pbourke

> I find it hard to imagine how they must see the modern world. It must seem like magic!

I think this is unnecessarily infantilizing. There are a great many very complex things in the modern world, and people must employ abstractions for most of it.

I think with the rise of multi form factor computing, there is more basic literacy about the nature of computers these days. People don’t think that a phone god makes their phone work and a laptop god lets them work on their document.

It truly does depend on what you’re building, in which organization and with whom you’re doing it.

If you’re building a production system with a small, stable team, and Python is a good fit for the work, then there is no reason not to use it.

If you’re doing programming in the large with a large and constantly changing team, then you’d be wise to pick a statically typed language that many people know (basically C# or Java)

Your education example is off base. Python is not a more basic form of programming that one passes through on the way to enlightenment. It’s hand screwdrivers vs hammer drills or diesel pickups vs electric sedans. Different tools for different contexts.

These are pointless nitpicks. Every language has things like this. In 4 years of using Python in anger I’ve never written a line of code that could be improved by the features you list.

Oh, good point

In the US, auto insurance policies are split into 3 buckets: collision, comprehensive and liability. Comprehensive kicks in for events which are “not collisions,” so tree falling on the car, theft, etc.

You are required to have liability and collision coverage in most states, but comprehensive is optional. People often drop it from their policies to save on the premium. I have tried doing that on one of our vehicles over the years but have barely realized any savings so I’ve ended up keeping it on the policy. Seems like others have fared better.

The point of your work is to contribute to society. The point of my work is to sustain my own life.

Driving a car is by far the most subsidized personal choice in the United States. It’s not even close.

As for subsidizing parenthood and children: the more the better. I don’t have kids, but as a human person I have an interest in the next generation of people being happy, healthy, well adjusted and well educated. And that of course begins with creating an environment in which the parents of those children can be successful.

Does the permanent working visa have a path to citizenship in an EU country?

The job title is just “developer” or “programmer” rather than “engineer”. Not a big deal.

I think the regulation should happen upstream of the software. Code that goes in a medical device should be subject to different levels of rigor than code that goes into a free to play mobile game.

To use your example of CAD software, certainly the system used to design a bridge should be built differently than the one used to make inputs to a consumer level 3D printer.

There’s no such thing as a “casual” bridge or a “good enough” pacemaker, but that analogy holds in the software industry.

Software’s infinite flexibility means that it should be regulated within its context of use.

> Weirdly i feel like there’s no really good, singular American equivalent

“Portlandia” fit the bill for me.

Edit: if you pull certain sketches from SNL over the last 5-10 years you get a good through-line of American absurdism: David S. Pumpkins, Airport Sushi, Bodega Bathroom come to mind.

> "Imagine being given a workstation with 1024 CPU cores, a terabyte of memory, and a GPU to match. Could you fully utilise this machine to solve everyday problems in your speciality? If not, why not? What are you missing?"

1. Shared memory space between the GPU and CPU

2. Tons of fast disk

Basically a memory hierarchy that descends from GPU RAM -> CPU cache/RAM -> fast hot storage (NVME) as easily as CPU cache/RAM or memory mapping works today.

Often that 1TB RAM is “wasted” with all of the copying required to feed things to the GPU in right-sized chunks.

Python just gets out of your way like almost nothing else. I work in graph ML, and Python allows us to glue together runtimes and technologies with ease (eg PySpark).

- Paintings by the Group of Seven

- The music of Newfoundland and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia

- the writing of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro

- the work of Métis artisans (clothing, decorative arts)

- music of The Tragically Hip

15 years here. There are a few things.

Housing affordability: Canadian prices have skyrocketed in the past 10-20 years and have increased much more than the US.

Cost of living: it’s generally higher in Canada.

Where to live: there is much more variety in the US. For instance, there are few “quaint small towns” in Canada in comparison. The American small town/city with a historic Main Street has survived, whereas it’s a fast-vanishing thing in Canada. Much of Canada is starting to look the same in terms of the built environment and urban planning.

Access to healthcare: Canada has universal healthcare, and the system kicks in if something serious happens. But for anything not at that level, there are serious issues. For instance, depending on where you live it can be hard to find a primary care doctor. There are waiting lists for many procedures, for imaging, etc. If you have an upper middle class type situation in the US your access to health care is much, much better. I can often get in to see my doctor within 24h.

Employment opportunities: it’s much better nowadays, but the US is still the place to be in terms of variety of work and compensation.

And finally, it’s hard to leave anywhere after decades - you get used to your life and your community. Canada will always be my homeland, but it’s starting to feel a bit alien to me, in subtle ways.

Canada has changed over the past 15 years and you can’t step into the same river twice.

Fleets as in fleeting. I thought it meant “group of ships” and seriously struggled to see how the name connected. Mind you, my use of Twitter is confined to “order by time desc” and Lists.

The US maintains nuclear ambiguity. A first strike wouldn’t happen under current conditions, but one could easily imagine it happening if the US had credible evidence that Russia was preparing a nuclear attack. Nuclear logic and the ladder of escalation are very terrible things.

> What we don't have to do is to start a process like the one that led Germany from the defeat in WW1 to desires of revenge and WW2, or Russia from the defeat in the Cold War to the current attempt to create its empire again.

I note, grimly, that your positive example (Germany and Italy post-WW2) was precipitated by the total defeat, occupation and renovation of those two states by the victors of the war. That is not possible in the current situation, where the best case outcome is that Russia retreats to pre-2014 borders with Ukraine.

We used Airbnb almost exclusively 5-10 years ago. We’re now back to nearly 100% hotels, with Airbnb as a backup option if there truly is not a suitable/available hotel.

1 out of 3 airbnb stays was deficient to the point of affecting the trip in some way: didn’t match the description, overbearing rules, maintenance/cleanliness issue that was difficult to resolve with absentee hosts, etc.

The costs became equal to or more than hotels once you added in fees, and the experience was guaranteed to be less consistent than just booking a familiar hotel brand.

Liability is the other side of the ethics coin. Professional Engineers have liability and carry insurance as a result. MBAs? Not so much.

Look at the Boeing MCAS and VW emissions scandals. Individual engineers and test pilots were named and faced repercussions. The MBAs that sustained the environment where this poor decision making happened? Aside from the very senior executives, we have no clue who they are. They were able to stay in role or slink off to another opportunity. They might not even think they had any culpability.

Seems odd to me to call Americans of that time Victorians, but it’s common to say they lived in “Victorian” style houses.

> Manufacturing has moved to these places in some cases because many customers just can't tell the difference or couldn't care less about the difference

Your argument does not hold in this case, because Etsy was established and sustained as a marketplace for handmade goods. This is true also for customers, who visited Etsy to support independent artists and artisans and to purchase unique and limited items.

Many of the sellers of cheap knock-offs are engaged in blatant theft of IP and misrepresentation as independent artists.

> Are the people organized under that website all wearing leather shoes hand sewn in Maine cottages? Or are they wearing more sweatshop produced junk

I don’t see what this has to do with anything. But, yes, many sellers try hard to support other artisans. Etsy is but one part of a culture and economy of handmade goods that includes in-person shows and other off-Etsy venues.

Seattle has, until recently, tolerated encampments on public property. The city council spends great chunks of money on outreach nonprofits that have dubious effectiveness (there are organizations doing good/effective work, to be clear).

The Seattle Police Department is woefully understaffed and has given up on responding to many quality of life and public order calls. In addition to drug use, car prowls, etc there is a thriving shoplifting-fencing business going on in spots throughout downtown. Enforcement has been very limited, so the problem has gotten out of hand. I have no clue why the Target near Pike Place remains open - they must be locked in their lease.

The friends in this story are naive clowns. If OP was a friend of mine I would have advised him to not get involved.

> And Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon and slaughtered them there.

I suppose that’s an early instance of p-hacking.

No, that just means that the military can take over civilian functions (law enforcement) and certain rights are suspended (curfew, habeus corpus, etc). It does not classify civilians as soldiers. I’m not sure how it works with “territorial defenders” aka militias. Probably a gray area.

Tell me you’re a lisp programmer without telling me you’re a lisp programmer

> Once you say that “they need you [the manager] in a time of crisis” you are putting the tragedy in a work-related context.

Sometimes all that’s needed is for the manager to not be a giant fucking dick.

My aunt passed away a few years ago, and I took a few days off work to go to her funeral (a few hundred miles away).

When I mentioned that I was going to take a few days bereavement leave, my manager at the time responded by rules lawyering whether the death of an aunt qualified under the company’s bereavement policy (it did). He otherwise said all the right things, but that’s what I remember nearly 10 years later.

Yeah, absolutely. The radioactive signature is highly traceable. IIRC, they were able to pinpoint the source of the polonium that Russia used to murder Alexander Litvinenko in the UK.

> I've never seen controversies like this in the .NET/Nuget ecosystem

Some .NET ecosystem projects have put political messages on their documentation over the past couple of years.