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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Exactly, Sci Fi writers almost never invent an entirely new technology for their books, they just look at current technology, think a bit about where it might head, think about how that could interact with broader societal forces, realize some flaw there-in, and write about it.

    Technologists are doing basically the same thing, looking at current technology, thinking about where it might head and what might be useful and/or profitable, and then start trying to overcome current obstacles to develop and build it.

    But one of them takes a single person a year or two to write a book, and the other has to start trying to do research and building things and testing them and breaking them and getting funding and overcoming the current obstacles etc. etc. If they start at the same time it will look like the technologist has just built what they were warned not to, when in reality they’ve been building it the whole time on a parallel path.


  • The SOLID principles are just that principles, not rules.

    As someone else said, you should always write your code to be maintainable first and foremost, and extra code is extra maintenance work, so should only really be done when necessary. Don’t write an abstract interface unless multiple things actually need to implement it, and don’t refactor common logic until you’ve repeated it ~3 times.

    The DRY principle is probably the most overused one because engineers default to thinking that less code = less work and it’s a fun logic puzzle to figure out common logic and abstract it, but the reality is that many of these abstractions in reality create more coupling and make your code less readable. Dan Abramov (creator of React) has a really good presentation on it that’s worth watching in its entirety.

    But I will say that sometimes these irritations are truly just language issues at the end of the day. Java was written in an era where the object oriented paradigm was king, whereas these days functional programming is often described as what OO programming looks like if you actually follow all the SOLID principles and Java still isn’t a first class functional language and probably never will be because it has to maintain backwards compatibility. This is partly why more modern Java compatible languages like Kotlin were created.

    A language like C# on the other hand is more flexible since it’s designed to be cross paradigm and support first class functions and objects, and a language like JavaScript is so flexible that it has evolved and changed to suit whatever is needed of it.

    Flexibility comes with a bit of a cost, but I think a lot of corporate engineers are over fearful of new things and change and don’t properly value the hidden costs of rigidity. To give it a structural engineering analogy: a rigid tree will snap in the wind, a flexible tree will bend.










  • To demonstrate the efficacy of the tiny screen, the researchers reproduced The Kiss, a famous artwork painted by Gustav Klimt. The image was shown in perfect resolution on the screen, which at approximately 1.4 x 1.9 mm was 1/4000th that of a standard smartphone.

    This makes me doubt the author of the article’s credibility. What exactly is the “perfect resolution” of a hand painted piece of art?

    The underlying paper is published in Nature which adds more credibility to its significance but an article that presents none of the limitations, drawbacks, or broader industry context that might hold something like this back isn’t adding much. What was the colour depth? Refresh rate? Is it thrown if the external light shifts and changes? How many children have to be sacrificed to the machine gods to produce it? Etc. etc.


  • And your point is wrong because you keep boiling it down to simple black and white.

    The Nobel prize is not purely political and is not devoid of merit.

    The world is not full of binary systems. It’s made of multi variable systems where multiple influences can be true at the same time.

    If you want to make a point about why accurately predicting the structure of hundreds of thousands of proteins doesn’t deserve the Nobel in chemistry then I’m all ears. Please tell us all exactly why you think their prize was political and not meritocratic, and why predicting protein structures automatically is not important?

    Because if you can’t answer that very specific question, then you weren’t making a point relevant to the conversation, you were making a snide generalization to hear yourself speak.



  • Lmao, it’s binary cause you say it’s binary.

    Bro grow up. The world is not black and white. Literally not a single award on the planet is meritocratic if you insist on dealing in absolutes. Every award is awarded by some committee and there is some room left for human judgement, which leaves room for human bias, which makes it not perfectly meritocratic.

    If you want to go an unhinged rant that no one wants to listen to then email the nobel association directly, don’t waste federated server time.