xbpx's comments

This is a hilarious comment. It's exactly the comment that was made in the 70s when workers had a larger share of national income and when average salaries could afford a house. Indeed, soon thereafter in the late 70s we saw rounds of union busting, neoliberalism, Thatcherism and Regan and drastic cuts to taxes and employment security. Inequality spiked, wages stagnated, many millionaires and billionaires produced and the growing frustration and malaise in the working classes generating the rise of nationalist and populist movements the world over. It's becoming a bipartisan realization we went too far with both Republicans and Democrats calling for reshoring, investment in industry and yes, worker protection. The most minimal watered down corporate friendly worker protection. This is 10% of what any radical would wish for.

And already this comment. The reactionary spirit has been embedded deeply.

A REPL isn't just a REPL. You are comparing modern day Toyota Corollas to a Spaceship sent from the future to the 80s. One is just different level radical. At least when it's baked by SLY or SLIME

Maybe because your entire lived experience has been reordered based on your skin color and how it isn't a light yellow color. Powerful cultural strands exist in your community to push back against constraints placed upon you because of your skin color. Maybe seeing the only option for skin color in tech be much more representative of white skin color only serves to further remove your lived reality from public debate and understanding.

Highlighted beyond irony by comments like this.

GDP doesn't measure a healthy economy however. It measures aggregate production which can be owned by a small minority of extremely wealthy asset holders while everyone else needs to work double shifts. I'd want a measure of inequality in whatever function is used to measure happiness.

Amen, real person role playing will remain superior to video games until AIs are more capable and fantastically deprived than humans. Until then, people bring the surprise, serendipity and wonder that makes a new game unique

Lisp feels more creative. You can bend the language, it's malleable. Rust may be the new Engineer's best friend but to me, Lisp remains the tool for the artist. Use Rust to Do It Right. Use Lisp to have fun.

It's so the middle managers can see that the line managers have done some due diligence. This is to prevent the case where line managers "don't have a good feeling" about an employee but can't point to specific items that have been communicated to the employee. In an ideal world with great line managers you wouldn't need a performance review, it would be handled in 1:1s. That's not our world and we need rigid formal systems to increase the likelihood that basic steps are followed, on average across many managers and employees.

Is this one a West Coast Canadian term of a certain era?

It was popular in Vancouver in the oughts but I've been met with blank stares elsewhere on the continent, especially East Coast younger millennials.

Regular exercise. Make your priority be health not work. Fit everything around that. Every day the goal is to get an hour of exercise in and hopefully some work. In my case the work actually improves.

Family and kids makes this more challenging but with clear communication and scheduling my partner and I can both make it work... with the odd chaotic off-cycle.

The Dig - political left with structural / material analysis of world around us. The back catalogue is vast. Excellent host, Daniel Denver

Know your Enemy - analysis of the US right-wing. Excellent and personable hosts, Matthew and Sam.

I went back to school in sciences at age 27. This is after flunking out of maths when I was younger because I never understood the point and had challenges outside of school that distracted me...

Graduated with a masters at 32 with advanced maths under my belt.

Started working at a startup at 33. Dir Eng by 35 owing to my time as a foreman in construction and remote geophysical exploration. Turns out managing people in those fields is more difficult than software and ended up being excellent preparation.

This is all years ago now but there is nothing systemic that has changed. Career switches can give you a superpower, or at least, another perspective. The key for me is honest work, tenacity and empathy. The rest is, as they say, details.

When the team doesn't talk synchronously. So many times I've seen folks post a question that needs swift response to some issue tracker and then act indignant when they are held accountable for the thing not getting done. The answer is almost always "well no one responded until 3 days later".

Yes well no one asked you to leave some text on a server somewhere and hope someone sees it. They asked if you could do X by Y time and you said YES.

Hey cheers, I bet I'm around a decade on the same install of Arch too. That spans 3 machines. The trick for me is hot swap backups. I do an rsync backup of the drive to an identical disk (nowadays a 1TB 980 Evo) and then immediately swap the backup drive to the main drive. I have little helper scripts to format drives, do backups and automatically update fstab and the boot config. So new machine no problem, rsync the files into it and boot it up and I have everything exactly as it should be.

Now and again I'll do some package spelunking (pacman makes this straightforward) and clean out cobwebs. Next on my list is my emacs config which is like 15 years old and a couple generations out of date. I wouldn't care but startup times are slowing down and there is a lot of great ideas and packages to solve this problem. Just need the time, it's a few hours here and there, but easily enough to keep Arch going forever!

Lisp code is written in those parenthesis because in lisp, that is how you write a list. This means that your code is data that you can easily compute. It's trivial in lisp to quote some code and operate on it, also it means the macro system looks a lot like writing "regular" code. This opens up programming paradigms such as language extending, DSLs and meta programming (writing programs that write programs) that are clumsy, difficult or impossible in other languages.

When someone says "In Lisp, everything is a list" ... They really mean everything

I identify with much in this blog post. One novelty argument:

Managing is hard because it embodies the dialectic between capital and workers. Therefore a deep understanding of the Marxist critique (and exposé) of capital will help provide an analytical framing around what an effective manager needs to do. You can approach it from other lenses but they all break down due to the two polar forces most strongly at play.

This has honestly aided me greatly. Your mileage may vary.

In my fantasy world this is a useful screed.

The world I see is different. You have your dominant companies and their web apps. They set the standard and cultural forces (what's cool, modern, high quality) push everyone to adopt or get left behind (loss of user growth, status, money).

Because we are all competing for attention and dollars, this is capitalism after all, we'll keep trying to outdo each other. And the big kids with the cool toys will set the standards and everyone else will race to keep up.

Cultural forces will indeed change, new tech will distrupt and new players emerge... But the invisible hand will soon be at work again and we'll be writing WASM blackbox web apps with kubernetes and a few blockchains running on on our laptops.

That too will pass, but we'll always be pushing, adding more complexity than strictly necessary for basic needs. It's what the system demands!

This looks promising

"As the coroner's inquest reached a verdict of an act of God, Meux & Co did not have to pay compensation."

The good ol days, sometimes a lot like these current days...

Yes we're all looking at you Sacklers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family

"The bankruptcy judge acknowledged that the Sacklers had moved money to offshore accounts to protect it from claims, and he said he wished the settlement had been higher."

Wished... Indeed... Only an act of God could have stopped them surely.

Thomas Piketty's Capital and Ideology.

It's like a master class in historical political relations all in a single (large) book.

I see it as calling a function with the link as the Arg stored in some structure. [SomeFunc](CalledWithLinkArg)

Not sure why that one stuck for me.