You are projecting your own feelings. You need to seek understanding before casting judgment.
It’s absolutely not an insult. It is a lament.
2,949 karma · joined January 28, 2009
http://sunir.org
It’s absolutely not an insult. It is a lament.
Instead of starting with blame and condescension of your own, try to seek understanding from the people you accuse.
Every profession that is about caring for other people have these jokes because it is necessary to maintain some distance from human suffering to remain professionally functional. Humour makes it possible to maintain two dissonant thoughts in one’s head.
It’s in the very website linked here. The sense of powerlessness and malaise and desperation shared between the patients and their caregivers. What else does one do to come into work the next day and keep at working to improve a hopeless task?
We had reasons. We already had clean syntax for [https://uri text description] and [https://uri] for numbered citations as footnotes and [#anchor] for named anchors that fit this format of square brackets for everything.
The double square brackets made it clear the inner tokens were not to be parsed at all but were the link itself. Plus they are fast to type and very easy to identify (they look like a [[button]]) and read cleanly as part of a sentence.
It’s a small world. The more you know.
Also I have enjoyed listening to people complain about our [[creation]] for decades.
I owe Ward stuff.
Gardens also grow. But if you don't maintain your garden, they ahem literally become weeded, cough figuratively speaking.
I have MeatballWiki still. I’d like to pass the torch.
I thought peer to peer social software was my future. I was going to speak at O’Reilly p2pcon September 23, 2001 in Washington DC. Well that didn't happen thanks to 9/11.
So unemployed after the bust I got into a masters program in Toronto to extend my ideas from MeatballWiki.
I met the love of my life and married her later. I got a job running marketing at FreshBooks and went hard into SaaS partnerships.
From there I created the Cloud Software Association and the SaaS Connect conference. Now I have my own startup AppBind to solve partnership problems.
So, not much.
Focus on one thing at a time and finish it.
Sleep matters
It's nearly impossible to fail out of tech; we're made. We'll all retire just fine. So why worry?
Life is for the living
Love and compassion is what gives meaning
https://www.inaliminalspace.org/blog/barn-raising?rq=Barn
Also for those who know about barn stars on Wikipedia, barn raising and the particular idea of barn stars is the concept that inspired it.
These high minded ideas about economic utility are for later, when they start worrying about their adult lives. But in the meantime, playing around with the computer and the games and websites and phones and seeing what they can do with them is the best answer.
First make sure you have permission to offer advice. But remember…
No one likes advice. You cannot really know what is going on in someone else’s world. It’s easy to get it wrong. And advice isn’t about controlling people despite what another person said; that would be very aggressive and really an intervention not advice giving.
Instead ground your responses in your own experiences. You can never be wrong about yourself.
Tell relevant stories from your own experience.
Share resources that may be relevant.
Work through your own mental models you might apply in this situation. That isn’t telling people your mental framework is correct though you may believe it deeply. It’s saying “I use this framework. This is how I’d apply it.”
This gives the listener what they are really after when asking for advice. Insight into how you think. It’s a mystery to them and pulling back the curtain is a wonder.
They will learn and take what they can from the experience.
Freshworks has a startup plan as well.
It’s fine to express the gulf of evaluation and execution that led to the error. It happened. There may not be any better known solutions at the moment to lower the risk any further.
Calling them careless is also unjustified. They made a mental error processing the information. Whenever humans are involved there is a risk of illogical and bizarre mental errors in decision making because we are degenerating meat robots granted full agency.
Shit happens. How we emotionally deal with it is the test of life as a human being.
That’s fine to be honest. They aren’t the Ministry. They simply had to enumerate some reasonable alternatives to satisfy the Oakes test requirements.
However I felt dumber after reading the ruling. They really leaned into the idea that race is real, which is a red flag for a judge in Canada.
However, it’s simultaneously true the math test didn’t pass the Oakes test because the math test is not really about testing for competent math instruction and therefore unjustifiable; and the judges did not simply "rule on the law" or rather the Charter.
At various points in the ruling the 3 judges just hotrodded right over Section 15 of the Charter by treating race as a real trait that could be ascribed to individuals by them. Part of the s15 meaning of race is that it is a social construct and therefore Canadians deserve protection from this ascribed categorization and decisions made thereby; and such kith and kin identifications can only be self-decided and self-described. Anyone appointed to the Superior Court should know this.
The judges even blithely decided and declared the race of a witness after a lengthy enumeration of the witness’s self-description. I was floored.
The judges make an argument that relies on a premise that some races are better at math than others.
They had to make an argument like that to invoke Oakes because the evidence entered was statistics by race showing some “races” did worse.
It is a simple logical error that s15 is meant to protect against. If you racialize the statistical analysis you will conclude racial causes. Section 15 says those arguments are disallowed.
It is more likely there are better explanations that are not based on race. Such better explanations would have equally caused the math test to fail Oakes. It would have been better to force the litigants to find true sociological data by denying the evidence presented. However that would be difficult to achieve.
Anyway now we have a ruling that appears to invert Section 15 of the Charter completely. This encourages more racialization. If race is decidable, ascribable, and causal enough to win rulings then race becomes an effective legal construct.
It was a very strange and bad ruling.
It is clear from the rest of the ruling the judges think racially. It makes me sad and frustrated.
Sometimes this is called a "network agency".
What's more rewarding than helping small businesses thrive? What's a bigger opportunity than bringing SaaS into an go-to-market model that's been broken for years?
AppBind makes it easy for digital agencies and IT consultants to manage the software and ads and cloud of their clients. And conversely, we make it easy for SaaS companies to sell through these partners.
We're a venture-backed startup, based in Toronto and San Francisco, and always fully remote. We're looking for a full-stack Javascript software developer early in their career who wants an opportunity to build AppBind and build themselves.
We operate on a React, Relay, GraphQL, Node.js, AWS Lambda, PostgresQL stack. We have interesting work ahead of us.
Learn more about the job and the company from https://www.appbind.com/were-hiring-a-javascript-full-stack-...
Apply by reaching out to myself and my co-founder Joe, the CTO at founders (at) appbind.com
Systems following were cloning Wikipedia I assume.
I am glad I am still causing endless chittering about syntax choices twenty years on. I am sure my gravestone will be “[[RIP]]”.
Single brackets were used for numbered or named “footnotes” by the way.
Here is the design discussion.
Billion!
Since this is an allegation, we must presume innocence. However I still cannot imagine what planet would entrust 10 figures to her control. Witness her rap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jlSHGAem6g
But I also realize reading this Twitter thread I do not understand the world of crypto at all.
Most companies had to market elsewhere, such as trade publications, events, direct sales, direct mail.
At BitFlash, one of the things we had to build was a SAX parser for the SVG DOM. I used the DSL of the W3C spec to compile the SAX parser.
One of the more strange things I did was in some contexts (think old school Blackberry) we had a server to pre-parse the SVG so we "knew" it was clean (I'm still sceptical 20 years later this is ever a good strategy, but take it as a given). Because we knew the SVG was clean, there was a faster way to parse the XML than reading the tokens.
I used my magic Perl script transformer to compute the lowest entropy decision tree to identify a token with the fewest comparisons, which was surprisingly way more efficient than a trie.
Or maybe I like building little compilers.
We started with C++ which is very flexible. As I built it and optimized it we had two problems. One the SVG spec was a moving target and second the same optimizations we learnt had to be applied across the entire codebase in many classes simultaneously.
The obvious solution is to build a domain specific language right? But we couldn’t afford to run an interpreter at runtime. So I wrote the spec as a mix of C++ structs, enums and comments and a Perl script (it was 2000) to compile that code into optimized C++ for the parser and DOM and rendering loop.
I also built my own metabuild tools (this was 2000) to generate makefiles and the like to quickly cross compile to new mobile phones. We were able to cross compile and deploy to a new handset from a manufacturer once while the bigwigs were in a meeting talking terms. That definitely impressed.
Another example was that I was brought in 4 months into a VoIP SIP hardware phone project that was floundering. It had gotten nowhere. I had never built such a thing but I had to quickly build a working phone.
We had a very detailed spec from the distributor of the set of use cases we had to implement.
In my opinion, hardware has this annoying requirement to never crash or have bugs because hotfixing is a nightmare. These phones were for trading desks so I think the pressure was high as well to not go down.
With four months lost I know most people would just dive in and start coding and never stop until a spaghetti ball was shipped.
However that is the road to hell as you are just creating chaos in the codebase instead of order. The whole point of logic is to create order.
So yes I did dive in to the code just long enough to spike one phone call with the SDKs to make sure I knew how the tools worked.
But my solution was to “waste time” after that to draw out the spec document as a hierarchical finite state machine in PowerPoint.
Once I had a simpler visual of what the spec was saying, I then wrote a hierarchical finite state machine library. And I then wrote out the phone logic as in the language of the HFSM instead of as a spaghetti ball of smash smash code.
This let me contain all the mutex logic in a tiny part of the code base so I could stop worrying about race condition bugs which plague phones.
I was also able to build a test first library with another domain language. I wrote the tests as message sequence charts (2D arrays with mock objects) that drove the phone. The spec had a number of MSCs so this made it a lot easier to prove correctness.
By going “insane” like this I did save the project’s bacon. Not only did I deliver on time, but I was able to prove the SIP SDK the distributor ordered us to use was broken fundamentally and survive the obvious, “must be your code!” objections rather handily.
Those are fun stories; I painted myself in the best light of course. 95% of the time I was panicking before I came up with a solution and the other 95% I was panicking management would wonder why I spent two months on a side quest. Those are so long ago that I think it is ok to tell them.
Nowadays we have package libraries that full of modules like this. It’s amazing how much people have simplified with better ways of expressing ideas as data instead of code.