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>This seems like a viciously difficult problem to solve to me. How do you hire someone for a city's transport agency who has the ability to manage a multi-billion dollar construction project? Anyone with those skills will surely be able to earn 10x more in the private sector.

You pay them 5x as much as they would get in the private sector. In all my hiring trouble never have I been in a position where spending what I was told was unreasonable money on staff did not result in a better outcome.

My only explanation why no one else does this is that CEO will never let anyone else in the company earn more than them.


Industries exist where “workers” can make way more than the leadership - sports, movies, etc.


I've been 50 since I was 12. I wonder what will happen when my body catches up with my age.


Not really. There's just as many opportunities in every age, it's just that you've been burned enough times to realize that the majority of opportunities are nothing of the sort.


I think the better example is that when you're young, the world hasn't sorted you into a bucket yet. Education, university, and your first jobs are largely that process: figuring out in which bucket you'll fit in society.

When you're older, if you want to change buckets, there is no easy mechanism. Even going back to university is clunky. It's by no means impossible, but I do wonder if we're missing out as a society for not having a very formalized process for adults who want to change buckets later in life.

The other problem is for lengthy training periods. Giving up 10 years for education and training when you're 20 is acceptable. When you're in your 30s or 40s, why that's a substantial amount of the time you have left before society decides you are old and must retire.


As the exception to that rule, I changed careers completely in my 60s, and picked up yet another at 66. You are welcome to remain in a bucket, I'm way too busy.


60s is a great time to jump buckets. Kids grown up. No debt if you're lucky and possibly some decent passive income.

30-50 is hard, primarily due to obligations you can't just walk away from. Your mortgage drains $Xk/month and the kids need braces is a bad time to try and find yourself ;)


Another part is the saying that the young are too dumb to know what's impossible.


1 and 2 are great, 3 isn't.


3. The difficulty with my genius is not that it’s there but that you don’t seem have any to recognise mine.


I feel like it can be simplified, but it’s basically there :)


>Needs a timeframe and context. Back in the, say, 1990s or maybe even early 2000s, when the modern world was just forming and the only languages students would work in were C and C++, maybe with some Bash and Perl on the side, 25k lines is a reasonable estimate for a brand new symbolic engine- a thing that in imperative languages didn't exist- with some element of typical PhD edge case over-engineering.

The modern world was very much formed by the 90s. Mathematica, Axiom, Maple, etc were all mature software written a decade or more ago. What people were doing wasn't writing a CAS from scratch but writing one that could slot into whatever program they needed at the time, e.g. chaotic simulation of the solar system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_o...


>Where do you even begin decompressing a claim like this?

Start writing the code and see where it takes you. Having done that type of work in grad school I moved from C++ to Guile for exploratory work for that very reason.

I then rewrote the slow bits in C as custom functions much like how you would in Python.


This has been my experience with music programming as well, music (not audio - music) being a highly symbolic domain. The past-me that had not experienced first class symbolic programming support would not have believed how much easier it is in a symbolic language (in my case Scheme). The size of my music code in Scheme compared to C/C++ or Python is an order of magnitude smaller.


I used to agree until I saw what has happened to biology in the last few years.

Economics is a science as good as any other. It's just that a lot of people with a lot of money want it to say something so it does. No science is insulated from its practitioners being bought out and the few with principles being silenced.


> I used to agree until I saw what has happened to biology in the last few years.

I'm missing the context here — could you expand on what's happened to biology?


The bureaucrats who should have been enabling and coordinating scientists instead decided what the policy should be for Covid19 and ruined the lives/careers of anyone who did not fall in line.

The worst of these decisions by far was the policy that covid was spread by aerosols and not airborne: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7

This was nothing short of Lysenkoism in the 21st century.


>Others have documented the sordid tale of Mastodon’s development better than I could, but suffice it to say that many queer people, people of color, and women have been cast aside by Rochko despite significant and often culturally defining contributions to the software and ecosystem.

This is why pandering to extremists never works.

It's time that everyone born after 1980 realize the Christ Freak of your childhoods has wrapped herself up in rainbows and moved onto a new culture to destroy.

In 202X The last refuge of the scoundrel is diversity.


what's the link between your quote and "pandering to extremists" ? who is the extremist in your reasoning ?

i'm trying to follow your argument but i honestly couldn't ( i also haven't followed mastodon dev story, so maybe that's why)


An extremist is someone who can't change her mind and won't change the subject.


That definition would make anyone who refuses to be silent about injustice an extremist.


No, those people are idiots.

Don't just talk about injustice, do something about it.


>What’s more terrifying is what happens to explicit material where consenting adults use filters like this? Is the law keeping up with tech like this?

I hope not. I'm sick and tired of everything being illegal because someone finds it yucky.


All my dealing with GNOME have made me dread the day that happens. We need a polyculture because we will never beat $mega_corp on a polished monoculture.


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