thomascgalvin

I don't think people want the legislature to cede its power to the other branches, but I do think the other branches are easier to understand. When the President issues an executive order, or a court issues a ruling, there are one, three, or nine people. It conforms more to what people think of as "rulership," and it allows for "easy" "victories" that route around the long and clumsy process of legislation.

But you do point out a significant problem, regarding polarized constituents. More than just communication, it's usually the most polarized members of a party who take part in the primaries. This has the effect of dragging politics towards the extremes, rather than the center, and makes cooperation between parties essentially impossible.

Removing first past the post, through ranked choice or some other mathematically superior method of handling elections, would do a lot to correct that.

I'm pretty sure I agree with this. Money in politics isn't the only issue we need to solve, but it is likely the most important. As long as politicians are beholden to people who can afford to fund their campaigns, the will of the people will always be a secondary consideration.

I think the actual long-term goal should be a government which reflects the will of the governed.

There are a lot of mechanisms that prevent the will of the people from being expressed at the federal level right now, but the two-party system, first past the post, and Citizens United are probably the big three.

The increasing power of the executive and the courts have come about almost entirely because the legislature has abdicated its power and responsibility. One of our two political parties is heavily invested in preventing action at the federal level, and the other two branches have stepped in to fill that power vacuum. This is sort of necessary, in that it keeps our country from grinding to a halt, but it also consolidates power to fewer, and in many cases unaccountable, people.

There are, unfortunately, no easy solutions here.

> What kind of nonsense statistic is an unemployment rate that doesn't count this fraction?

Like the inflation rate, unemployment statistics are more bread and circuses than useful information. They're designed to help the people in power remain in power, not to provide guidance for practical governing.

There is no single silver bullet, but if you combine tree planting with nuclear / renewable power with remote work with electric vehicles ... eventually it starts to add up.

Shooting down solutions because they aren't the entire solution will mean we never make any progress.

I wonder what proportion of new pandemic hires were also software engineers.

I have no data to back this up, but my gut tells me that during the pandemic, many companies over-hired software devs, and this round of right-sizing is correcting that mistake.

I agree that this doesn't quite feel programming, but it's certainly a related discipline. It feels kind of like mentoring a junior engineer.

We might start with a user story, translate that to pseudo-code, and translate that to python. We might iterate a few times, showing the junior the incorrect assumptions they made, or the edge cases they missed. But eventually, you get to the correct answer.

You might not even _know_ the correct answer when you start out. This can be an exercise in showing the junior how your brain works when it tackles a problem.

Coding with ChatGPT is very similar.

And honestly, the "code" part of software engineering is the least difficult part. Understanding the problem, expressing it cogently, accounting for edge cases, and so on are the real meat of the job. Once you understand the solution, translating the solution into Javascript or Go or whatever is, if not trivial, usually straightforward.

Coding with ChatGPT is an exercise is carefully stating a problem, so that it can be turned into executable code. It's still software engineering, but the final step, the translation from answer into an executable, is more automated.

I dropped about forty pounds during COVID quarantine, pretty much effortlessly. The only real change was that I now eat at home, and eat food that I cook, instead of whatever I can grab at the McDonalds near the train station while I'm running to the office, trying to get there on time for morning standup.

Why would you want a hello world at all? That isn't a realistic distribution scenario.

What an utter load of shit.

You know what's good for me? Having an extra fifteen hours a week, where I'm not trapped in bumper-to-bumper traffic, breathing in smog.

Taking a walk around my neighborhood with my wife and dogs in the afternoon, instead of running to McDonalds to cram some calories down my throat so I can go back to work.

Driving to the gym, instead of driving to the office.

Those things are good for me. My commute was killing me. If something hadn't changed, I fully believe that commuting in Boston traffic would have shaved years off my life.

Fuck this "back to the office" nonsense.

I know you're joking, but as a US dev I am very well compensated, and I don't even blink at giving JetBrains a hundred bucks a year for IntelliJ. Good tools make my life better.

I'm not a sublime user, but if I was, if it was critical to my workflow, I would absolutely pay for it.

I only follow this stuff casually, but IIRC hair is notoriously difficult to render realistically without massive computing power. It doesn't surprise me that this would be called out as a leading feature.

I just wish I was part of the first generation to benefit from post-scarcity, and not the generation that is going to have to go through the turmoil of getting to post-scarcity.

This could be fixed by:

1. Eliminating income tax on 401k distributions

2. Eliminating tax on social security income

3. Increasing social security benefits

None of these will happen.

My view of the job market might be skewed, because I'm twenty-odd years into my career, and the people that are looking to hire me and often different than the people looking to hire a recent CS grad.

That being said, I wonder how much of this is just that people who have a bad interview experience are more likely to post about it than someone who has a "normal" experience.

Like you, I had one interview, when I was fairly new out of college, where they asked me how many golf balls it would take to fill a school bus. I've had a handful of interviews where I've been asked to do some live-coding; these were all less than two hours.

I've never been asked to go through six rounds of interviews, or do a take-home test, or tell them which color dragon my code is. Of course, I intentionally avoid FAANG, which is where I hear about a lot of this dumb-assery.

The Fed has been leaning hard into Quantitative Easing since 2007. Joe Biden was inaugurated as President in 2021.

The goal is to provide "evidence" for the decision that has already been made. She was "recovered" and no longer "needed" care. Now, generate supporting evidence for that conclusion.

The borrow checker is a hard hill to climb for a lot of people, to the point where many devs get to that part of the tutorial and decide to go do something else with their lives.

If these drugs prove workable over the long term, pretty soon everyone will suspect you're on it, because the majority of people will be. There would be no more of a stigma about this than taking a medication for blood pressure.

This is a drawback, but I'm not sure how terrible it is.

If you go off the drug, you regain your weight. If you go off your diet, you also regain the weight. That, then, is a wash.

These drugs currently cost a fortune, so lifelong dependence is an expensive scenario, especially since most insurances refuse to cover them. On the other hand, this is preventative medicine, which might significantly reduce costs from obesity-related health issues down the road, including heart disease, cancer, and arthritis.

Compliance with a weekly injection is also likely to be higher than compliance with a long-term dietary change. Of course, since something like 95-plus percent of diets fail long-term, almost anything would have a higher compliance.

I don't know that we have enough data on long-term use of these drugs to be confident about long-term side effects, either.

I don't love the idea of being dependent on a medicine for the rest of my life, but there are plenty of other lifelong medicines that we just sort of accept as normal now. Insulin-dependent diabetics and people with high blood pressure are just two examples.

I guess for now I'm putting these in my "cautiously optimistic" bucket.

Elon's bold strategy of "not paying any of his bills" doesn't seem like a great way to keep a service up and running, but then again neither does firing any engineer who doesn't agree to be on call 24/7/365 to address Elon's little temper tantrums.

Completely anecdotal, but I rented a Tesla when I was on a business trip a couple of weeks ago. I only had to charge it once over the entire week, but to do so I needed to park in front of a charging station for about an hour, and I was parked next to three other people, also charging their vehicles for about an hour.

I understand that most people would (ideally) be charging up at home overnight, but the logistics of taking a long trip are, if not daunting, at least very different from today's "pull into a gas station, fill up, hit the restroom, and get back on your way in fifteen minutes."

There are exceptions to warrantless searches and entry given probable cause, reasonable suspicion, and iminent public threat. If a guy is doing 120MPH down Santa Monica Boulevard after emptying a magazine at a Girl Scout who was out of Thin Mints, that's gonna check a whole lot of "the rules in this situation are relaxed" boxes.

There are plenty of problems with policing in America (and worldwide, for that matter), but this ignores the entire category of "crimes involving stolen vehicles."

It seems like a drone with a high quality camera would be useful, as well.

Also: everyone also has Amazon and WalMart on their phones. For many phones, they come pre-installed. Of course their downloads have plateaued. There's little room for growth when your customer base is already "everyone".

I think the big difference is that BJJ is meant to be used against a resisting opponent, while gymnastics is not.

You can get really good at kata by, well, doing kata, but that doesn't mean you're going to be able to employ your knife-hand block when someone's trying to punch you in the face. That drill lacks an important aspect of the actual practice.

On the other hand, if you can pull off an armbar against a guy that's really good at defending armbars, you can almost certainly pull one on a drunk guy in the Kroger's parking lot.

Gymnastics doesn't have that dynamic variable. The drill and the skill are largely the same, or the drill is at least a component of a larger skill. There's huge transfer between the two.

> I imagine a group of Democrats could have helped vote McCarthy in with a much milder set of concessions.

The problem with that is, there would be no way to hold McCarthy accountable to those promises. Republicans do not negotiate in good faith, and any promises about the debt ceiling, committee assignments, and the like wouldn't be worth the air they were spoken with.

Digest and metabolize. This would mean that early in the day, you digest food and put it to work. Your body temperature is higher, you fidget more, your body repairs some of the damage you did when you worked out last night.

Later in the day, the food you digest sits around. Your body temperature is lower, you fidget less, your body performs less maintenance and repair. But the body isn't wasteful; it's still built to survive periodic famine. So, those extra calories that are just sitting around get stored away for later.

> I am interested in reading about healthy eating.... Yet, all I can ever find is how to eat in order to lose weight.

I suspect that this is largely due to the fact that industrial food owns the food science in this country, and in most of the developed world. For decades, we were fed (no pun intended) a Food Pyramid that is a blatant lie, because it correlated to how monied interests wanted to feed the nation.

I had my annual physical last week, and my doctor told me that the consensus is now "eat whole, natural, unprocessed foods as much as possible, and probably cut back on meat." That seems reasonable, on its face. It also seems prohibitively expensive for many people.

I'm afraid that there isn't a great solution to this problem in this country, almost by design.