digitalarborist's comments

I'm sorry, but I have to ask, if you don't care what we all think, why do you bother talking to us at all?

There was a time when Youtube view and subscriber count was similar. Now there is a cadre of Youtube professionals whos careers live and die by these numbers.

Also, neither I nor anyone else cares about the points, I don't expect to spend them at the karma store. What I do care about, as I'm sure you do as well, is whether something I said is incorrect and why.

Tech folks always say communicating with huge corporations is similar to communicating with a psychopath, but communicating online in general has this feeling. You're not talking to anyone it's like talking to a brick wall that will give you a pat or a prod after you give it a couple hours. I think I might just not be up for online mob communication like this and will just go back to lurking. I do have the desire to contribute, but it doesn't really feel worth it a lot of the time.

Funny how this is taking on a family dynamic:

Baby-Boomers: Eldest child, assertive and confident, though takes for granted the opportunities it's been provided by being the eldest, feels the younger kids would be more successful if they just followed their example.

Gen-Xers: Middle child, mostly forgotten about, more involved in taking care of the youngest.

Mellenials: Youngest child, brash and open, generally optimistic, though sometimes hit hard by the harshness of the world.

That's a problem with all open source software though. Heartbleed comes to mind. This problem may be compounded a bit by the fact that npm has such a low barrier to entry due to its simplicity.

Though saying other open source software is secure due to a higher barrier to entry feels like security by obscurity. Particularly since that higher barrier is often not higher because it's insisted on being high quality tested code, but just because it involves greater complexity in actually submitting it to be distributed.

It's interesting to me that everyone uses that isArrayish module example as though it represented the downfall of civilization when to me, yes maybe it represents the downfall of civilization a little bit, but it also represents the strength of npm. Absolutely anyone can create code, put it online and then have others use it fast. Of course this means you do end up with a lot of nonsense, but a lot of brilliance too.

Nobody does this with maven because maven and the Java community in general makes this hard. It's doable, but generally takes more work, which is a strength and a weakness for the Java community. You could argue this is "worse is better"[0], making sacrifices, in this case in redundancy for simplicity of use. People should really just write the code for isArrayish if it is this simple, or perhaps the language or babel or whatever should provide such a function.

However no one forces anyone to use these, if you want a standard library, use Lodash, here is its isArray: https://lodash.com/docs#isArray, it even has differentiations of this like: https://lodash.com/docs#isArrayLikeObject. Complaints about something like the isArrayish module make my head hurt. It filled a void fast where one existed so people could use it and get on with their projects and subsequently their lives. I just don't see anything wrong with that.

0) https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

> Yes, everyone could learn mathematics. Just like everyone could get rich and go into space.

Ah the false analogy[1], we meet again. You don't really believe this do you? I mean you could make the same argument about gardening. Literally anyone can learn at least basic math, most people just don't have the inclination.

1) http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/falsean.htm

I know you wrote this with tongue firmly planted in cheek, but I agree this list has nothing to do with the people involved. It seems possible that if pg wrote a piece on maximizing your odds of being a healthy adult both of those could be included, probably along with not doing a startup.

Trouble is, like with all advice, your mileage may vary. Some people sacrifice themselves and the people around them completely for years in the hope of startup success and then bask in glory and wealth, others do the same thing and end up broken and alone at the end. Some people take the safe path, have loving friends and family and enough to live on, others take the safe path and end up unfulfilled, not producing a tremendous amount of value and next in line for layoffs.

It's probably easier to make a list on what startups need than what people need at a fundamental level.

Not sure what you mean "rerun all the tree", if you change a a state variable that is added as a prop in another component it has to rerun refresh on those components, but only those components, so not all the tree. Also not sure how this relates to atomic updates, with a flux pattern each state change is associated with ui changes propogating down, the difference to angular is, they aren't supposed to be allowed to propogate up, which you can do in angular since there isn't necessarily a central state store and since there is two way binding children or parent can change the variable.

It's easy enough to write two way binding into a react state variable, it's just nice to not have it happen by default since having state able to change anywhere in the app can get confusing.

This has been happening a lot with words, Negro to African American, Indian to Native American, moron, idiot, and retard were all once medical terms, now replaced by mentally challenged, midget to little person, queer also once a medical term, replaced by member of LGBTQ. Many disorders are being replaced by acronyms, ADD, ADHD, PTSD etc.

I think removing the humanity from these words is part of the point, because people are naturally judgmental, if they hear "Operational Exhaustion" they think "Oh, just tired then", not that there is a medical issue. You can't use "mentally challenged" as an insult precisely because it's had the humanity sucked out. Assuming that a term having "humanity" means for it to have emotional connotations.

Words are stretched and tortured such that it's difficult to immediately derive the meaning, which again is the point, to get you to use your logical brain rather than your more emotional lizard brain.

I think it's pretty good :D. I know the apprehension of releasing creative works on the internet as you never know how they will be received. Thanks for putting yourself out there.

I think you're likely underestimating the resources it takes to make robotics work. They get better all the time, but they do so by a lot of blood sweat and tears. We haven't even managed to make them walk at all convincingly yet, it's a really tough problem. As messy as the virtual world can be, the real world is a lot messier. In the long run robots are almost certainly cheaper, in the short term though they are usually very expensive resource wise.

I agree the backend can't be truly generic, there will always need to be config. But the config which provides the customizations could be made arbitrarily more simple.

The backend can't truly go away because it's always going to be managed by somebody, AWS, App Engine, Azure, etc. From the developers point of view though, running systems on these platforms could be made easier to implement and run to the point of being effortless.

I didn't mean to suggest tossing out server side validation. Though now that you mention it, if you wanted to, you could just toss every request into Hadoop, it's not polluting your data because the metadata associated with it indicates each is a request, and nothing more. When it gets to be too much, you could flush it, or do whatever you want with it.

I don't think custom backends are going away either, I do think it will become way less prevalent then it is today though, similarly how all programs used to do manual memory management, this hasn't gone away but most programmers now rely on garbage collection.

So much of backend work is redundant, login, user info management, allowing the creation of groups of users, user following, user data uploading or sharing. Not to mention all the DevOps, managing CloudFormation scripts, VPCs, proxies, load balancing, dns, ssl, cdn, database schema, the list goes on, and that's before there has been any original development at all.

With react native and electron (I haven't found the atom browser or vs code weirdly restricted) the web stack is moving into desktop territory and with serverless frameworks becoming more prevelent hopefully this will make writing original software easier with less redundant work.

As to your point about data processing needing a custom backend, I see the exact opposite. Generally all this data is just funneled into a generic hadoop cluster and can be manipulated any which way from there using spark or any number of data analysis tools.

Probably that otherwise normal people just don't make it into the stories because they're not as memorable. Though often you'll hear of people otherwise healthy who are down on their luck, addiction problems, abuse, or just general anxiety and depression. The other problem is that the definition of sane changes depending on context.

I recall watching a documentary on Japanese school children and their attitudes towards baseball, ritualistically crying when they lost a game. A western therapist could easily justify feeding them all meds, but in reality it wasn't particularly unhealthy. I feel like a lot of ADHD is kids being kids and teachers and parents wanting an easy way to deal with it. Lobotomies used to be common less because anyone believe they cured anyone but because they rendered the patient docile. Mental health ends up being as much about societies easy function as it is about helping the patients.

There's a reason those laws exist. Mental health is still a taboo topic and as soon as anyone knows there's an issue the reflex is for everything to go into lockdown. This comes up on reddit with some frequency [1][2]. Some of the stories are pretty harrowing. Though a lot of this is to do with the poor state of many mental health institutions.

1) https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3hlcyu/serious_r...

2) https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1tdoc1/redditers...

It's probably a mistake to assume that just because it's the way we do it that it has to be the way machines do it. Although that's usually the initial assumption. In the early days of flight most attempts were based on birds, similarly submersible vehicles were based on fish. We know now it's better to use propellers. It could be we just haven't found what is analogous to a propeller for the AI world.