Programmers of rattumb, how much truth is there to the rumor that many programmers can’t program, or that they cannot cross programming languages without specific instruction, or pick up new language concepts on their own?
If you know three programming languages within a paradigm, you can pick up another in a couple of weeks. You can write something simple after a day, but learning the API takes a bit more time.
If you know programming languages within three different paradigms, you can learn a language in another paradigm as quickly.
If you only do high-level stuff, moving to a lower level closer to hardware is harder than the other way round.
Moving to another paradigm within one programming language, say from MVC to a continuation-passing web framework or from a game library like SDL to an entity-component framework or from PostgreSQL to Redis, or from gradient descent to bayesian filtering, can also take some time.
If you know a couple of concepts and paradigms, you start working on day one, but you will only be really productive after a coupe of weeks.
That said: If you have trouble understanding a concept like distributed version control or object-oriented programming or shader pipelines, it is orders of magnitude easier to ask an expert to help, tell the expert what you think you understand, and let the expert tell you where your understanding needs to be updated. Experts can tell you where you’re wrong. If you learn a new paradigm, you can get stuck on a fundamental misunderstanding for some time.
Specific instruction from experts is great for that reason, even if you can pick stuff up on your own.
While what I’ve gone through so far mostly matches up with this (it took me about 10-20 manhours to feel like I was really starting to ‘get’ javascript in terms of general program structure and thus feel less tongue-tied, for instance), the real purpose of my question was to assess employment prospects according to the distribution of competence in the field.
With Newt fucking Gingrich complaining about Mueller overstepping his investigatory mandate, it’s beginning to seem like we’re reaching levels of hypocrisy that are ridiculous. It feels like it’s exceeding that which can be explained by generic ill intent, it feels like the universe is mocking us.
They’re all hypocrites, every last one of them, and in this moment, I am furious
Not because of some fake Newt Gingrich’s hypocrisy, but because our nation is eviscerated by our own political class’s incompetence
I have evolved beyond such petty, mortal concerns.
I’m out-of-phase with my home timezone, but rest assured, I am a true North American and not a paid poster operating on behalf of the Australian Hegemony.
Why do you think China is about to enter a period of decline?
Well, kind of. They have some serious challenges ahead in the 21st century which exceed those of America’s.
The rivers running red with industrial runoff? The gradual slowdown in economic activity that the PRC has depended on to remain in power? The continued significant corruption, debt, and malinvestment such as the ghost cities? But the biggest one is, of course, the after-effects of the One Child Policy, which dramatically increases the ratio of older dependents to workers, and puts more economic pressure on young people, making family formation difficult/unaffordable.
China can potentially rise to meet all of these challenges, but it will not be easy, and the stress may break the PRC government and result in a civil war.
To do so, it may be necessary to transform their style of government into something new, but if they go the direction I’d go if I were them? That may be one helluva fight for dominance of the 21st century.
(Not sure when I got this ask. In fact, I can’t even remember when in recent times I mentioned this about China. It is important to remember in this and other considerations that the Chinese are not stupid, contrary to what the outsourcing American corporations assured us with “but the good jobs will stay here!”)
Programmers of rattumb, how much truth is there to the rumor that many programmers can’t program, or that they cannot cross programming languages without specific instruction, or pick up new language concepts on their own?
jesus fucking christ, some poor soul shared David Hines’s debut article on Jacobite on /pol/ and the users are really going out of their way to prove his point about the right being incredibly disorganized and ill-prepared for any actual happening
What if people are not stupid because of political ideology, but political ideology is stupid because of people?
the thing that’s fucking killing me about The Last Night is that the idea of a like panopticon sousveillance state where everyone is under constant scrutiny by those around them, and any wrong move you make can be instantly broadcast to frothing legions of people who hate you and will do you real harm, is
a) extremely cyberpunk and something I’d be interested in exploring
b) a hugely fucking ironic premise, coming from a Gamergater
*inbetween digging out tweets from X years ago to report to people’s bosses to hopefully get them fired* damn. It’s really Ironic Coincidence that my enemies are concerned about frothing legions of people who hate them
If there is a gay gene, gay marriage and adoption will pull it out of circulation soon.
This is the usual and obvious response to people who say that gayitude can’t be genetic because otherwise it would have been selected out already. Bruh, before we had gay liberation being gay was not a major knock on fertility since you would probably be having kids anyway. Fortunately, now we do have gay liberation so we can weed the queers out of the gene pool as Darwin intended.
Cochran goes off against the “gay uncle” theory and other cockamamie schemes which claim that gayness is not selected out of the population because of some offsetting benefit, by making the entirely true point that the benefits to your family have to huge in order to compensate for taking you out of the gene pool entirely. However, this objection loses a lot of its force if the fertility loss from homosexuality is small. If homosexuals reproduce at rates similar to heterosexuals, then having the gay gene becomes all-upside from a Darwinian perspective.
Seen in this light, homophobia is a eugenic cultural institution which keeps gay genes in the gene pool by forcing even obligate homosexuals to marry and have children.
Personal anecdote indicates that Cochran is probably on so something:
I think it’s an alternative developmental trajectory that can reduce intermale competition for mates or something. Seems like it could be more influenced by early environmental triggers than anybody wants to admit. In-utero tuning to the parental environment is probably part of it. Cochran goes so far as to say that it has to be partly communicable, which would upset a lot of people.
I mean, Alzheimer’s is apparently bacterial/microbiomic in origin, but nobody treats it like it’s communicable because it really doesn’t look like it is. The vector would have to be extremely convoluted and indirect.
I don’t think we’ll lose the gays for another reason - by the end of the century, we will have figured out how to make new people gay or bisexual on purpose. That has to be factored in to the calculations.
The inability for the different political parties to work together to accomplish their goals is just like when I was working on this project for school and... Oh my god, I just remembered that time Emily refused to do her part of the group project, even though we had initially all agreed on what each of us had to do, and we had two weeks to get it done, but nooo, she just never got around to doing her part. She even had the easiest part, and I had to do it for her. Uhm, what was I saying before?
this is like a political cartoon except all the passive aggressive labels are set in a girl’s high school like a tedious anime
Glad we got that sorted out. Now onto the next item on our discourse agenda: Ugg boots - sexist, or female empowerment?
brutally appropriated from Australian bogan culture, next question
Funny that you say that because they literally were- the original Uggs were Aussie but the patent was filed by an American who saw it and copied it. Guess who’s making all the $$$. Hint it’s not the Aussie family business out somewhere in WA.
wait did you think I was joking
Me: I have never made a single joke in my life
Mutuals: I know yet we laugh anyway
“We don’t shitpost to lie. We shitpost because when the world itself is a joke, so is the truth.”
I think the “robot“ thing comes from this thinking that the majority of the cost of the items we buy is the cost to produce the item. Every once in a while, I see someone go though the cost breakdown of an item, and it’s transportation, retailing, marketing, and all the other things that you have to do other than making an item that cost most of the money.
That might be some alternative ways to organize society that could take advantage of reducing those costs, but… I think they’d be so exotic that you couldn’t call them Communism anymore - not in the way we understand it now, and not in the Fully Automated Luxury Communism way, either.
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was shot at congressional baseball practice in Del Ray, Virginia, and possibly four others were injured by an assailant, according to another lawmaker who was at the practice.
Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama said on CNN that he and other lawmakers tried to apply a tourniquet with his belt on one injured person to try and stop the bleeding. Scalise crawled to the outfield.
I’m afraid that we’ve crossed lines we can never come back from. Attacks on public servants are an attack on democracy.
A truckload of presidents have been assassinated over the course of U.S. history. Congresscritters have been succesfully murdered before. Democracy will survive.
Attack more public servants imo
Do you want right-wing paramilitaries? Because that’s how you get right-wing paramilitaries.
We already have more right-wing paramilitaries.
Elevated above background levels for now, but they’d disengage over time as the narrative of leftist violence lost credibility. Doing stuff that will only seem to prove them right is not a good plan. Have you even been here? The Klan/etc are not actually that big. In fact, they’re pretty friggin’ small relative to population.
I’ve figured out why I take such a strong dislike to fantasy stories where people are persecuted for their special powers. They’re often modeled on real oppression of people who were considered unimportant–poor, unattached, and not influential within the community. The stories reframe them as having supernatural gifts that make them more special than their oppressors, and that makes their oppression wrong. But if you need to be special to deserve not to be oppressed, then what does that say about the real not-special people who were persecuted, cast out, and outright murdered?
muggle pride! although they are something of a majority, so not quite the same.
Reminds me of a great insight I got from (IIRC) John C. Wright: the X-Men is such a powerful fantasy precisely because it allows you to imagine being both the innocent victim of persecution, with all the moral legitimacy that conveys in the modern world, and the ubermensch, the next stage of human evolution – at the same time.
it’s nice to see that Tumblr has both opinions on ethnic minorities, that they are bloodthirsty savages who carry knives and start fights and cavort in the streets with dark designs on our women or that they are precious smol cinnamon rolls whose quaint folkways and colorful costumes must be protected at all costs.
wait, cinnamon rolls isn’t some kind of lewd slang?
“Jeremy Corbyn tried to pass through a law that would required private landlords to make their homes safe and “fit for human habitation” last year – but it was rejected by the Conservatives.
Labour proposed an amendment to the Government’s new Housing and Planning Bill – a raft of new laws aimed at reforming housing law – in January last year, but it was rejected by 312 votes to 219.
According to Parliament’s register of interests, 72 of the MPs who voted against the amendment were themselves landlords who derive an income from a property.”
Whatever you think about the man as an individual or politician, he sure is on the right side of history a lot.
More regulations driving up the cost of housing <—-> Right side of history
the regulation about not cladding the outside of high rise buildings in flammable material tho
having sufficient fire escapes
for that matter fire alarms
very poor choice of example of regulatory harm
I’m sure our dear Voxette wouldn’t mind losing the regulations in favor of requiring all landlords to carry insurance against the death or debilitating injury to occupants with a cap at $1 million per occupant, reflecting the cost to the rest of society of people dying in unsafe housing. After all, it would be terribly immoral to give the landlords a subsidy, right?
They will of course also be required to carry sufficient insurance for neighboring buildings. It wouldn’t be very fair if they got away with a huge fire burning down someone else’s property just because they were bankrupt.
Right, and the insurance company needs to prove that it can actually cover these policies, which requires them to inspect the properties and regulate their safety, such as not covering the exterior with fuckin’ inflammable cladding.
You’re going to get regulation one way or another.
Glad we got that sorted out. Now onto the next item on our discourse agenda: Ugg boots - sexist, or female empowerment?
Steve Scalise is a racist, homophobic, anti-choice, shithead that gives speeches to crowds of white nationalists and called himself “David Duke without the baggage.” Please stop normalizing the murderous, bigoted agenda of the Republican party and pretending these right wing lawmakers just have a benign difference of political opinion.
The guy almost died, and you’re just going to insult him? What’s wrong with you?
Look, you nazi sympathizing, hentai loving piece of shit: Not a single shred of courtesy or sympathy is owed to an avowed racist that gives speeches at white nationalist events. None. Zero.
The only regrettable thing about this incident is that the shooter missed.
The original Nazis, the actual ones, not these washed-up, low status fringe guys that no one likes, came to power because of an environment of substantial political violence in which people were willing to make large, very large, tradeoffs to restore the perception of security.
Socialists and Communists literally fought them in the streets and it failed.It made the problem worse. It took empires to defeat Nazism.
You lot have this idea that if White Nationalism is not constantly suppressed, it will naturally grow and take over, but this perception is mistaken. Under normal post-war circumstances, white nationalism doesn’t have much to offer the typical white person. After all, Hitler made them all look both stupid and evil, and his thousand-year empire imploded in only a fraction of a century. White Nationalism has been mocked and made low-status for some time.
Now, normally, WNs don’t have much to offer the typical white male…
Unless you crank up the political violence such that WN ideas about erasure of whites and fundamentally incompatibility between races start to sound more reasonable to marginal people most vulnerable to WN conversion. Mass immigration doesn’t help, nor does not believing in borders or countries, since you can’t credibly offer them a home they’d live in for a lifetime, but it might be overcome by someone clever enough.
You think you’re fighting White Nationalism with your righteous indignation, but you’re actually creating it. You’re getting high on outrage while increasing the actual level of risk.
With every wrong password he entered into the stolen phone, the thief forgot a cherished or important memory.
have I mentioned how much I am into magic systems that require you to pay in happy memories
partly because there’s not an easy way to game them. it’s not like ‘extracts a price in pain’ (which is still fun too!), or even ‘damages you in some way’, because with those you can ‘cheat’ the system by using a payment option that you find disproportionately unobjectionable
if you’re paying in happy memories, you’re never going to have an easy decision to make, never going to be able to use magic without it being a wrenching necessity – because by definition the price depends on how good, how cherished, the memory is for you, how much you want to keep it
I guess, but while I see the ability to bring about pain in the story, I can’t say it appeals to me, and I find myself thinking more in terms of “game balance”, I suppose. But I have a very technological orientation, one about human strength, human power, the capabilities of companies and states and continents. But these things are paid in mundane prices, mundane misery, mundane blood. A collapse here, a fire there, a polluted river, the hours of the lives of our brightest and the hours of the lives of pur most mundane. But all along, the goal is to ‘cheat’ as one would cheat at magic, to profit, and to profit off of that profit, in a self-reinforcing cycle as we ascend towards the skies and gain entire worlds. If a magic is a spiral that only ever leads downwards, then what use is it, except for the benefit that only be gained through immorality(/amorality)?
Please, enlighten me about your principled dissent from the "orthodoxy" of racism and sexism. Is it possible to get a rationalist to admit, just once, that they hate black people and women? Or will you continue pretending to live in a weird alternate universe where you're an oppressed minority?
I am very proud of my “
principled dissent from the “orthodoxy” of racism and sexism
“ and I hope other people take the same path.
I do not agree with rationalism, as it is an ideology obsessed with cleansing society of the “irrational”, with insufficient humility about what is knowable and insufficient compassion for the unreasonable Other.
Presuming this ask believes it is part of some social justice orthodoxy, then they should know that the problem with their ideology is the obsessive focus on shaming individuals. Classism, racism, and sexism are structural problems that need reworking of the incentives our society lives on. All the constant shaming does is continue the cycle of fear and violence.
Christianity and communism represent an escape from that cycle.
Markets don’t actually work efficiently when people don’t have practical alternatives, don’t have access to information and the ability to process it, or just don’t go through the work of comparing. Obtaining information is NOT free! It has major opportunity costs! And the vendors will fight against you doing it!
“Jeremy Corbyn tried to pass through a law that would required private landlords to make their homes safe and “fit for human habitation” last year – but it was rejected by the Conservatives.
Labour proposed an amendment to the Government’s new Housing and Planning Bill – a raft of new laws aimed at reforming housing law – in January last year, but it was rejected by 312 votes to 219.
According to Parliament’s register of interests, 72 of the MPs who voted against the amendment were themselves landlords who derive an income from a property.”
Whatever you think about the man as an individual or politician, he sure is on the right side of history a lot.
More regulations driving up the cost of housing <—-> Right side of history
the regulation about not cladding the outside of high rise buildings in flammable material tho
having sufficient fire escapes
for that matter fire alarms
very poor choice of example of regulatory harm
I’m sure our dear Voxette wouldn’t mind losing the regulations in favor of requiring all landlords to carry insurance against the death or debilitating injury to occupants with a cap at $1 million per occupant, reflecting the cost to the rest of society of people dying in unsafe housing. After all, it would be terribly immoral to give the landlords a subsidy, right?
They will of course also be required to carry sufficient insurance for neighboring buildings. It wouldn’t be very fair if they got away with a huge fire burning down someone else’s property just because they were bankrupt.
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was shot at congressional baseball practice in Del Ray, Virginia, and possibly four others were injured by an assailant, according to another lawmaker who was at the practice.
Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama said on CNN that he and other lawmakers tried to apply a tourniquet with his belt on one injured person to try and stop the bleeding. Scalise crawled to the outfield.
I’m afraid that we’ve crossed lines we can never come back from. Attacks on public servants are an attack on democracy.
A truckload of presidents have been assassinated over the course of U.S. history. Congresscritters have been succesfully murdered before. Democracy will survive.
Attack more public servants imo
Do you want right-wing paramilitaries? Because that’s how you get right-wing paramilitaries.
Owls actually sinister Capitalist plot by Korean consumer electronics giant and heavy industrial conglomerate Samsung, created in very farsighted move to sell more Galaxy S9s.
@digging-holes-in-the-river reminded me of a form of sexism, or at least huge wrongness, that I sometimes suffer from, although I think I’m improving.
Logical belief: as reported by reliable statisticians, women are 52% of the population
Alief: women are a small minority, like 5% or something. They don’t really take part in society.
I think I get this from working in a very male dominated profession, and, to the extent I ever socialise, socialising with people from that profession.
I don’t often seem women complaining about this kind of view, presumably on the view it’s too ludicrous to occur to them, although I think complaints like “why are you treating all women as a uniform special case” are a sort of second-order effect.
I mean you’d feel like that in some industries, business, politics.
On the other hand: primary school teachers, nurses, dental hygienists (apparently 98% female, in Australia at least).
It’s interesting when you see a particular field pass 50% female intake because you know there’s going to be a shake up coming when all the old guys hit retirement age and society recodes whatever it is as a ‘girl thing’.
Victoria Police has got their female representation up from 8% to 26% and I’m really curious to see how people react if it ever gets to 50% or above, that’ll be totes fun.
Some Normie: as reported by reliable statisticians, women are 52% of the population
A Nerd: women are a small minority, like 5% or something. they don’t really take part in society.
Enlightened Discourse Master: there are no women, only men and traps
Oh you're gay? Then why tf are you playing with nazis?? THEY LITERALLY WANNA KILL YOU. at least people on the left with us fought for you to even have any rights
I’m their god and they worship me and my feminine thighs. I have entire death squads at my disposal, and i could not be happier. My guns and paramilitias are my rights, and I don’t need you to fight for them you fucking normie.
[Random Interval] Reminder that the White Nationalists still seemingly haven’t noticed that widespread human genetic engineering is arriving in 1-3 decades.
Like, here they are, freaking out about IQ levels, when if they’re right on the origins of IQ, it will be sorted out within one or two generations. And that’s assuming that they’re right in the first place.
[Random Interval] Reminder that the White Nationalists still seemingly haven’t noticed that widespread human genetic engineering is arriving in 1-3 decades.
How the fuck does someone like me (who sometimes considers himself an alien in a human suit) have a better grasp on basic human interaction than like a good 60% of this hellsite
Blue Hellsite™ is a social experiment in selection bias and Homestuck fanart sponsored by the University of Nantong. I’m surprised you hadn’t realized that yet.
I wonder, if, on some level, the opposition to “cultural appropriation” is driven by an intuitive realization that if you actually mix all the cultures, you don’t have a multicultural society anymore, just one with a dominant one again.
Brand loyalty is such stupid nonsense though. Like…we know you’re not a real person, McDonald’s™; we’re not going to swear an oath of fealty to your shitty ass hamburgers.
teens in unison: today we will cast off the corporate shackles
OP may not realize what practical brand loyalty is. It isn’t about swearing fealty, but about not putting in the effort and risk to try another brand. Not a big deal for hamburgers, but, say your family had major issues with a Ford minivan and started exclusively buying all their cars from one Japanese company…
Or perhaps OP was somehow exaggerating for humourous effect. I have heard that such things are possible.
teens in unison: today we will reblog OP
Clearly unpossible.
Though I may have just been exploiting this opportunity to talk about how explore/exploit makes brand loyalty sometimes rational.
Brand loyalty is such stupid nonsense though. Like…we know you’re not a real person, McDonald’s™; we’re not going to swear an oath of fealty to your shitty ass hamburgers.
teens in unison: today we will cast off the corporate shackles
OP may not realize what practical brand loyalty is. It isn’t about swearing fealty, but about not putting in the effort and risk to try another brand. Not a big deal for hamburgers, but, say your family had major issues with a Ford minivan and started exclusively buying all their cars from one Japanese company…
Sometimes, a prominent person P says something ambiguous and weird on TV. It can be pre-taped, but it has to be “live” like an interview or a late night talk show. The statement is possibly problematic when taken out of context, and only a small point in support of the main thesis.
For example: “If you don’t know what the candidates stand for, maybe don’t vote” or “Women’s child rearing work is important and should be valued”or “Black men have big penises”.
The talk show host asks next question. Someone tweets this sentence in isolation.
News Cycle I
“P said racist/sexist/fascist thing”
“Other people react to thing said by P“
“What twitter users think of P’s latest gaffe“
“Former friend condemns P”
“People distancing themselves from P”
Now our protagonist clarifies that they meant what they said, but they meant it in an innocuous, literal way.
News Cycle II
“P doubles down on racist/sexist/fascist comments”
“P still not apologising”
“Right-wing weirdos agree with P“
Now P must clarify that he really didn’t mean it like that. He does not agree with the weirdos at all and regrets any offense he may have caused. He clarifies his original statement to eliminate any confusion.
“Has racism/sexism/fascism re-entered the mainstream? A political scientist explains, also P is terrible“
At this point, the actual statement by P is buried three clicks deep in these news articles. P thinks the original offhand statement was blown out of proportion. He tries one more time.
News cycle IV
“P: Concerns about racism/sexism/fascism blown out of proportion“
“P goes on offensive in racism/sexism/fascism row“
Q, a friend of P, tries to give a sympathetic account of the original statement.
News cycle V
“Q: P was misunderstood“
“Q defends P’s racist/sexist/fascist outburst“
“Q’s defense of P proves old boys networks still at work“
“P’s employer has still not fired racist/sexist/fascist P“
After Q, nobody wants to stick their neck out for P now, and nobody wants to be seen talking to P. People who defend P mostly do so anonymously.
News cycle VI (mostly think pieces, not news stories)
“People need to stop defending P“
“Stop saying racism/sexism/fascism is no big deal“
“Waffling about giving racist/sexist/fascist people a platform hurts marginalized people the most“
The media realise that there is nothing more to say, and smaller outlets/latecomers try to milk the issue one last time. Nobody wants to talk to P any more, and P is wary of any journalist who contacts him.
News cycle VII (still no news stories)
“The privilege of P-supporters“
“We’ve had it with pro-P trolls in our comment section“
“Why we don’t talk to P and why people like P do not deserve a right of reply“
P tries to find somebody who wants to talk to him, somebody sympathetic. He does not want to talk to anybody who previously painted him as racist/sexist/fascist.
News cycle VIII
“P sets record straight“
“P shows true colors, talks to far-right ‘newspaper’ “
This can end in either irrelevance after the third news cycle, P going on the offensive on social media - cutting any and all reporters out of the loop to say his piece unfiltered, or P going “Welp, guess I’m a Nazi now, whatever that means in this day and age”.
