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logicchop | 3 years ago | on: “Unexplainable” core dump (2011)

Hard to say. Most of the uses probably predated the custom operator new and so nobody thought about it. Not to mention the places you cannot sneak into to switch to std::nothrow.

logicchop | 3 years ago | on: “Unexplainable” core dump (2011)

I suspect that windows still has a subtle FP restoration bug. We do large scale validation of floating point data and occasionally get ever so subtly different results.

logicchop | 3 years ago | on: “Unexplainable” core dump (2011)

This is likely your answer. C++ story. I worked at a large company that had a "no exceptions" policy and a custom operator new. If a new expression failed it would return nullptr instead of throwing. So lots of people wrote "checking" code to make sure the result wasn't nullptr, except that the compiler would always just elide that code since the standard mandates that the result cannot be nullptr. Many weird crashes ensued.

logicchop | 3 years ago | on: Stop saying 10x developer

I think this is worrying too much about a particular interpretation of "10x" and ignores the subterranean fact that people are trying to convey. There just are super-valuable devs. Everyone knows this. They stick out. And they are productive in a myriad of ways. Some are leetcode superstars, sure. But some are simply masters of unblocking the rest of the team. It's hard to even associate a particular skillset with it. But I'm sure most of you have a list in your head of the people you would absolutely want to poach if you were starting up something new.

logicchop | 3 years ago | on: Why does anything exist?

I think it does exactly that, which is supposes a one-time exception to get out of infinite regress. But, I mean, if God exists, that's how it is. So the story doesn't seem incoherent. As for asking why is God necessary, I think that is a misplaced question. God's necessity wouldn't derive from something else, because then it wouldn't be necessity (just another derived contingency). The starting point is that something necessary has to be the basis of the rest of the stuff, that's it.

logicchop | 3 years ago | on: Why does anything exist?

I don't see what the infinite sequence of contingency buys you. Seems you might as well say there is fundamentally no reason why anything is (though I think that's untenable).

logicchop | 3 years ago | on: Why does anything exist?

Maybe, but the capacity for "something" to "stop something else from existing" seems to depend on laws, and the laws themselves seem pretty contingent. Why are the laws sustained? If the laws changed and things themselves caused their own demise, things couldn't just go on existing. So what keeps the current laws on the books?

logicchop | 3 years ago | on: Why does anything exist?

You probably have to assume there is a necessary substrate. What else can you possibly think? Contingency means being contingent on something else. You could suppose that the "something else" is itself contingent, but then you have another contingency. At some point you will likely take it for granted that there must be something that is itself not contingent and that the rest of the stuff downstream turns on it being the way it is.

logicchop | 3 years ago | on: Why does anything exist?

It doesn't really have anything to do with time. The "sustainment" question is different from the "causal" question. Causal questions are typically temporal and past-looking. Sustainment is a question about "now", always.

logicchop | 3 years ago | on: Why does anything exist?

Depends on if you mean direct-dependence or some ancestral-dependence. Contingent things can depend on other contingent things in some narrow scope. But a complete answer to "why X?" (e.g., "because Y") should avoid begging the question (e.g., "ok, why Y?").

logicchop | 3 years ago | on: Why does anything exist?

That is the whole point of God as an explanation. God is where the buck stops on contingency. God is necessary.

logicchop | 4 years ago | on: Don’t be spooky

I should clarify: I don't mean that you shouldn't be worried when you get the "let's talk" message. What I mean is, it shouldn't come across as "spooky"; that is, when they say it, it shouldn't leave you with the utterly baffling sensation of not knowing whether they are about to tell you something utterly horrible or something utterly trivial.

logicchop | 4 years ago | on: Don’t be spooky

If you are in a new relationship with management and they are already hitting you with vague "let's talk" statements, you are pretty much guaranteed that they are bad communicators and that you won't be able to glean much of anything from what they say to you.

logicchop | 4 years ago | on: Don’t be spooky

I don't disagree, but I think it's more about establishing a good rapport where statements like "let's talk" can be informative and not just confusing. If you trust your manager and have good communication with them, "let's talk" should get you worried. Management obviously has a power advantage, but good managers that communicate effectively know how to become reliable signals, even when they aren't in a good position to divulge more information. In other words, I take it that the problem OP raised is not "don't signal that bad news is coming" but rather "don't put out confusing signals." If you are a manager, and you say to someone "let's talk" and they can't figure out how to interpret that - they can't figure out whether they are about to be fired or whether you simply want to ask them about such-and-such - you have already done a bad job at establishing a rapport. A good manager, who has established good communication, can use a carefully placed vague statement to communicate that something unpleasant is coming.

logicchop | 4 years ago | on: Don’t be spooky

The way I see it, if "let's talk when you get a minute" comes across as spooky that means you already have a communication breakdown and mistrust has already blossomed. Here's a slightly different scenario: You have a disagreement with management; there are many subsequent conversations happening behind the scenes; but no one keeps you in the loop or updates you on what is being decided. In that situation, practically any message (apart from "here is exactly what we are thinking..") comes across as spooky, and you will start reading into what _isnt_ said. In short, if you think someone might want to know something, and they have a reasonable claim on deserving to know, let them know. Keep people informed, and if you do that then "let's talk when you get a minute" won't feel like such a lurking shadow.

logicchop | 4 years ago | on: Afghan president flees the country as Taliban move on Kabul

Of course there was a "winning strategy." China is about to embark on it. There must have been clear signs that the Taliban was capable of doing what they just did. Even if the goal is to exit Afghanistan (which we should have done a long time ago) you still need to build a bridge out and not simply let the cardboard government collapse on itself spontaneously. We should have been making concessions to the Taliban, acknowledging it is a legitimate political force in Afghanistan. At the very least we should have negotiated a permanent military base in Afghanistan while accepting Taliban control of the rest of the nation. We spent too long trying to do too much and ended up getting nothing and looking stupid.

logicchop | 4 years ago | on: Meritocracy and Its Defects

The article sounds like it wants to criticize "meritocracy", but it really just ends up criticizing the measures of merit that someone (strawman?) apparently has? If it were really critical of "meritocracy" it would be advocating for random lotteries for jobs, or promotions, or whatever. But nobody wants that, not even radical "anti-meritocrats." All they seem to actually want is a different measure of merit, but then what's the trade-off? We'll get a different elite and a different underclass? I don't see the point. It would be different, of course, if this guy were arguing that, for example, by using a different measure of merit, a business could improve its performance, or we could get better doctors, or our software wouldn't have so many bugs. But I didn't catch anything that suggested the author has anything at all like this in mind..

logicchop | 4 years ago | on: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

> Cardinal even having more flexibility

I thought Gibbard-Satterthwaite (or maybe just Gibbard's version) applied to cardinal systems as well. This seemed likely to me for some reason, as if an ordinal method could approximate any particular cardinal discretization by just including "ghost" candidates that can be packed (ordinally) between your actual candidates.

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