive into an IQ signalling exercise. At least that was the case when I switched to back-end only dev a couple of years ago. And of course other parts of the stack also keep evolving: TypeScript (which is probably a positive, but again, I know people who do bizarre things with the language to build their "nerd cred").

Off the top of my head there was also Grunt/Gulp/Webpack/whatever is around now. NPM-Yarn->NPM. Angularjs->Angular 2.0+.

How many different CSS positioning methods are there? (that's what led me to leaving front-end, I was expected to do a pixel-perfect rendering of a design for a time-critical back-office app for some reason).

On the other hand newly minted accounts (a few months old) seem to be getting involved in arcane things by nominating articles for deletion, despite having flimsy edit histories and limited experience on Wikipedia, possibly to build credibility for adminship in future. A worst case scenario is that the long-in-the-tooth admins finally let go, and these dodgy noobs gain adminship.

I've kept a clean sheet over a multi-decade editing career, so I can't be dismissed as a crank who doesn't understand the project, but there needs to be some sort of reform.

In any case, most people are born into a religion and have no real choice in the matter. They acquire various markers of their religion (a name for example) from their parents. You seem to think it’s a personal choice, but for the vast majority of people that’s not the case.

In the context of the person whose resume was rejected, he was not considered for the job based on his name and his educational history, which marked him as a Muslim. Even if we accept your argument that religious practice is a choice that can be discriminated against, there is no indication that he actually was a practicing Muslim (I don’t know if he was) he was rejected, sight unseen, because of those markers.

Fortunately you don’t make the law. But, regardless, he not only violated company policy and also broke the law, his “personal preferences” put a large program of work at risk.

You leave your prejudices at the door and hire the best people for the job: one of the fundamental rules for (non-f*d) businesses.

So no, I’m not going to engage with it.

EDIT: it looks like you’re from India, so you may not be aware of this. In most western countries engaging in workplace discrimination based on religion would get you into serious trouble, and quite likely fired. Not only is it illegal, it’s bad for business (losing a potentially valuable senior staff member because they’re the “wrong religion” has seriously hurt our project). Your reaction is quite telling though.

The article also brushes up against caste, but doesn't explore the role of caste networks in tech.

If that's the "bridge to the west" that India is pushing, I hope some of those tendencies are stamped out, hard.

It's interesting how much Americans venerate the founders. At the same time, I recall that no less a conservative jurist than Antonin Scalia thought that they made a mistake by making the constitution too hard to amend: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/how_scalia_and_ginsb... ("Scalia said fewer than 2 percent of the population could prevent enactment of a constitutional amendment. “It ought to be hard, but not that hard")

As an outsider, especially looking at how powerful the Supreme Court has become so both sides can read a seemingly inflexible document in a way that suits their purposes, did the founders foresee this?

The iPhone X seems to have aged a lot better than the iPhone 8, which it was released alongside, but it looks like Apple's decided to kill both off at the same time.

How much of this math gap is because other countries focus heavily on test prep and exam performance?

My spouse works in early childhood education and they use ChatpGPT routinely for low-value boilerplate stuff (social media posts that no one reads, etc).

A relative is in commercial real-estate management, and they also use ChatGPT routinely (in fact they started using it before I did).

So I don't think it's an echo chamber.

Could the decline in test scores be related to a shift im how schools approach these tests?

I think those horrible, noisy environments would have led to a backlash sooner rather than later. Now any complaints about open plan offices will just be dismissed as people whining about not being able to WFH.

The difference may be that once a particular back-end approach/architecture/design is adopted by a dev shop it remains stable over multiple projects. I’ve seen this in both consulting and in LOB roles. Because of this, I can hire a competent .NET developer and be confident that I can get them to be productive relatively quickly, since the foundation on which we write our code is stable, and I can invest in enhancing the developer experience to support them. In fact, an explicit criterion for every project in my teams is that we make it easy enough for any competent C# developer to ideally be able to open a small, but meaningful PR by the end of their first day on a project (if needed, I don’t treat it as a retention gate or anything!). They do have to adapt to our infrastructure and our ways of working, they don’t need to relearn the fundamentals of how to produce code.

Whereas every time a new front-end project starts, there’s a near-compulsion to use the latest and greatest techniques. Everyone has to catch up, because of their previous experience being somewhat redundant. No one can invest in improving things for other developers, because they don’t have the time, and because any investment would be wasted, since it would be redundant beyond the current project (or two, if we’re lucky).

I can’t really hire an Angular developer for a React project that starts tomorrow, and expect them to be reasonably productive immediately, despite them being competent in Typescript, CSS, Node etc. Heck, I wouldn’t even be able to hire a React developer who last did it 5 years ago, and expect them to be immediately productive.

It isn’t only front-end developers who are prone to this: 20 years ago, before FP became a mainstream thing, being able to do pointer arithmetic was seen as the differentiator between a “smart programmer” and a “bad programmer” (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...).

Was React great and fun to work with? Yes, but then Redux came along and made something simple into something stilted. Our team used Mobx instead, which was simpler IIRC.

Similarly it’s been a couple of years, but I remember React Hooks being a bit complicated for the value we got out of them.

Ultimately, it’s hard to tell if something is an improvement, or a time suck to allow the elites to stand out. I stopped playing the game and stepped away from front-end development, as have many of my experienced colleagues.

I’m assuming things have settled as Big Tech focusses on profitability rather than funding an endless parade of frameworks, and the IQ-signalling will become less prevalent as generative AI competes with the brainiacs. When that happens, I’ll dip my toes back in the world of front-end development.

https://web.archive.org/web/20011212191924/https://www.googl...