imagist

People with expertise in the area, ideally.

I'm not sure what you mean by "this will never be viable". If you mean that many content providers' businesses will never be viable without ads, good. Content providers that serve advertisers rather than their users should go out of business. That would be a great benefit to humanity if content was geared toward the needs of humans rather than companies.

Everything anyone does is their decision. That doesn't put them above criticism. Lots of people make shitty decisions.

That's a false dichotomy. The options aren't advertising or astroturfing (which is just advertising). My goal is to not look at ads, be they pop-ups or sponsored Reddit posts.

It's true that companies won't be able to saturate markets quickly without ads, but I'm not sure why we want that. I'd rather see small businesses grow slowly based on the quality of their products than see companies with the best advertising grow, crushing competitors with better products. Every dollar spent on advertising is a dollar not spent on developing a good product.

By searching for things we want instead of waiting for things other people want us to want to be shoved in our faces.

Just because someone is a hypocrite doesn't mean they're wrong. Nobody lives up to their ideals perfectly.

But that's not what he's doing. The entire purpose of advertising is to put ideas in your head--that's invasive. That's not changing the definitions of words, that's what those words mean in common parlance.

Not only is Erlang's and Haskell's threading model unlike async/await, but Erlang's threading model is unlike Haskell's. So I'm just not sure what you're taking about.

This something I've realized about my own impostor syndrome: the people who are most likely to knock me down a peg when I'm being overconfident are the only ones I trust when they compliment me. If you only ever hear positive things from someone, you can't trust that what they say is true.

Employee-owned cooperatives sidestep this issue pretty well by empowering workers. I don't know of any entire economies, though.

> It's 2016 and there are many well documented and widely adopted solutions arising from external libraries and developments in ECMAScript.

"Solutions" is a strong word for what's available in JavaScript. Promise hell isn't better than callback hell, it's just horrible in slightly different situations. To make matters worse, it seems that many JS libraries have just wrapped the old callbacks in promises, meaning that we end up using promises in situations where a callback would actually be easier (because that's how it was originally written).

None of this comes close to the ease of threads in Erlang.

> The most talented and senior engineers looked up from their desks and noticed the company was no longer the one they loved.

This is well-worded. The problem for these execs wasn't that the company was no longer a good place for engineers. The problem was that the engineers noticed.

Don't be the engineer who doesn't notice their job sucks until they start charging for soda. By that point you've been working for a terrible company for a long time.

Incidentally, the office of IBM I worked at a decade ago had free sodas.

I'm not proposing you shouldn't work hard, and I don't work for a large enterprise. I'm unsure how you got that from what I said.

Eh, it's not all that big of a problem of you know how to deal with it (protect your own interests, not the company's, by making conservative choices as I described above).

I work 35 hours a week, make $125k/year, have good benefits, like most of my coworkers, and am doing relatively interesting work for a company that isn't completely evil. Sure, my boss can scapegoat me if I let him make technical decisions, but I don't. That's a tradeoff I'm okay with. I'm always on the lookout for something better but I'm happy where I am.

And besides, most people who think their bosses won't scapegoat them if something goes wrong are naive. If it's your job or theirs and they have the power, you're screwed. It's better to avoid the risk and not put yourself in that situation.

To be clear, I'm not saying don't take risks. I'm saying wroth risks on your own behalf.

This works if you trust your manager to take responsibility for the decision, which you often (usually?) can't.

If you can't trust your manager to take responsibility for the decision, then it's better to make a decision you're going to be held accountable for than to let your manager make the decision and then hold you accountable.

I've seen other engineers in the position where they give a risk analysis and warning in writing, and then shit hits the fan and they get fired. Maybe it doesn't happen immediately, maybe the reason they were fired isn't explicit, but the change in the manager's attitude toward the engineer traces back to when they did what the manager said.

There are also mangers who won't follow through on the tech debt part because they don't trust their engineers even if their engineers are trustworthy. When they discover that they can bypass testing by pulling the emergency lever, they'll start pulling it all the time because they see it as a way to get what those lazy engineers to do their jobs faster. And when tech debt catches up with you, bugs abound, and development slows to a crawl, the engineers get blamed.

Maybe you have a boss you can trust to take responsibility for their risky decisions. Maybe your boss trusts you when you say that paying down tech debt is necessary. But maybe your boss and their boss don't have the same relationship, and the shit rolls down hill.

Yes, I want to work in a trusting environment where my interests are aligned with doing what's best for my company, but an at-will employment capitalist economy doesn't always work that way. It's every man for himself at a fundamental level, and exceptions to that are too rare to make a blanket claim that people should just do what's best for their company.

To some extent, but the bigger factor is that it also selects for obedient employees.

Your efficiency doesn't matter to most execs if they don't control it.

Why? Can you describe the dangers you're thinking of?

You can't claim the scientific high ground based on how things "strike you".

I absolutely would say that if you can come up with an experiment that has reasonable risk, some connection to your cancer, and has measurable effects or lack of effects, you should go for it.

Good luck finding an experiment that fits those criteria for cancer, though.

Pulling an all-nighter to see its effects on your depression fits all that. It's low-risk: it doesn't interfere with your doctor's orders and plenty of people have survived all-nighters without ill effects. It's connected to depression in that it affects the brain, which we believe to be connected to depression. And it has measurable effects or lack of effects in that you can take stock of your mood at intervals after doing it.

There is nothing unscientific about anecdotes. The problem with anecdotes isn't that they are unscientific, it's that the scientific claims they allow you to make are very, very small.

Anecdotally, I've found that Vitamin D3 helps me with motivation. That's a very small claim, but it's a scientific claim because I've experimented extensively with supplements to improve my motivation. However, "I've found that Vitamin D3 helps people with motivation" would not be a scientific claim, because I've only experimented on myself, and don't have enough evidence to extrapolate to the rest of humanity.

Personal experimentation is a useful tool. It's how we know our personal preferences, fears, and hangups, which nobody else can tell us. Applying scientific process to it allows us to avoid some of our biases. We just have to be careful not to extrapolate our results to other people.

Yeah, I did too.

I just don't understand the obsession with configuration oriented programming these days. Sure, it looks nice for common paths, but as soon as you're doing anything they don't have an option for, you have to write code just like before. But now the choice toy have to write is some awful hack bolted on to the side of your configuration. It's a mess.

In practical terms, are there even many cases where cycles are desirable? The only case I can think of is threads (two threads communicating with each other). Most cycles I have seen even in GC'd languages were bad designs.

1. You are correct about the potential for long term damage. However the evidence I have seem indicates the permanent damage is due to neurotoxicity while the serotonin is depleted, while the serotonin depletion itself is temporary. Contrary to other posts here, the serotonin depletion can last in the order of 2 years, however, although this is usually in extreme cases.

2. When speaking about potential for abuse, it's worth making a distinction between drugs which cause dependency and/or chemical craving, and drugs that don't. You can develop habits without dependence or craving, but that can apply to almost anything, and is much less of an indicator that the thing is harmful. MDMA certainly had Prentiss for habitual use, usually as part of a multiple-drug-abuse condition, but in and of itself does not have dependence or craving properties.

At least in the US, there's a strong investor preference for growth stocks. This often drives companies to keep trying to increase revenue from saturated markets rather than stepping back reinvestment and paying a dividend.

I don't understand this. What does the NDA have to do with who owns the code?

A better plan is to get paid up front. At least partially.

Low-quality diamonds can be manufactured more cheaply than the synthetic diamonds intended to compete with the jewel industry. I imagine this prove would come down with the scale batteries are manufactured at.

> Were there any alternatives? Because the fact that our efforts had an undesirable outcome does not mean our methods were bad. Heck, even the very best methods can lead to undesirable outcomes.

A more hard line stance on greenhouse gas emissions is an alternative. You can claim that this isn't a viable alternative, but viability is made by a majority trying.

I'm not just looking at outcomes. Ten years ago we knew that immediately halting greenhouse emissions wasn't enough to stop climate change, but there wasn't even a push to do that. We weren't even trying for desirable outcomes, so I don't think it's unreasonable to say our methods were bad.

> I feel that sometimes we expect that an acceptable outcomes is reachable. Sadly, it often isn't. A large part of my growing up has been realizing this.

You claim that taking a hard line stance for an acceptable outcome is unreachable, but the right has been making this work for years. They take an extreme right stance, even more extreme than they want, knowing that the left will compromise and the right will get what they want.

You can't claim that compromise is a winning strategy when over and over the left compromises and loses while the right takes hard line stances and wins.

> More to the point, the only real mistake I see environmentalism might have made is come in too hard in the middle. We needed to stir up the shit to get enough people on board. But after that, you need to calm down and get grinding on affecting change. Shooting down progressive action for 'not being good enough' is a great way of preventing progress.

History does not bear out this assertion.

Environmentalism is the quintessential example of why compromise doesn't work. Climate change is an existential threat to humanity and has only become more of a threat since the origins of the modern environmental movement. I'm not sure how you can represent a failure of this catastrophic magnitude as "tremendous gains".

That's because university economics courses are typically taught by economists with a vested interest in the continuation of rampant consumerism.