quocanh

I don't know much about computing as a profession, but wasn't it just algorithmic arithmetic?

I'd settle for any society where women built the huts. Nearly every society has needed to construct some form of shelter or build some sort of tool. Basketweaving comes to mind.

Grilling and baking are great examples of what I'm talking about. Actually, in the past baking was seen as a masculine activity. Ovens used to be much more dangerous than now. You had a dedicated town Baker just like you had a Blacksmith. Over time with the invention of gas and electric appliances and the proliferation of cheap baked goods, baking became a luxury. Now it's a feminine activity. If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine. I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it.

To find some sort of culture that isn't influenced by biology, we would have to find some aspect of culture that we invented in our heads. For example, religion or philosophy or law. There are a ton of examples out there. But when we examine the culture that organically forms, I think there's a biological explanation for most of it. Maybe even all.

I think the point is that a significant part (majority?) of our culture is defined by our biology and nearly all is at least influenced by biology.

The ultimate counterexamples would be societies where women are in charge of the engineering/construction and to my knowledge there are none which is a sign that there's something deep within our psyche which drives these interests. I'd love to hear counterexamples if anyone has them though.

If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've been trying.

I think the irony here is more pleasing.

Yep. You got it. And I would go further - not just ignore but reject. That’s what is meant by separating ideas. You find what is orthogonal and keep what is useful.

Close/open-mindedness isn't about being morally wrong/right. It's about holding a vile idea in your head long enough to see its various facets. To study it and understand it.

Openmindedness here means being able to understand that slavery is wrong at the same time you study what it reveals about the human condition. To be clear, no one in this thread has argued that slavery was good. If you think that, then maybe it's a sign that you're not separating subtle ideas well enough.

You're twisting my words. No one is arguing "for" slavery here.

You definitely have to be opened minded in order to read this.

I can see how this could be offensive or distasteful but from a purely academic point of view it's interesting to see that a master-slave relationship was more than a contractual relationship. Leadership was just as important in that relationship as it is in a manager-employee relationship. And although we have since abolished slavery, we will always need leadership skills.

If your mind is open and is able to understand nuance (able to keep similar concepts separate amid complexity) then you can learn from history and take lessons from the masters (bad joke).

Because judgements are arbitrary and in practice unfairly hurts foreign companies.

There's an analogue that has happened in the U.S. Let's say that my little white town passes a law that forbids jaywalking. Protects pedestrians... Makes it easier to drive... Sensible law right? But in practice, it's the 1940's and the cops ONLY ticket black people. In practice, it's not a law against jaywalking - it's a law to drive out all the black people and make the white town inhospitable to anybody with skin tone.

GDPR claims to protect the people but is used as an economic weapon.

I don’t feel that, actually. I’m not sure where you got that impression - maybe straw men are easier to debate?

There are laws and then are how laws are enacted. Hint: pay attention to how homegrown EU companies are treated.

EDIT: https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ Look here specifically. Sort by fine amount. Look at the companies that are being fined the hardest. It's not just the US that is being targeted. There's this island nation that recently decided they didn't want to be part of the EU...

That is one purpose yes and that’s why it has support of the people. The PATRIOT Act is similar. Its purpose is to protect Americans from terrorism.

GDPR enforcement is completely arbitrary (in both senses of the word). People might cheer for the downfall of the tech giants but it's really just a way for the EU to control US companies, extending their power beyond their jurisdiction.

Anybody who creates unnecessary conflict is insufferable. There's no reason to use this achievement to bash others.

I agree that the columns of the results should be more obvious. But I am a proponent of "from should be first". I have never written a SQL query without thinking about the contents of a table or its relations. If it was my way, I would describe where the data I'm pulling from, then describe any filters/joins, then describe the columns that I'm interested in (last).

I love this!

Do you experiment with your tech stack? Swapping things in and out to see which apps are best?

From what I understand, a chip plant's workers have PhDs because when problems arise on the line, they require a lot of knowledge to fix.

There's an article written by a public school teacher that disagrees with you. What is your personal experience with the issue?

Keep in mind (and this is conjecture) that the specific kind of person who makes a great SRE will be more neurotic than the average person. There's a specific kind of meticulousness and paranoia that makes certain people way better at spotting and resolving problems even before they appear.

It would be General Intelligence but it's probably not Artificial General Intelligence in so much as the intelligence aspect wasn't designed and created. It also wouldn't be able to get smarter at the rate of singularity since its intelligence comes from using humans as raw material.

It's interesting to see the most active reasons: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GbVdarjAHEjUzhDsmtPJ...

If you're willing to dismiss an anecdote then you should also dismiss the first anecdote in this thread. If you're willing to listen to an anecdote, then you should also listen to the second anecdote in this thread.

This is about more than denying issues. It's about trying to get the whole picture. Ignoring any anecdotes you don't agree with doesn't help you get the whole picture.

It seemed suspicious to me that the vaccine seemed to increase the rate of infection. I had no idea how it would do that, so I looked at the report itself. My initial suspicion was some confounding factors.

> As with all vaccines, the safety of COVID-19 vaccines is continuously being monitored by the MHRA. They conclude that overall, the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh any potential risks (2).

> We present data on COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status. *These raw data should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness as the data does not take into account inherent biases present such as differences in risk, behaviour and testing in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.* Vaccine effectiveness is measured in other ways as detailed in the ‘Vaccine Effectiveness’ section.

> Vaccine effectiveness is estimated by comparing rates of disease in vaccinated individuals to rates in unvaccinated individuals. Below we outline the latest real-world evidence on vaccine effectiveness from studies in UK populations. We focus on data related to the Delta variant which is currently dominant in the UK.

Nearly every statistic in the report except for this one showed that the vaccine was effective against COVID19. Look for yourself: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

UKHSA explanation for this one statistic: https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2021/11/02/transparency-and-data-u...

- people who are fully vaccinated may be more health conscious and therefore more likely to get tested for COVID-19 and so more likely to be identified as a case (based on the data provided by the NHS Test and Trace)

- many of those who were at the head of the queue for vaccination are those at higher risk from COVID-19 due to their age, their occupation, their family circumstances or because of underlying health issues

- people who are fully vaccinated and people who are unvaccinated may behave differently, particularly with regard to social interactions and therefore may have differing levels of exposure to COVID-19 COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report – week 1 36

- people who have never been vaccinated are more likely to have caught COVID-19 in the weeks or months before the period of the cases covered in the report. This gives them some natural immunity to the virus for a few months which may have contributed to a lower case rate in the past few weeks

I love this. But also why.

Showing one way to get to the solution doesn't mean that it's the only way to get to the solution. It's still possible to solve these problems without the training examples that Copilot has memorized.

Here's my minority opinion: Leetcode-style problems can be valuable for finding talent. I know this will get me a lot of hate in programming circles.

Trust me that I know it feels horrible when you're bad at them. It does not mean you're a bad engineer by any means. It just means you're bad at Leetcode problems! Clearly, you still have strengths that have allowed you to accomplish what you have in your career. Those are strengths that should not be discounted by potential employers and certainly not by you.

But that doesn't discount the value of those problems either. You're right that you have to memorize the basic data structures and there is a certain pattern to these problems once you're good at them. But if there wasn't any art to these problems, then after 400+ problems wouldn't you have figured out the robotic algorithm to solve them? I argue that there is more to those problems than bullshit.

People who are good at these problems exist. I would not dismiss the strengths of these engineers either. These engineers may not even possess the same strengths you do! But just like you, there is a certain skill or talent that allows them to solve those problems. Those skills are valued by companies who want to run smart engineering teams.

It is not the only skill out there, it's just the easiest skill to empirically measure. You cannot run a large organization without a data-driven method. If you trust the human intuition of your hiring team, you will have a lot (more) variance in your hiring quality. Not to mention that your hiring will be biased against women and anyone of a different race than of your hiring team. This is true even if everybody is aware of their own internal biases. This is why large orgs give these problems.

Even if you do not share those skills, you might still be valuable as a good engineer. You just have to look for teams that are looking for asymmetric advantages: that is, those who can't afford to compete directly against the richer teams.

> He said one trucker was handing out bottles of water and one bread delivery truck opened its doors and people handed out loaves.

I love hearing stories about the positive aspects of humanity. It's too easy to hear about the negative.

Anecdotally:

It's a drug that sort of shakes up your mind. It lets you make all sorts of connections that you aren't going to sober, unless you spend a ton of time reflecting. At the end, you gain this incredible emotional clarity which helps you regulate your emotions. This is probably why it's being studied for use with depression and anxiety.

That's an interesting hypothesis but it wouldn't explain why the data-driven algorithms promote negativity. Perhaps there's another mechanism at work here: e.g. once you've tasted enough sugar in your diet then anything less tastes bitter. Maybe Twitter users walk around addicted to negativity with warped worldviews like the average American walks around addicted to sugar with warped tastes.

Which results are different than Google's?

Facial recognition software.