Where does the supply come from? You could still argue that people choose this as a career when they have the choice of better-paid ones, increasing the supply of people with the smarts and training needed by the publishers.
I don't know if that's what's happening, but it might work towards TFA's point.
It probably has to do with the fact that we condition children and adolescents to consider white-collar jobs as more noble than blue-collar jobs, then we tell them that to get a good white-collar job, they need a degree... and then we make STEM degrees hard by subjecting students to more math than most people realistically need. So we have a lot of frontend developers who know calculus and an oversupply of people with humanities degrees.
With that degree, you're generally pushed toward jobs in journalism, publishing, graphic design, teaching, administrative functions, and so on. Most of these pay relatively little.
Calculus is required for English degrees in other countries. Heck a lot of countries require some amount of calculus just to graduate high school.
Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.
6 semesters seems like... a lot? IIRC getting a math undergrad at my Uni didn't require that many classes of calc.
I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics.
Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.
I don't think it's a matter of more 'noble', simply a more comfortable option if it's available to you. It has historically paid better and taken a lower toll on your body. The former is now less true, but the latter is still a big issue.
It's a shame that calculus isn't required by every college degree. Just because I'm not integrating functions during my normal work, doesn't mean I don't benefit from understanding the fundamental principles.
Yes, totally. I was about to undero surgery but found out the doctor didn't even know about Laplace transforms. He small-mindedly spent his formative years learning anatomy, never benefitting from the knowledge of frequency-domain derivatives. I dodged that bullet by storming out.
Would you say the same about learning Christianity: maybe not directly useful for your job, however it is rather foundational to much of English society.
My current hypothesis is that as AI forces software development down less and less deterministic pathways, I suspect that the value of a basic CS degree will diminish relative to humanities training. Comfort with ambiguity, an ability to construct a workable "theory of mind", and to construct unambiguous natural-language prompts will become more relevant than grokking standard algorithms.
Most people don't have the "choice" of being an engineer or software developer currently.
To be blunt, it's much easier for the majority of the population to get an English degree or some other generic liberal arts degree and therefore be qualified for an entry level job in the publishing industry.
I'm sure someone somewhere is giving up a highly lucrative job to roll the dice on the next great American novel, but it's not a meaningful number.
> adding another parsing step after the json/toml/yaml parser is done with it. That's not ideal either
I'd argue that it is ideal, in the sense that it's the sweet spot for a general config file format to limit itself to simple, widely reusable building blocks. Supporting more advanced types can get in the way of this.
Programs need their own validation and/or parsing anyway, since correctness depends on program-specific semantics and usually only a subset of the values of a more simply expressed type is valid. That same logic applies across inputs: config may come from files, CLI args, legacy formats, or databases, often in different shapes. A single normalization and validation path simplifies this.
General formats must also work across many languages with different type systems. More complex types introduce more possible representations and therefore trade-offs. Even if a file parser implements them correctly (and consistently with other such parsers), it must choose an internal form that may not match what a program needs, forcing extra, less standard transformation and adding complexity on both sides for little gain.
Because acceptable values are defined by the program, not the file, a general format cannot fully specify them and shouldn’t try. Its role is to be a medium and provide simple, human-usable (for textual formats), widely supported types, avoid forcing unnecessary choices, and get out of the way.
All in all, I think it can be more appropriate for a program to pick a parsing library for a more complex type, than to add one consistently to all parsers of a given file format.
This is an interesting angle, and I could see how the prospect of reducing the flow of oil to China, and also to teetering democracies in Europe, might have occurred to the US decision makers as beneficial. However, the question is, how much reduction for how long, and how critical this would be for China.
And the point remains that this operation has been started in a way that leaves the US in a weaker strategic position, not just in the Gulf, but also, crucially, in the far east. It has now become harder to contain China, both in the medium term by the reduction of US military capabilities both globally and in-theater by pulling out strategic defensive assets from South Korea and Japan; but also long-term, by putting themselves into a situation where they have to do that, retroactively, after painting themselves into a corner elsewhere, therefore undermining their posture as a credible, rational actor that can be relied on to oppose China's ambition in the region.
You can easily get compressed episodes of a TV show that are 250MB, so it's like watching a TV series at the rate of 2 episodes every 5 minutes. Obviously better quality is in the range 500MB-1.5GB for a 45-minute episode, so even being generous it's 20 minutes of compressed TV or 70 minutes of uncompressed music every 5 minutes.
Yes, as I understand it, the ~700 MiB "standard" was derived from the capacity of a CD. A rip is definitionally a copy that lacks some of the original data of the source media.
I see a fun metaphor for doing the tedious work of arranging a meeting, getting people to join, and getting a solution. Reading it put this way made my day a little brighter. I needed that, too.
Btw, border collies are awesome dogs, and sheep are also awesome. I find no automatic disrespect in using them as stand-ins for our human foibles; intent matters.
One of my first real experiences with Border Collies was at a family reunion. There were a bunch of kids running around playing in the park. At one point someone showed up with a border collie and I watched with delight and amazement as the dog did the herding thing and slowly and carefully pushed the group of children closer together. The kids didn't even realize it until they were way too close to each other to comfortably play tag. The owner called the dog back and the games continued.
Later on I ended up with a sheltie with a very strong herding instinct. She mostly just acted like the Fun Police though with the other dog and cats. Lovely creatures!
Herding sheep is such an interesting experience too. The best way I can describe it is that each sheep has a really large soap bubble around them. You need to push gently on the bubble to get them to go where you want them too. If you push too hard and the bubble pops, they'll scatter and you have to step back and let the bubble reform.
For some reason, you're reading things into the original statement that are not there. "An etiquette exists in a culture" does not mean everyone has to follow or even be aware of it.
If mentally adding an "s" to the original comment enables you move past this issue and actually consider the comment as it was intended, then I would say that is well done and worth the effort to get to this point. :) Have a great Sunday!
Usually, you don't want your developers to be coding monkeys, for good results. You need the human developer in the loop to even define the spec, maybe contributing ideas, but at the very least asking questions about "what happens when..." and "have you thought about...".
In fact, this is a huge chunk of the value a developer brings to the table.
And this is usually one of the defining traits of a senior engineer. They understand the tech and its limitations, and thus are able to look around corners, ask good questions, and, overall, provide quality product input.
Programs are a socially constructed artifact that help communicate and express a model (which is perpetually locked in people's heads with variance across engineers; divergence is addressed as the program develops). Determining what should or should not be done is a matter of not just domain knowledge, but practical reason, which is to say prudence, which is a virtue that can only be acquired by experience. It is an ability to apply universal principles to particular situations.
This is why young devs, even when clever in some local sense, are worse at understanding the right moves to make in context. Code does not stand alone. It exists entirely in the service of something and is bound by constraints that are external to it.
This is very much my experience from working with outsourced development. Almost by design, they tend to lack domain expertise or an intimate understanding of the cultures and engineering values of the company they're contracted out to.
This means that they will very quickly help you discover all the little details that seemed so obvious to you that you didn't even think to mention them, but were nonetheless critical to a successful implementation. The corollary to that is, the potential ROI of outsourcing is inversely proportional to how many of these little details your project has, and how important they are.
So far I've found LLM coding to be kind of the same. For projects where those details are relatively unimportant, they can save me a bunch of effort. But I would not want to let an LLM build and maintain something like an API or database schema. Doing a good job of those requires too much knowledge of expected usage patterns working through design tradeoffs. And they tend to be incredibly expensive to change after deployment so it pays to take your time and get your hands dirty.
I also kind of hate them for writing tests, for similar reasons. I know many people love them for it because writing tests isn't super happy fun times, but for my part I'm tired of dealing with LLM-generated test suites being so brittle that they actively hinder future development.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that taboos should not be examined from within the space where they hold effect, because doing so calls into question the whole concept of a taboo and robs all taboos of their usefulness, and that would summon evidence for, or even cause cultural decline?
That sounds suspiciously like something a taboo would say that has something to fear from being looked at. ;)
I think this chain of reasoning is made of links that do not self-evidently follow. From my lay perspective, taboos seem more complex, resilient and variable to require a perfectly dogmatic approach to hold up. If they were this easy to bring down, they'd all be gone.
I'm also not sure what a "culture without taboos" is, or one has ever existed. Also, what is meant by "peak"? Is there an optimal amount or set of taboos? How do cultures with taboo-ical differences (and their peaks) compare to each other across space and time?
I think it is good and healthy to approach taboos with curiosity, whether it is to interrogate them or to appreciate them more.
Not should, can't. The assertion I'm referring to is that once something can be rationally discussed it's no longer a taboo, and once a culture has no taboos it has no real vitality or potential for growth left.
Nothing there about causing cultural decline, just evidence of it, and thereby limits on the kind of culture that can host the attitude you describe.
> once something can be rationally discussed it's no longer a taboo
This appears to be an entirely impractical definition, to the point that it would not allow a taboo to ever exist in a group of people capable of any sort of rational discussion. Any two moderately curious and independently-minded people could simply destroy any taboo by talking about it. They could even do it on purpose, using this fatal weakness.
Taboos, as in: the actual attitudes and behaviors of people, do not simply disappear the moment they are named or even questioned. I think we have to allow for taboos to be more nuanced, or we will struggle to describe the actual, interesting phenomenon, let alone do anything useful with it.
> once a culture has no taboos it has no real vitality or potential for growth left
That's an extraordinary claim on multiple levels, even when allowing for different ideas of what taboos are and how they work. I already mentioned some questions this raises, which makes it surprising to find the naked claim simply restated, in an even stronger form.
It's the kind of sentence that can sound really deep and powerful in passing, but when you look at it, is really only a huge, gaping question mark in a fancy dress.
I would not. But I don't see how that's relevant here.
I'm also not going to guess what point you're trying to make. I'd ask you to explain how exactly you think Overton windows relate to our argument about taboos, because, despite a superficial similarity, taboos and Overton windows deal with different things and are very much not the same; but I'm not interested in this style of discussion, sorry. Have a nice day!
People really say this ("I could care less") to express that they do not care at all. I've seen it happen here on this site. Calling out the sheer absurdity of it, even in a respectful way, is not universally well-received. Unfortunately, I could care less about this, as it sounds very grating to me.
I try to remember that I ain't got no problem with other "illogical" uses of negation and could this one in a similar light, but it's more easily said than done.
I don't know if that's what's happening, but it might work towards TFA's point.
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