throwaway999777

Oh, cultures and practices that are different to your own are strange to you, are they? You want a cookie for sharing that enlightening piece of information?

> Yeah a lot of us do it even if we find it awkward, because we feel it's better than seeming cold and smug.

In what universe is a simple greeting cold and smug?

Yes. You can either do AA or do nothing with your problem. That's the only two options in the world.

Jeez these AA PR snippets are just stellar.

That's what all the drama around OSS communities have been about lately, haven't it. People that say they want more diversity and inclusion in OSS communities, at the possible price of toning down or neutering certain elements of human culture and interaction. And in effect turning voluntary OSS projects into professional -- in an American sense -- gatherings. How diverse.

> The reason this is so important is that should this woman have a "slip" - which LOTS of alcoholics do - now the world, and needy alcoholics, have one more reason to dismiss AA.

> Try it before you judge it.

An organization that tries to inflate its own public success rate, and then asks people to keep an open mind towards it rather than dismiss it. Ok.

Better the devil you know.

People should think more about Moravec's paradox when they decide to rag on janitorial jobs.

> Unions once explicitly took that position. A century ago, when Samuel Gompers was asked what he wanted for his union members, he answered "More".

What do companies want? Uh, more. It's not unreasonable to guess that all actors will look out for their own hide in matters like this.

> Do you think the ruling classes are idiots?

Hey, hey now. The ruling class doesn't disproportionately influence/control the market. It's the magic fairy dust of the Free Market that keeps the Just World as it is. /s

> "Please nerf the inheritance system."

The random spawn system is broken in that game!

> Anyway, consider the following scenario. Bob makes $10 an hour, and produces $100 of value. Obviously, this is a great bargain for Bob's employer. So much so, that another employer should be perfectly willing to offer Bob $11 to lure him away. Another sweetens it to $12 and Bob moves again. Rinse, repeat until Bob is making $100 minus the opportunity cost.

Except if the companies in question are Google, Apple...

Life is a obviously an open-ended sandbox game.

I'm sure that relying on blogs for being informed on matters like this is another kind of bias.

Oh, you've started losing your hair in your 40s? Count yourself lucky.

Technically examples are biased to the specific examples given though they aren't supposed to serve the particular examples in particular.

> Anything can be made to look bad by only looking at the negatives, anything can be made to look good by only looking at the positives.

And then you have the faux-"fair and balanced" posts about Go by jerf, which always ends up favouring Go for some inexplicable reason.

Norway: Greenland and Vinland (New Foundland).

The thought of those vikings sucking the fertile soil of Greenland dry fills me with guilt.

You misunderstand me. I wasn't trying to diss FP but rather the naysayers who try to associate people who like FP with certain groups.

> Higher productivity of feature development is probably another.

So productive that they had to invent a new language for the JVM platform?

I thought functional programming[1] was associated with ivory tower CS researchers/enthusiasts? I guess it's been turned on its head for some reason.

[1] At least the Haskell/ML kind.

It's not directly linked, but it is shallowly indirectly linked by going to their home page which is listed on their profile. In any case I agree that presenting information in this manner can feel a bit invasive, as in putting someone on the spot/making the topic about them.

Rude like asking someone who has disposable income why they aren't donating to a specific cause? Hmm.

Was there a need to develop a Java IDE in Java to begin with? I can understand dog fooding by building IDE-primarily-for-lang in lang itself. But were there technical reasons?

Or maybe Java just was the best alternative [at the time].

rdegges obviously has a lot on their plate already.

> You have it flipped. "This group of people with a neurodevelopmental disorder are more inclined to X and therefore industry of X has more of them."

> Which is an entirely valid thing to say, by the way.

The point was the severity. 1 to 2 persons in a thousand, and you think this is sizeable enough to impact a whole industry which is not really small at all? To colour a whole industry? To such a degree that everyone or a majority is on the autism spectrum, to refer to your last paragraph? Ridiculous. Not to mention that would require all people with autism to be functioning enough to maintain a job. Assuming I would even accept your pulled-out-of-your-hat numbers.

What is effectively being said is that many of those nerd archetypes are born out of, or affected to a large degree, by people with neurodevelopmental disorder. A great springboard for people who hate nerds to claim that they are suffering from a kind of arrested development or other non-normal deficiency, for sure.

> I can understand a displeasure that the association is with something "negative", but that doesn't immediately invalidate the statement.

You're right that it wasn't as much of a statement about it being wrong as it was a statement like this betrays his attitude towards the tech industry. Hint: I didn't ever say that it being an outlandish belief made it wrong, for crying out loud! The mention of 1-2 in a thousand was more of a reference to how it was unlikely, however.

Maybe I'll start to consider the veracity of this claim itself when I see some effort to prove it one way or the other. But I don't have much patience for complacent musings on deficits of a whole group of people.

> I'd be willing to bet that people with higher-than-normal levels of empathy and an outgoing attitude are more inclined to work social jobs than solitary jobs. Would you disagree with that?

But that wasn't the comparison to begin with. The implicit comparison was with people who have a lack of empathy and social inclination due to neurodevelopment disorder, and normal people. Now if we change that comparison to people in general -- on average normal -- who can either be inclined to be people-oriented or not, then this becomes a whole other question. Not even objectionable anymore!

I thought that we were about to move beyond viewing people who choose to, or somehow have less talent for, being social as being underdeveloped in some way[1]. Apparently not. Do we ever hear about extra talkative or otherwise people-oriented people being deficit in some way? No, of course not. Such people are just good, normal people. Apparently people with some kind of high intellect (not that all such people have that) must have traded something else in some way, but people who are people-focused are just well-rounded and overall fantastic. Maybe we should also discuss one of those ridiculous tropes about how some high-powered jobs are "filled"[2] with people who are apparently sociable and outgoing, but really are sociopaths. Right? No one would ever be offended by that.

[1] In the sense of being medically diagnosed with autism.

[2] Again: it's the relative quantity that makes these discussions absurd. Certainly without any extraordinary evidence to back them up.