Something interesting maybe none or few you will likely experience: Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous meetings, presumably any 12-step meeting.
Say what you will about the 12 steps, and the belief of god that is associated with them. Feel free to disagree with the dogma. As a member I openly do that from time to time.
The real beauty of these meetings is that when someone speaks, they are left to speak completely uninterrupted. (Some groups use a timer and people generally wrap it up when the timer goes off.) Speaking about your experience during a meeting is called “sharing” and it is fucking magical. It’s helped me learn to listen, it’s helped me to speak extemporaneously on things that matter to me deeply, it’s taught me patience as an object lesson. You may not agree with what the other person is saying - there is no rule that you have to, and as might be expected it is not at all an infrequent thing that you hear absolute nonsense or worse. But there are also messages of beauty, there is often identification, there is definitely learning, and there is freedom, and there is genuine respect.
I believe there is some significant power in the 12 steps: confession of harms caused, attempts at restitution where at all appropriate, and learning to take responsibility for one’s actions. I do not believe in an all powerful and loving god because there is simply too much needless suffering in the world for me to agree with it. Occasionally I share about this but I try not to harp on it.
But the real beauty of a 12 step meeting is in the sharing, in my opinion…
This reminds me of the Infinite Jest bits about Boston AA. David Foster Wallace portrays these as some form of radical honesty and radical acceptance...with the possible exceptions of justifications, excuses, or dishonesty, which get met with concern.
For what it's worth, the notion that God controls everything isn't something that I have ever seen reflected in the Bible. In the Bible, God directly intervenes at specific instances, and there are patterns to the circumstances around those.
I realize this isn't the more common popular take, but I believe the characterization that you're using projects God as some type of puppet master who's going around giving people cancer, making people rich, etc. I have simply never seen it reflected in any part of the Bible and because of that, I think the notion is a bit dangerous.
God changed my life when I was at an absolutely low point after 2 years dealing with something that I finally had to admit I could not control about myself. I asked for His help when I had exhausted everything that I, as a man, could do to overcome it myself. And He fixed me as easily as flipping a light switch in a way that left me with absolutely no doubt.
To this day I wonder if I had to get to a point where I had to put aside my pride to realize I couldn't do it on my own.
the idea that we have perfect free will already is silly, so much of who we are and what we are allowed to do is environmental or due to circumstance. who cares if some magic dude makes people not want to murder kids when circumstance already makes a bunch of simple things like choosing to be an artist as a career impossible?
Also, since artists exist, it is possible to choose an artistic career. It's just not possible to guarantee that it would give you any comforts in life besides art.
i mean feel free to attack the example while letting the idea escape, anyone with 5 minutes could come up with a hundred professions where circumstance is the only prerequisite.
How much could the opportunities for the exercise of free will have been expanded through the application of modest constraints on it in relatively few cases?
Not even God can have omniscience, omnipotence, an unwavering commitment to free will, and an intimate concern for the wellbeing of individuals, without compromise. Personally, it's the tendentiousness of the arguments made to reconcile this conflict, not some logical flaw, that renders me skeptical, as they can be debated endlessly without resolution.
I do sometimes think about what a "good" socialist dictator would be like - and I'm aware there's been quite a few. But things like 'forced' socialism like capping health care prices or nationalizing health care, making rich people pay more taxes to lift up the poor (economic leveling), making politicians live as the poorest people they rule over for a few months.
Or things like limiting free speech; I like to think the world would be a better place if nazis, the KKK and the Confederation, their offshoots, teachings and their symbolisms were banned altogether. No tolerance for intolerance, and stuff.
I mean yeah, this line of thinking is dangerous, and the political left-right spectrum is more like a horseshoe, and I'm no political philosophist or anything. But as we are now, the right-wing is leaning heavily towards totalitarianism, to the point of wanting to abolish 'bad' law enforcement (like the FBI and IRS) in favor of their own cronies (the SS?), and disregarding the constitution and other laws while it suits them.
Assuming otherwise precipitates a collapse of the world to meaninglessness. There is too much intelligibility in the world for me to reconcile with that.
>I do not believe in an all powerful and loving god
Correct me if I'm wrong, but AA just requires you to believe in some kind of higher power, does it not? Saint Anselm's interpretation of God is not required. I don't know if you could stretch it all the way to Einstein's God, but you could probably get away with Zeus.
The way I was taught in the program: a higher power can be anything that you have the ability to believe can help you.
For many atheists and agnostics, that higher power becomes their particular 12 step group. Not the program as a whole, but literally the collective wisdom of the people they fellowship with. It could also be a door knob, if you can bring yourself to believe in the power of the door knob.
The logic is fairly straightforward:
1. Recognize that your best thinking got you here. If you were wise enough to fix it yourself, you wouldn't be in a program.
2. Since you can't fix it yourself, you have to develop faith that SOMETHING other than you can fix it.
3. This is easiest if you believe in a religious deity, since once you assume there is an all-powerful being who loves you, it's not a stretch to think that deity could give you the strength, courage, and wisdom needed to persevere. But it also works if you can simply believe that the group (or even your sponsor) is better able to guide you than you are able to guide yourself.
At least that's how I understood it and found it worked for me.
Lots of development practices come back again. E.g. techniques for optimizing code for computers sometimes make a resurgence for mobile phones a decade later.
Without sounding like a dick … I totally would have let one of my old flat mates chill for a bit! No immediate danger there, and potentially kinda funny, but yea every situation is different.
The more worrying thing is the alarms button seemingly does nothing
It’s all in the eye of the beholder. I once had a friend trick me into running barefoot through a few cactus patches. We’re still great friends to this day.
Lowering the risk of a situation, ignoring the potential panic of your "friend", all of it for some laugh... Sure sounds like a solid example of being a dick.
Note that I'm doing evidence-based work and hypothesis, in no way am I being judgemental. We're on HN, after all ;)
I used to have a friend who, whenever he was going to say something incredibly rude to people, would preface his remarks with the statement "I don't mean to be rude but..."
How did you conclude there is no immediate danger? There is something obviously wrong with the elevator. What if it plummeted down and someone died? Even a couple of floors can turn out badly.
Rather than a tool like Copilot, which does look very interesting, I'd be curious to see the effect of using evergreen (self-updating) off-the-shelf free open-source components.
Imagine if you get get an app that uses `http-rest-api` and `http-www-crud` with `http-www-multifactor` and `http-rest-api-license-key` and you could automatically be using the latest rest API, the latest CRUD framework, the latest multifactor/whatever framework (which you'd probably pin to some standard like YubiKey so user tokens don't get invalidated regularly). The actual reference implementation could be done in pseudocode even, and ported to many languages (ok this is getting too meta). You could throw together a professional quality application in a few lines of package management. And if someone finds a bug in the code, it gets updated, and next time a release is cut you'll pull it down automatically and deploys itself.
I've copied plenty of Microsoft sample code verbatim, because the Win32 API sucks and their samples usually get the error handling right.
But, I can't think of a single scenario where I've copied something from Stack Overflow. I'm searching for the idea of how to solve a problem, and typically the relevant code given is either too short to bother copying, or it's long and absolutely not consistent with how I want to write it.
"Too short to bother copying"? I copy single words of text to avoid typing and typos. I would never type out even a single line of code when I could paste and edit.
> "Too short to bother copying"? I copy single words of text to avoid typing and typos. I would never type out even a single line of code when I could paste and edit.
Very honest suggestion: learn how to touch type. You can still copy if needed, but your typed input will be much faster.
I'm somewhere between 45-75 wpm. But Ctrl+C Ctrl+V can type 300wpm!
Typing when you could paste is like having that Github Copilot put the right sentence right in front of you and you decide to type over it instead. Not only does it feel like wasted and robotic effort, typing everything leads to RSI.
I'm not sure why people disagree. Another symptom is that I insist on aliases for everything while others type out all the commands every time. Maybe I get distracted by the words when I type and lose my train of thought?
You need to highly the correct test first and move the curser to the correct location to paste text. I bet you can type 123123 several times faster than you can highlight that text in this comment and past it into a reply.
Same here. I copy boilerplate code for new projects etc. regularly. But I don't remember copying anything verbatim from SO. Function, argument and variable names rarely fit the scheme used in the particular project I'm working on at that moment and usually I do a better job at adapting the code thinking what I'm doing rather than just copy and paste and then wonder what went wrong.
This book looks interesting. I'd like some advice on whether it will be useful for me.
I've been a professional dev for over ten years and I have a CompSci degree from a respected university. I'm getting paid principal engineering salary for a moderate sized city in the U.S. and I work remotely from Canada in a fairly cheap cost-of-living city at a small company (far from Silicon Valley salary, but pretty damn high for here).
Do you think this book will be useful to me? I want to maintain my career as a developer and grow in skill and salary. I have started blogging about a year ago and I do infrequently but I think my posts are decent. I also am taking the time to learn some stuff like ML and am constantly trying to improve my skills with stuff like PostgreSQL and Go.
you have more experience than i do, so your call on deciding whether you have a superset on this content. all i can offer is, if you do choose to check it out and decide it is not for you, I will honor your refund request.
Good luck! I am certainly always on the side of developers working on themselves.
Having an integrable folio-style keyboard is a hard requirement, and Apple seem to be filling this niche, though their manufacturer (Logitech) is the same company I've had an horrible experience with myself.
at 9", almost all PDF-format texts are readable, though good bookreading software is hard to come by. I've mostly settled on PocketBook, which is reasonably inobtrusive for reading, but which makes large-scale document management (10k+ items) impossible. The metadata fields, as an example, lack an author field, and updating content metadata is cumbersome to the point of being all but impossible.
I've been hunting for alternatives, but to date, no joy. Apple's devices look superior based on hardware, though I have concerns for the actual usage experience.
Something interesting maybe none or few you will likely experience: Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous meetings, presumably any 12-step meeting.
Say what you will about the 12 steps, and the belief of god that is associated with them. Feel free to disagree with the dogma. As a member I openly do that from time to time.
The real beauty of these meetings is that when someone speaks, they are left to speak completely uninterrupted. (Some groups use a timer and people generally wrap it up when the timer goes off.) Speaking about your experience during a meeting is called “sharing” and it is fucking magical. It’s helped me learn to listen, it’s helped me to speak extemporaneously on things that matter to me deeply, it’s taught me patience as an object lesson. You may not agree with what the other person is saying - there is no rule that you have to, and as might be expected it is not at all an infrequent thing that you hear absolute nonsense or worse. But there are also messages of beauty, there is often identification, there is definitely learning, and there is freedom, and there is genuine respect.
I believe there is some significant power in the 12 steps: confession of harms caused, attempts at restitution where at all appropriate, and learning to take responsibility for one’s actions. I do not believe in an all powerful and loving god because there is simply too much needless suffering in the world for me to agree with it. Occasionally I share about this but I try not to harp on it.
But the real beauty of a 12 step meeting is in the sharing, in my opinion…