programmer1234

10 lat temudiscuss

I almost never cry but I view it as a problem with the way I deal with stress, which is usually to get angry or withdraw. Recent research has shown that veterans with PTSD who have a "tough guy" attitude recover at a slower rate than veterans with a more self-compassionate attitude, which includes allowing oneself to feel negative emotions and express them.

programmer1234

10 lat temudiscuss

Time saver: Just look at his company's website.

Time waster:

Rails has won in the same way that PHP and .NET "won" in the 2000s. There are a lot of problems with Ruby, it's sort of this isolated language that's useful for Rails only, and I wonder if python and django don't offer a suitable replacement for 80% of cases where you can choose between hiring Rails and Django engineers.

Graphing "PHP", "Rails", and "Nodejs" on Google Trends makes Rails look like a fad and all the future money is going to be in maintenance work.

The article's weakness lies in the fact that it argues against the assertion that "Rails has these big problems, it's no longer the best approach", by instead arguing that "Rails is good enough most of the time" in a way that doesn't quite live up to the title.

programmer1234

10 lat temudiscuss

If you strip away the appeals to emotion, their point seems flimsier in isolation: "Non-European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within European and American philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the American and European tradition, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in Anglo-European philosophy."

This is on the surface, reasonable. But why don't we try reversing the names, which should be allowed under their pretense of fairness and equality, like so: "European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within Non-European philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the Non-European traditions, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in Non-European philosophy."

Now it sounds at best sloppy (Which non-European traditions?), and at worst chauvinistic against the background noise that makes up the bulk of what really drives their point, which is the "apologize for imperialism" theme. So at one level below the surface, they are suggesting we abandon evaluating ideas based on their relevance to us as westerners, and subordinate that principle to saying sorry for imperialism. At two levels below, they are just talking their own book, as white male professors of Chinese philosophy.

programmer1234

10 lat temudiscuss

That said, David enthusiastically taught us about 100% white dude based approaches to forming a foundation for cognitive science. He's a good politician but I think he ultimately believes deep down that modern western science > zen BS for explaining the world, although he claims he basically will draw from anything if it seems consistent enough with his foundation.

programmer1234

10 lat temudiscuss

Part of Stallman's motivation for starting the free software movement was that your computer is an extension of your mind, and ubiquitous computer surveillance is basically the same as Orwell's thought police. The chilling effect is real, as demonstrated by a recent study that showed a drop off in terrorism related searches after the Snowden leaks. I freely research terrorism though, because I'm not "the type of person who would do something". So I basically rely on racial, ethnic, and economic discrimination to feel secure about what I search online. I just don't understand how James Comey and the FBI think that they can make us all safer by turning into criminals themselves.

programmer1234

10 lat temudiscuss

I don't think PG is making an empirical argument, it's based on intuition and then tries to just offer a few instances that are at least nominally consistent with the idea. Nate Silver recently said about Trump, "voters are much more tribal than I thought", and if you assume most voters don't know anything about candidates other than "it's a guy on the TV", they wouldn't respond to whether this guy was a yes man for Johnson or whatever, they just respond to who they like the most on an emotional level, and that's going to be whoever is the most charismatic during their campaign.

programmer1234

10 lat temudiscuss

That's what she gets for running the company into the ground

programmer1234

10 lat temudiscuss

I know this is massively simplistic, but a lot of people were predicting the downfall of Apple as soon as Steve's cancer was revealed to the public. A lack of freshness is starting to creep in to their product line. Cook is great but as far as I know he isn't really a product guy. He needs someone like Ive to come up with new products, and maybe Ive needed to be babysat by Steve for the magic to happen. Apple can't support its current valuation without making new products that are in some way drastically better than their competition's so people will pay the premium price.

programmer1234

10 lat temudiscuss

I am glad this is happening. Theranos lent credibility to the idea that Silicon Valley technology investors were and are in a position to improve society through funding legitimate scientific research, in contrast to say, Snapchat. Theranos lied, which might not have been a problem had it not been praised so much, and the board hadn't been stacked with major power brokers who are supposed to have integrity. The best we can do is figure out who was responsible and put them on a cross before the reputation of the whole venture community suffers from this scandal.

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