slumdev

Even doing all the right things, it's so rare to ascend without quitting.

Spending 3 years, earning a single promotion, and then (not immediately but shortly after) quitting and going somewhere else (for another promotion) is the surest route if applied consistently. Another route is to parlay one's background as a senior at a large company into an outsized role at a small company. Perhaps even CTO if it's a startup. After a few years as CTO, that person can work his way back into senior management at bigcorp.

It's difficult to see how someone could turn this into a profitable business. But if the backer isn't interested in profit, it's a great way to get assets inside the upper echelons of a lot of major companies...

Yes, some companies still do this. In fact, the oneNO CARRIER

It's an interesting idea, but ascending the ladder (beyond "senior" or "line manager") usually has very little to do with productive output.

> However for every project I take on, there will always be something I have never done before, or a maybe some new technique I want to try, could be a new language.

So you do care. But you care about the technology, not the InCrEdIbLe ImPaCt this latest "X-but-as-an-app" is going to have on the course of human history.

There's nothing wrong with you, and I'd love to work with you.

Wavelength matters - it's the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing. This article seems to indicate that not all of the non-ionizing radiation is harmless.

And heat itself is carcinogenic, yes -- drinking hot beverages is independently associated with a higher risk of mouth, throat, esophageal, and stomach cancer.

We know that ionizing radiation has no safe upper limit.

We know that non-ionizing radiation can be harmful at a high enough dose (like sticking your hand in a microwave.)

This research suggests that non-ionizing radiation might not have a safe upper limit, either, only that we haven't totally quantified the damage it causes.

"Know Your Customer"

In the West, KYC means that a bank is going to ask to see your ID before letting you open an account.

In China, KYC means that, in order to use something as pedestrian as social media, you have to let the CCP AI dragnet build a profile that can be used to surveil you for the rest of your life.

Wild. Apparently there are many different efforts to use FPGAs to simulate old hardware:

"Using FPGAs to Simulate old Game Consoles": https://jakob.engbloms.se/archives/3026

"AMSTRAD ON AN FPGA": https://hackaday.com/2017/01/06/amstrad-on-an-fpga/

"MISTER FPGA: THE FUTURE OF RETRO GAME EMULATION AND PRESERVATION?": https://www.racketboy.com/retro/mister-fpga-the-future-of-re...

Postmodernist suppositions regarding power and ideology include an implicit assumption that absolute truth doesn't exist.

That used to be called relativism.

It's ad hominem at scale -- an attack on the institutions that produced centuries of good work rather than an honest confrontation of the work itself.

That's a reasonable source. My list was what I could recall from the Baltimore Catechism. I went to find a link, and it looks like I missed a few.

Q 1170: http://www.baltimore-catechism.com/lesson30.htm

> If you're not Catholic christian, then you're Pagan

Pagan is only one category of unbeliever. There are also:

1. Heretics (bad Catholics and all Protestants)

2. Schismatics (the Eastern Orthodox and splinter groups)

3. Infidels (Muslims and anyone else who acknowledges the Abrahamic God but denies Christ)

4. Jews (for having been God's chosen people and having denied the Messiah), see #3

5. Heathens ("spiritual but not religious")

6. Atheists

> if you're not adhering to Catholic Christianity then you are doomed

Strive to enter by the narrow gate.

The clarity of St. Thomas is incomprehensible to anyone raised in postmodernism and not educated in philosophy.

> Which was very highly regarded back then, but now we know better.

Aquinas is still highly regarded. Virtually every philosophy department in the Western world still teaches him.

It's over Eight QUADRILLION kilobytes!

> fatigue, headaches, joint pain, muscle aches and shortness of breath

> “brain fog,” depression, anxiety and issues with sleep

Given that this constellation of symptoms existed as "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" for decades before 2020, don't we need a more convincing reason to attribute it to a disease that has existed only since September 2019?

To both of your questions, no.

> Not to take away from your excellent point but is spending $9k/year on transportation really mandatory?

Before "Cash for Clunkers", an Obama-era program that removed a lot of older vehicles from the road, it was normal to be able to purchase a functional and clean used vehicle for $2-3k. It is clear that the program was a great success at removing these vehicles. But with the average American car today being a mid-size SUV, it's not clear that it achieved its objective of reducing our CO2 emissions. Either way, the cost of a used vehicle today is much higher.

> $7k on utilities?

This is $700 per month. Someone in a medium-large house in a state with high electricity costs might spend this during the summer months. But the median American utility bill is probably in the $200-300 range, or $3600/year at the high end. The actual category on the linked web page includes "and other household operational costs". Figuring 1% of home value per year spent on maintenance, for a $300,000 home, that's another $3000. And that, combined with the utilities, gets us pretty close to the $7k number.

Cyber Polygon begins.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/cyber-polygon-will-ne...

In 1991, the immutability of gender might have raised the ire of 1 in 10,000 -- if even that many.

This should be common knowledge (but, unfortunately, isn't.)

A primary breadwinner should carry at least 10x his family's annual living expenses in term life insurance coverage.

Once the size of his retirement accounts exceeds this, he can start thinking about reducing the insurance.

Both will pay directly to beneficiaries in the event of his death.

If you say that to a person who insists on taking offense, he would tell you that a white person using red icons might be offensive to Native Americans or people with albinism.

None of these statements were even controversial twenty years ago:

"Sex and gender are the same; they are immutable; and there are only two of them."

"Every child has a right to a mother and a father."

"An individual can't change his race."

"China is the world's worst human rights transgressor and currency manipulator."

People who are deaf, legally (but not totally) blind, on dialysis, or with a slew of other disabilities are not visually distinguishable from people who do not have a disability.

People with disabilities are the most neglected of any demographic because they are not easily exploited for political gain.

I thought making everyone cartoon yellow was more empowering.

Especially on the Internet, with pseudonymity, we're all nothing more than the ideas we present.

An egalitarian dream was twisted into a woke nightmare for bad actors to earn free PR by pitting people against each other.

> * Oh boy was that ableist ?

It was hate speech against your neurodiverse colleagues. Doubleplus ungood.

An interesting effect is that railing against bootcamps in general is common and uncontroversial.

But railing against any of the bootcamps you named above would be career suicide.

> It's really weird for software engineers to judge something by its current state and not by its potential state.

No, we're not afraid of Copilot replacing us. The thought is ridiculous, anyway. If it actually worked, we would be enabled to work in higher abstractions. We'd end up in even higher demand because the output of a single engineer would be so great that even small businesses would be able to afford us.

Yes, we are afraid of Copilot making the entire industry worse, the same way that "low-code" and "no-code" solutions have enabled generations of novices to produce volumes of garbage that we eventually have to clean up.

Tools like xsd or T4 (in the .NET ecosystem) are great time-savers, but you would never consider directly modifying the code they generate. You would leave the generated code untouched (in case it ever needed to be generated again) and subclass it to make whatever changes you intend.

I think Copilot is so unfortunate because it's not building abstractions and expecting you to override parts of them. It's acting as an army of monkeys banging out Shakespeare on a typewriter. And the code it generates is going to require an army to maintain.

Premeditated data breaches like this are covered under the boilerplate language in your employment contract -- "sharing data with our partners" and other such nonsense.

Yes, you can, and I encourage everyone to do so:

https://theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/

Equifax sells your salary data to employers so that they can negotiate against you.

They use a subsidiary called The Work Number to keep this evil separated from their good name (ha).

You can and should freeze your Work Number file:

https://theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/