fatherzine

agreed! at small scale, we are persons engaged in meaningful relationships. at large scale, we are faceless cogs in the machine, numbers on a spreadsheet. being a faceless cog is dehumanizing, stripping our very identity away. how to reconcile the efficiencies brought by scale with the dehumanization it inflicts is a unique challenge for the technological society. I have yet to see a plausible answer.

"as long as people are just units inserted into well-defined slots, the machinery doesn't need to care who they are." -- nailed it

Unlikely it will ever get better. First to market with a prototype tool, gains market share and momentum. Eventually the enthusiasm fades off and people start hating it, for good and sometimes bad reasons. Yet users are stuck because change is expensive and risky. The team is stuck because any change risks becoming the straw that broke the camel's back, possibly cascading through the user population. Story of our young industry.

children are taught to eat with a spoon. to tie their shoelaces. to read. to write. to play sports. to play an instrument. to dance. to perform a job. it takes effort, but the rewards are worth it, primarily for the children themselves. same with weight control via exercise and diet. it's learnable, and teachable. we can do much better, while being neither judgmental, nor defeatist.

the ability to withstand temporary discomfort for a higher end is trainable. most people do not know any better, and telling them to not even try is rather not charitable.

possible, but uncomfortable -- nailed it. life is not supposed to be 100% comfortable. traditional spiritual practices bake in periods of discomfort for a reason.

1. sedentarism + unhealthy diet

2. magic pill

3. ???

4. profit!

"people had fewer than 3-4 hours per day to actually work" had the same experience. the unwritten expectation was to pull 8 hour coding days /plus/ all the Scrum overhead. if you don't like it, there's 1000 guys waiting to take your place, partly thanks to remote. a core reason we haven't fire you yet is that it is costly to ramp up new people, but don't try our patience.

see also "hire fast fire faster"

great look, decent code.

examples at https://penrose.cs.cmu.edu/try/?examples each example has three tabs:

    .substance => data
    .style => low level 2d vector art
    .domain => data ranges

heavy lifting done by .style, random fragment:

    forall repeatable Element a; Element b; Element c
    where IsProduct( a, b, c )
    {
       shape productShape = Rectangle {
          center: ( b.u, c.v )
          width: a.width - global.boxPadding
          height: a.height - global.boxPadding
          cornerRadius: 2.0
          fillColor: a.boxColor
       }

       shape productText = Equation {
          string: a.label
          center: productShape.center
          fontSize: "8px"
          fillColor: a.labelColor
       }
    }

on 4, the fun way of doing it is teaching / helping others doing it. coincidentally, that's the most common path to escape the toxic loop.

populations are governed the S-curve, which approximates an exponential in boom times. for humans, the exponent is biologically limited by the speed of raising children into reproductive adults, which is ~20-25 years.

financial and technological advances free us from traditional constraints, increasing productivity (wealth 1st derivative) faster than raw biology allows. the dark price is faster, larger boom / boost cycles. see eg the speed of adoption of technology, or the average lifespan of an S&P500 company.

the more removed an industry is from atoms, the higher the exponent, thus the perceived instability. alas, industries close to atoms don't pay that much. it's a tradeoff: low growth and stability + boring work and low pay, or high growth and instability + interesting work and high pay. the places you speak of are indeed havens, good luck finding one!

i generally agree with the sentiment, yet sadly this topic has been politicized. we apply partisan blinders depending on which political faction is perceived to have promoted a concrete course of action.

for one example, while i have been out of the loop on this one for a while, iirc the use of mechanical ventilators in early stages of the pandemic, by medically licensed personnel was tantamount to medical malpractice. establishment will never admit it, at the very least for legal liability reasons.

via a cursory search, see eg https://www.practiceupdate.com/content/chest-2021-mechanical...

our economic system is a scam to fleece populations by shifting value attribution from moving atoms to moving money. 'brightest' minds have a vested interest to keep the system going, after all it pays their bills.

Measure time-to-results = compile-time + execution-time, for jit/O0/O2/O3. Fairly basic.

there is more to life than economics

great points. thanks for the link, too. the abstract reads great, sadly the rest is paywalled.

That's a fun list. Random pet-peeve.

"Human ancestors almost went extinct 900,000 years ago. “A new technique analysing modern genetic data suggests that pre-humans survived in a group of only 1,280 individuals.”

Another interpretation is that there were always large numbers of hominids / humans alive at any point in the past 1M years. Rather the descendants of those 1,280 individuals out-breed and out-warred all other hominid / human groups.

"14% faster than LLVM -O0" is fairly misleading too. How does the generated code compare with LLVM -O2/-O3? These are SQL queries, which are usually fairly short programs, where I would presume the cost of compiling is negligible compared to the cost of execution.

the slogan is generic enough to cover anything from curl to jdbc. be more specific.

mistral

the system, as flawed as it is, is very effective for its purpose. see eg "success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration". on a darker side, the purpose is not to be fair to any particular individual, or even to be conducive to human flourishing at large.

spoiler alert: facebook was always about fakes

"new technology is disseminated quicker" as in "microbial dissemination"

build a paperclip optimizer

after wwii, vietnam, desert storm and the ongoing ukraine war, i have a sense that people vastly underestimate how much personnel and ordnance is necessary to wipe out the military capacity of a country with 100m inhabitants.

a realistic count probably starts at 1M boots on the ground, possibly 10M or more. even summoning all csgs for the task would only yield a force of ~75k personnel, which is one or two orders of magnitude too small. deployed half way around the world in a hostile region.

could us hurt their most valuable assets? for sure. wipe them out? not even close.

Don't Look Up

by users, worldwide

    JavaScript  17M
    Python      15M
    Java        14M
    PHP          8M    
    Go           3M
    =====
    Excel      750M

i have no beef in this argument, except to note that if one wants to study hunter-gatherer societies, one does not dig three rotten sticks from the ground and wildly extrapolates some cockamamy just-so story about the lives of that society that is 90% a reflection of the biases and pieties of the bureaucracy that is funding ones work. instead, one buys a ticket to Port Moresby, and hauls ones ass into the mountains on the horizon.

carry on.

ChatGPT. Gemini. We just don't know it yet.

100%

Very hard to turn down the volume as an individual actor. It's a social dilemma (sic). I remember a recent poll indicating students would pay for /others/ to use their devices less.

It is no random accident that the Church sees itself as the 'body of Christ'. That body, social fabric in modern parlance, is splintering at accelerating pace, thanks to digital comms -- thanks facebook. Uncharted rough waters for a social species like ourselves.

A good summary on X -- please ignore the tacky username. Similar sentiments in Gabor Mate's 'Hold on to your Kids'.

https://twitter.com/TheBrometheus/status/1725303595908628684

"Most people use therapy the way humans are meant to connect with our 5 safety net systems, which we retained even up to 100 years ago:

Immediate family

Extended family (kin)

Family friend network (kith)

Local community

Religious community

All 5 are now broken."