14 karma · joined December 28, 2019
You don't need to look further than Maslow's hierarchy of needs to see why, when you don't have enough money to reliably fulfill some of the most fundamental needs like shelter and food, it's going to severely hinder your self actualization. Forget about moving on to the more psychological higher-level needs when you are worrying about where you are going to sleep tonight. It's easy to understand why happiness might be very hard to reach for individuals who don't have enough money to cover their basic needs
That aside, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by social credit, but in some communities the creators of hacks and cheats(at least the people making fun, constructive cheats - not aimbots and the like) are highly esteemed. They are regarded somewhere alongside competitive players/speedrunners but in a more shadowy background roll(which many people may find cooler/more valuable). They also tend to have universal support among the community rather than being on one team or the other like, for example, tournament players.
This is all true in the communities I've witnessed at least, I don't play many esport type games though.
In monster hunter, the speedrunning community is migrating to PC because the ability to use cheats to negate the huge amount of RNG present in the game. Cheating is usually looked down on by speedrunners for obvious reasons but because of the difficulty of speedrunning a game with so much RNG(not rng that effects your gameplay, but that effects your ability to play at all), modders are basically making a new game with the rng removed and people are speedrunning that, and it's widely accepted as necessary by the community.
So cheating is often just a means of either getting something new out of a game or 'fixing' aspects of a game that the community takes issue with.
I agree that players like you describe, who's main goal is griefing other players, also make up a large portion of cheaters, just wanted to further elaborate on your response that not all cheaters are doing it to 'move up the leaderboard'
I make 75k and save almost half my income while having all the material items that I want. Granted I don't want a lot, but I actually believe quite strongly that not having that constant desire for more and nicer material items makes me much happier than those who are stuck in that cycle.
Not to sound douchy but I think that kind of materialism that is so extremely common across all levels of society seems to me like such an enormous and obvious problem that most people fall into for some reason regardless of how smart they are, and they would almost all be significantly happier just not caring about such sh*t. It's a crutch and prevents people from finding real meaning and happiness and for most it lasts their whole life or at least until they are too old to change.
I know this isn't a novel idea, any slightly rebellious teenager can and will point out the obvious harm of this kind of mindset, but that only makes people disregard it even more. It's such an obvious problem, and most people even agree when you point it out, but then those same people live out the rest of their lives without doing anything about it.
I blame social pressure and peoples tendency to not wander to far from the norm, combined with some conditioning and of course the addiction-mimicking dopamine effects
The depends on the question. You can compare Buddhism and Christianity in many ways, each with their own score. Are you saying 'which one is better for humanity'? Or 'which one will make my stoner friends think I'm rad?'?
if you were to compare which one has done more good/bad for humanity, than the score would be how much good or bad each one has done for humanity. You may say Buddhism improves the lives of it's adherents about twice as much as christianity on average. But Christianity has 20x as many adherents. But but Christianity is responsible for 10000x more deaths... etc. Then you just need to decide on the value of 'improving a persons life X amount' compared to 'killing X number of people' and do the math.
Of course, you typically don't get to the level of assigning numerical values to human life when forming your opinions most of the time. That's just the explanation of how these things are quantitatively 'scored' to try and answer your question - in practice it's a much more guesstimation-based system.
I agree that such a metric exists which is the same as the desired outcome. Such a metric does, in fact, exist. The metric IS the desired outcome. The problem comes when you try to write a generic, reusable formula that describes the desired outcome and attempt to implement a system that teams can use to apply the metric to their work. It ends up being effectively impossibly complex to create the formula, and even if you could create it, it would take longer it than it would to write the software that it's supposed to measure.
What we're left with is 'the best that we can do', and that's what we have been doing. We absolutely COULD make more accurate(yet still very imperfect) metrics that more closely model the actual goals of a project by simply including more factors(bugs, readability of code, difficulty of feature, size of feature/LOC, number of modules/classes that the code spans or communicates with in some way, how easy-to-read and easy-to-modify the existing code that needs to be altered is, etc times 1,000,000). But adding more factors just makes the metric exponentially more complex and difficult to implement. I'm sure people have tried using way more fine-grained metrics than what we have now - but nobody knows about them because nobody uses them anymore because they weren't worth the time and effort.
So we're kind of left with what we have, which in my opinion as a software engineer is definitely not good enough. Which is pretty bad, because by 'good enough' I just mean better than doing nothing at all.
The only problem here that can be solved, and therefore that is worth solving, is why these metrics are still commonly enforced despite being counterproductive. Obviously managers managers-of-managers feel a need to have some nice, concrete, objective numbers that they can look at to see how well developers and teams are doing. The people pushing these metrics are often the ones who have no other way of understanding what exactly developers are doing, either because they've never written software before or because they are too far removed from the level of the guys actually writing code to pay attention to what they're actually doing beyond just looking at a single number.
It makes sense for managers who don't know what engineers are doing to seek out a different way to measure their performance and progress. The solution isn't do nothing, and it's not story points or any of that BS. But what are the alternatives?
The only one I can think of is, don't put a manager in a position to manage individual developers if he/she is unable to understand what those individuals are even doing. Having an experienced senior engineer with the right skillset for management directly in charge of every team is amazingly valuable in my opinion. It's also vital that those higher up on the ladder are able to trust these manager-engineers, who are basically acting as an abstraction layer between the regular engineers and higher management.
A lot of teams already have this in the form of a senior engineer or software architect, my team has one and it works out amazingly. We all feel that doing a good job will be recognized and rewarded, problems are easily identified and addressed, we get things done very quickly, everyone gets along, and there's not a lot of pressure.
This is just my own single anecdotal experience and it has worked out very well but I'm aware it may not always be that way, so I'm interested in hearing others thoughts/experiences/solutions
Almost all people would consider C to be a low-level language compared to most languages they're familiar with. If you work in assembly all day then maybe you don't think C is a low level language, but those people aren't the ones calling it low-level.
Unless someone wants to define a cutoff for what a 'low-level' language is(and that would be a bad idea, the way it's used now is very useful and working as intended - it'd be better to make a new word) then I think the way the term is typically used is perfectly fine.
I could see an argument for saying C is 'less low-level than people typically assume', but saying it's not low level makes me think it's on the same level as Java or something.
I'm probably just nitpicking though, I always feel like people ignore the idea that the point of language is to communicate what you're thinking to someone else and have them interpret what you're trying to say as closely as possible, and language is already pretty good at evolving in a way that optimizes this. Trying to change that or force people to address technicalities that are outside the scope of what they're trying to communicate only complicates it(ignoring obvious exceptions like if you're writing a scientific paper and say things that are factually wrong for the sake of clarity)