2,576 karma · joined May 17, 2013
I am sure people would queue up for the job, fully aware of what it entails.
Back then it felt like a bit of a club, one that forms around a common hobby. Nowadays it feels more like the "community" of a high-school graduation class. Sure there is community there, but its mostly one of folks randomly thrown together into classrooms.
Folks like Raymond Hettinger would today be totally drowned out in the listicle-style attention seeking times.
> in the web world
I would put that more broadly though, it was web, data-science, there was a point when it became the universal scripting language, and part of me kind of hoped that the crowd would move to nodejs for all of it, so that Python can become more peaceful again. But I guess there is no going back, we went from dinghi to cruise ship, and when the crowd leaves, it will just be a deserted cruise ship.
As a college student the premise of screening through the cocktail menu would have sounded like a great project.
As a 30 something I am more interested of drinking my way through the mocktail menu.
I am old enough that my first 2 jobs were subversion-based (repo side, client side git-svn) and both teams didn't care about branching. It might have to do with how awkward subversion branches felt.
Anyway, we would commit (in git lingo pull-rebase & commit) directly and we basically maintained the id of the last reviewed commit and jointly did PR reviews commit-by-commit with the code on the projector in the office.
We had a joint look at code, everyone voiced their feedback ("I don't understand a variable name like `xzc`"), "where is the unit test", "I read in a blog post recently you are supposed to not use classes...". etc. pp. Sometimes fixes would be pushed right in the PR review session so you had the variable renamed 4 commits further.
Anyway, in retrospect it worked surprisingly well at helping the team to develop a joint understanding of values & virtues that the team would like to maintain in their code base. This might of course be nostalgia of a dev looking back into their junior years.
When we finally got pull-requests, we really felt thrown into the future. It was just great. But after a while I started to miss the direct conversations about code with fellow humans.
And honestly I couldn't tell whether PR really improved the quality of the code base in the long run. They lowered the probability of bad code being committed to the code base, but also lowered the probability for a dev to just fix awkward things while they stumbled over them.
Nowadays I think its more of a conscious decision many times. Like "We know someone could travel to france as a tourist, but its a small fraction of french IP addresses so screw these people". etc.
And then, the translation of video titles etc. is often surprisingly bad, because (I think) they don't consider the video context / content while translating, so it almost looks like a translation-by-dictionary-lookup translation.
Most infuriating though is when you watch a video of a channel you watched for years and all of the sudden the audio is auto-translated into your primary language. So cringe.
To summarize: Universal basic income can be seen as a kind of negative poll tax (a poll tax being a fixed tax per person). Werner argued that the current tax system is unsustainable because it places a disproportionate burden on labor. He suggested that instead of taxing income, we should tax consumption—essentially, by significantly increasing sales tax and eliminating income tax. Of course, this would make life unaffordable for low earners, so a negative poll tax (i.e., a basic income) would be necessary to make higher sales taxes socially acceptable.
In practice, a large portion of the universal basic income would end up returning to the state through sales tax anyway.
Even back in 2010, I sensed that Mr. Werner was promoting a system that would benefit his own financial interests. As an employer with high labor costs, he would gain from lower taxes and fees associated with employment in Germany. And, as a wealthy individual, only a small part of his wealth would be subject to sales tax, since he wouldn’t need to spend most of it on taxable purchases.
When pressed about numbers (how high the sales tax, how high the negative poll tax) he just wouldn't discuss numbers saying society would have to figure it out and potentially one might start out with some amount and then progressively increase the negative poll tax, increase the sales tax and decrease other taxes. It really felt like someone not having done any actual simulations / calculations.
oh and one thing he really emphasized is, that UBI could allow for people to go from like a 40h work week to a 30h work week being employed and use their fridays for example to become entrepreneurs/artists/etc. That really felt like as close to prosperity gospel as one can get in germany.
if the 2nd amendmend was literally interpreted it would be (quoting from memory) “in order to form a well-ordered militia the right to bear arms shall not be infringed”
As in you cannot infringe the right to bear arms in a well ordered militia, but gun ownership might be regulated for example by the militia organization owning the arms. Nothing would speak against codifying in law what constitutes a well-ordered militia, etc.
Whats somewhat interesting is how structurally similar Oberon is to Go. One could say Go is Oberon dragged halfway towards C/Unix conventions (curly braces) with Go channels slapped on.
Rob Pike was aware of Wirth's work, as his ACME editor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) ) took inspiration from it.
So either way, if there was inspiration for Go form Oberon or if there was not [a case of convergent evolution I guess in that case], it shows the strength of Wirth's thought.
However, it is also very understandable why vim was forked by the neovim devs, in my view it has been a great success. That doesn't diminish Bram Molenaars achievements and contributions to the world.
I am happy with bram’s work on vim and with the neovim devs and their work on neovim.
But honestly at work, I think I am the only one using either a vim or emacs (I kind of use neovim and emacs but primarily neovim). In my childhood there was a TV series called "The last of his class" and it really showed old people (retirement age) doing jobs that will be gone once their retire. While some jobs truly vanished, others just transformed so drastically that they cannot be likened anymore to the job those folks did. Anyway, I feel we are watching changes in developer tooling that will be seen as the end of an era.
* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Letzte_seines_Standes%3F
In Germany only certain purposes qualify as "gemeinnützige" which makes the formation of non-profits at times difficult, especially in the computing space.
Maybe I didn't read careful enough. But it's actually not spelled out which form the new European non-profit is incorporated in.
Simple example: tango is a dance. A DJ playing tango music at a tango dance event will only use certain recordings that maintain tempo and don’t confuse the dancers.
You can also listen to tango music records that cannot be danced to.
Chopins dances usually fall into the “reminiscent of the dance” category.
Another classical music example is the minuet. When people danced minuets it was the time of the sun king Louis XIV. When Bach composed minuets they were just a song in 3/4 meter adhering to form.
Now that I have established another dance in 3/4, it should be clear that it’s not enough for music to be in 3/4 to qualify as a Waltz. There are various things involved that make a Waltz a Waltz. And in one of the Chopin Waltzes, enough is “fulfilled” in the sense that if you ask a pianist listening to the piece whether they here a Minuet, a Waltz or something else in 3/4 they will probably identify it as a waltz.
Pianist here uses a lot of Rubato (slowing down of the tempo), which kind of is assumed to be an innovation from the romantic period. In any case it got popular during that time. But that would be definitely appropriate for a Chopin piece. One could say it’s a historically accurate practice to use rubato here. It would be used a lot less when the musicians played music for a dance in the local village.
In any case, classical dances of European music are really interesting and there is a lot to discover throughout the centuries. We tend to assume music got more complex by the century, but if you dive into romantic dances, baroque dances, a lot of interesting rhythms are present, a lot of rhythmic playfulness is there.
Now, theoretical physics is a bit of a troubled child however in recent years.
If we map computer science aspects in not the four physics disciplines, we get:
Software / hardware engineering
Applied computer science
Theoretical computer science
Mathematics dealing with problems inspired by computer science
A compatibility nightmare of the same magnitude as Python 2 to Python 3 migration.
It goes both ways, excellent developers, quite often people who would also have excelled in a computer science program (but failed because bad grades in foreign languages prevented them to get admitted, etc.)
But you also have those that struggle to adopt something other than the Visual Basic they learned in their apprenticeship.
> The Anglophone thing of having developers do a 3-year degree in Computer Science (an almost entirely unrelated discipline from Software Development) is ridiculous in comparison.
Is that different from Germany? Most devs have completed some kind of university degree (or "Hochschule").
If I think of the quality of Software-Engineering instructions I have seen in universities they were always so outdated, that I wonder whether its actually something that can be studied in such an institution in a way that makes sense.
For example I had a lecturer who was ADAMANT that in every software-engineering organisation, Nassi-Schneidermann Diagrams were drawn prior to implementation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi–Shneiderman_diagram ).
He taught a C++ course which basically was C (with printf and scanf having been replaced by std::cin and std::cout). Of course it was outdated material and if someone had cared enough they could have created new material, but at what pace and at what frequency?
It makes much more sense to teach concepts, that that's what computer science curricula do, then add some engineering concepts in the mix (requirements engineering, validation / verification) and you have someone who can pick up tech on the job quickly.
One should not underestimate how the "Journeyman -> Master" step is overall also one of gate-keeping. My cousin did his "Meister" as a car mechanic and it was costly (compared to for example getting a university degree in Germany which basically is for free) and he needed to do it, so that he could own his own repair shop (otherwise he would have had to hire a "Meister"). In his Meister-Training he was also exposed to a lot of legal regulations and some training in book-keeping etc, which of course is valuable to someone to whom math never was intuitive.
Traditional artists think in terms of palettes and of mixtures of colors on the palette. They also think about colors in relation to each other. They think of layering, and about the perception of the eye.
The point is, when you discuss colors as a multi-dimensional coordinate space, you already lost (from the perspective of the painter).
Painters will explore the medium they are working in for its capabilities. Is "dark on bright" (watercolors) or "bright on dark" (soft pastel) the way to go? Can I dilute and perform washes (watercolor), or will the medium break down (acrylic).
I can only recommend James Guerney's "Color and Light" book to get impressions.
Then again, if you do digital art to scren, or if you are printing things from a computer, you need to anticipate how the devices render your colors. This is where color spaces and coordinate systems for colors and how to translate between them becomes relevant.