It sounds like you are making a lot of rationalizations for not investing the time to practice live-coding and whiteboarding. Those are skills that can be learned, like any other.
> What `ncurses` is to you, computers are for normal people.
That is a really dumb analogy, that makes a really good point. Try piping a program that uses ncurses. Ncurses is a shitty way to do a GUI on serial video terminals. It is a GUI and not a Unix command-line interface.
First ARPANET connection went up in 1969, Ted Nelson's _Computer Lib/Dream Machines_ was published in 1974. Steve Jobs was just repeating things that people had been talking about for decades at that point.
> Men approaching women in real life is now rarer than it was in favor of online meeting through Apps.
Ask your female friends (if you have any) about this. You might be surprised.
> Elite men can get dozens of sex partners.
Why so low? I have a few friends who have had more than 100 partners.
> Average or subpar men are essentially invisible in the dating market as evidenced by declining rates of sex by most people.
Nothing to do with dating apps. 70% of the adult US population is obese or overweight. Those people have a very hard time finding partners, and obese men have associated coronary issues that can make even maintaining an erection difficult.
> Dating Apps are part of the reason that birth rates are generally dropping in first world countries
About time; if only the population crisis could be solved by dating apps! World population in 1969 was 3.6 billion, today it is 7.7 billion. We need any and all measures to bring down population levels.
Amazon book recommendations and keyword search are garbage. Sometimes even a direct search for title and author name will put the result halfway down the list. The two good things Amazon has going for it are the huge catalog (great for finding the right ISBN), and reviews dating back to the 1990s. Makes it easier to decide whether or not to purchase the book from a more ethical retailer.
Out of all the online bookstores, Thriftbooks has the best recommendations in my experience.
The best ways to find good books are still bibliographies and large public and university libraries - browse the shelves, ask the librarians. Online library catalogues usually beat online retailer catalogs for keyword searches.
> a left-leaning Sunday paper (WaPo/NYT)/news magazine.
The fact that either the Washington Post or the New York Times is considered left-leaning is one of the problems in US media. They are both corporate rags pushing the neo-liberal plutocrat agenda. Try Jacobin or the London Review of Books as a somewhat left of center starters.
> However, we also know that the difficulties of typing these languages without special keyboard support have led to a variety of more English in ASCII language successors such as J/K/L.
The input language has nothing to do with the keyboard. How do you think people type foreign natural languages? This comes up again and again in programming-related online discussions - why is it so hard for people who program software every day to imagine that keyboard input is also mapped by software?
The real reason Iverson used ASCII for J is that in the early 1980s, you had to get an APL character video ROM (code page 907) for your terminal or PC (exactly the same case as for foreign languages). Obviously not a problem at the time for Macs or other computers that use bit-mapped fonts, and has not been a problem for PCs for the past 30 years.
> The problem is that the only programming language I know of that tried to be its own language-language was APL and thoughts of coding in that give me nightmares.
Have you ever actually tried learning APL, or are you just trolling?
Tor bridges do not have this problem, do not consume a lot of bandwidth, and are very useful for people who need to circumvent firewalls. I have been running one for years without any issues. The Tor Project is currently looking for more volunteers to run bridges:
The only thing anyone outside of the US needs to see to understand the insane situation we have with gun ownership can be found in this news story about Waymo driverless cars:
"“Haselton said that his wife usually keeps the gun locked up in fear that he might shoot somebody,” Jacobs wrote in the report. “Haselton stated that he despises and hates those cars (Waymo) and said how Uber had killed someone.”
Haselton's wife told officers he was diagnosed with dementia, according to a police report."
> Seriously, email these days isn't the greatest communication tool any more, thanks to the spammers.
Do you have any better alternatives?
> GMail does a pretty decent job of filtering, but not everyone uses it.
Yes, anyone not using Gmail is completely inundated with spam every second of every day, is a troglodyte, and how do they even survive? As the posted article shows, the best thing for everyone is to hand over all of our private information, communication, and GPS coordinates to the big tech oligopolies.
> Take into considering that while the wages for software engineers were high, they weren't as high as they are now.
That is a common misconception when people do not take inflation and housing cost increases into account. $1USD today is worth only 65 cents in 1999 according to the consumer price index:
Tech worker salaries only seem high relative to salaries for other workers, because the tech worker salaries have not been falling in inflation/housing cost adjusted terms for the past 30 years. IMO computer programmers are, as a whole, grossly underpaid today, just not as underpaid as much as people in other lines of work.
Amazon is a trust, not yet a monopoly. There is an inherent conflict of interest, and lack of recourse (forced arbitration), between Amazon marketplace sellers and Amazon the e-commerce store. Likewise between AWS customers and Amazon the e-commerce store and advertising network. By any reasonable consumer standards, AWS should be split off into a separate company. The pervasive surveillance and continual scandals surrounding Ring's handling of user data, when taken in context of Amazon's collection of user data from the e-commerce store, advertising network, Alexa, other Amazon business units, and purchased third party data, mean that Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire Ring in the first place. If the Department of Justice Antitrust Division had not been completely captured by corporate interests, they would be in the process of litigating to undo this acquisition right now.
40% of the adult US population is now obese, 70% is obese or overweight. Overweight people have a hard time dating, for those obese it is even tougher, and many give up hope. Men have a further problem: obesity is very strongly linked to diseases that have an impact on their ability to have an erection.
Stop right there. You know nothing about the "modern left" if you have never heard of John Zerzan. And if you think that he is some kind of Marxist because you skimmed a Wikipedia page, you are clearly a know-it-all idiot Dunning-Krugering himself.
> That's pretty much what my copy does. I'm grateful the profession has TAOCP as a resource, but the reality for the majority of workaday engineers is that most of the sort of art described in that series is abstracted out into libraries.
The books are a collection of algorithms and commentary on them. That is not that different from a collection of algorithms in a library.
> The keybindings it does have are terrible and give RSI, and crucially because there's a whole ecosystem of addons that try not to collide, they can never be changed, which is why CUA mode isn't default.
Everything you are claiming is wrong. I came to Emacs from the Apple HIG shortcut world (which btw, Apple copied from PARC), and I think the keyboard shortcuts Emacs comes with are better thought out and more ergonomic to use. That is why they are the default (Emacs users prefer them), instead of cua-mode, which comes with Emacs and is easily activated.
Emacs key bindings are also far easier to change that in any other application, because Emacs keymaps are first-class objects with inheritance and are separate from commands. That is why Emacs can easily support not just completely different keyboard shortcuts, but completely different input methods such as modal editing.
> I mean, if you're too conservative to use modern technology, this doesn't seem like the right field to work in.
That kind of attitude ("why aren't you using <insert personal preference bloated point-clicky IDE released 6 months ago>?") is just as obnoxious as what is in the article.