first class languages

So like Racket/Scheme and like maybe Ruby?

Factory factory…n is literally just creating an OOP closure for when your language doesn’t support first class functions, closures and/or currying.

Also metaprogramming and abstraction is literally the only way to actually manage and deal with the capriciousness of your stakeholders.

It’s not simple, because it’s literally not that simple. It’s Conway’s Law. That’s what being a programmer in the industry is. I run a platform team, and I get paid because I can organize and deal with technical risk and contingency better than anyone else at my company. You bet your ass I do metaprogramming.

Also my product itself is a factory factory factory. Users create processes to author content, author content, and that content is delivered to other users. All in the same system. Managing complexity is extremely important if you want to work on interesting things.

“And this is the way everyone is doing it now? Everyone is using a general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory now, whenever they need a hammer?”

I’ve had this exact conversation with a programmer who was retiring. He was complaining that I ask too much because I told him that he needed a more generic way to represent the logic that encodes how our end-users traverse the content that our authoring users create and manage. He literally said something to the effect of the above quote to me, but as complaining contempt.

The business explicitly doesn’t want to spend money crafting individual code bases and products and unique logic. Our system lives and dies by our ability to service our internal clients and meet their needs in a dynamic manner. We need manage each factory layer carefully because very often different clients want two different things at two different times, and so each decision needs to be encoded in a way that allows us to make future platform changes without having to sell the business on refactors.

Sure you’ll run into people who overuse things when it could be simpler from the business perspective. But the reality is that most programmers in the industry have never stepped foot into a well run shop. Most programmers in the industry haven’t actually launched a product tip to tail.

It’s very easy to criticize patterns when you don’t actually have to use them, you’ve never seen them being used properly, and you don’t know how and when to implement them.

You don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain what two phase migration means and how to do them across multiple dependency links in the chain.

Both approaches have a load the world problem.

losing court cases

It’s actually a lot stupider. He kept defaulting on court cases by not showing up. If he had shown up with a mildly competent lawyer he would literally have walked away with his legal fees paid.

When that screen came up, as I was reading, I literally said the name of the book out loud.

All white, all mostly middle class to PMC jobs, and 2 of them wrote in Mike Bloomberg and Larry Hogan because they couldn’t hold their nose for Trump.

This practically means nothing tbh. Social networks when they gain economies of scale due to the network effect will effectively shed all the pretense of open source and open platform etc.

We’ve seen it with Facebook, Google, etc, during the 2010’s with closing of chat standards and destruction of XMPP. Reddit 3rd Party API access is another example of this. We’ll see it again.

They’re the same answer.

You need money to market applications to users. Bluesky is sold the same way that Twitter is, your favorite moron celebrity might hit like or retweet on your stuff.

Yep. The only people I know that use that term today as a descriptor and not an epithet are conservative Jewish families who are typically rich. To put it in your reddit dot com user name is literally just signaling privilege among what is a essentially just a pool of NYC/Westchester County/Fairfield County Jews that understands it.

Here’s a “gift article” as the NYT calls it:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/13/opinion/focusgroup-young-undecided-voters.html?rsrc=flt&unlocked_article_code=1.Z04.BAmP.TisBcJ4rM7p5

This article should be the coffin nail for people thinking the kids are gonna save us. I screenshotted this as I read yesterday. Also I swear to god the casting call for this focus group had a question about how much you love Josh Shapiro that NYT filtered everyone out on.

Here are my favorites:

Some of the few good points:

The liberal ad campaign is grating:

“Amazing” zoomer media criticism:

Young undecided voters are just a reddit comment section:

The dumbest white woman you know:

Megyn Kelly style women are the most oppressed people in America:

I’ll add more later when the rate limit on uploads resets. There’s some more amazing garbage in there.

As a Jew whenever you see someone self describe as a JAP prepare to hear the most insane self absorbed privileged idiocy spouted at you until you simply give up.

You’re talking from a relative position of understanding of these concepts. You’re not talking from a blank slate. Even in professional environments that I’ve been in where everyone went to college and theoretically is fully literate, you would have trouble getting people to retain these concepts even if you used friendlier technical language. You’re overestimating the amount of time it takes to actually achieve understanding, there are people on this site that constantly mix up these words and concepts, have a hard time applying them to the real world and misapply them regularly and are self professed Marxists. You’re also mistaking cultural policing of agreeing/using these concepts for understanding of them. Just think about how many people in America agree with capitalism but can’t adequately explain what capitalism is. They agree with freedom but don’t have a working definition or framework of what freedom means. On a societal level this often becomes bromides. My parents and grandparents read Marx in school but couldn’t give you an accurate basic run down of Marxist concepts.

Marxism isn’t some magical thing. There were plenty of people in the USSR that also didn’t understand the system they existed under and it’s concepts but reflexively or sheepishly agreed with it.

Because if you break down the cost to unit economics, the biggest pieces of the pie are labor, profit and overhead. If the price of processors cannot go up, the pie needs to be adjusted for the workers. TSMC claims that in Taiwan it averages $76K USD yearly per worker, a country where the average wage is $21k. So roughly this translates to the employee mix for TSMC being 3x more expensive than the average wage. In the US this translates to $59k USD population average to $177k USD TSMC average, which is 2.3x the cost. In reality they’ll get that down to ~2x because ASML median salary is around $132K. So now you have to shift that pie to be less profitable or cut into overhead. Some share of overhead is actually executive perks/salaries/inefficiency so we get into the agency problem. Some share of overhead is the maintenance of favorable political connections which are more expensive in the US. Some share of overhead is maintenance on loans for capital expenses such as the buildings, machines, training, etc. Profit is obvious why it can’t be cut. They demand the same or increasing rates of profit.

This also assumes that the output between the two countries is comparable which is not true due to workforce mix and may never actually be true due to labor laws and cultural expectations of workers.

This doesn’t get into the more complex financial realities like, training and retaining a workforce who has no experience fabbing chips, the differences in work culture and expectations of workers between the two countries, etc.

The one thing Gaetz is good at is knowing how to break the law and get away with it. He defeated the FBI probe simply by picking targets and collaborators that would be difficult to use for prosecutors. This is because prosecutors now typically rise to their position involved using the weight of the state to roll over people who didnt know how to do crime. It’s all a numbers game to prosecutors so they don’t have enough experience dealing with the politics of criminal court, plus the fact that anyone who understands how the system works can simply set up their crimes in a way that benefits them in open court.

The sad reality is prosecutors look for perfect victims which allows imperfect victims who are often actually more vulnerable people in society to be abused at greater rates.

Remember how Democrats can’t figure out why people think that rich and connected people can get away with breaking the law? They just have to look at the failure of the Biden DOJ.

It’s antisemitic to talk about how Israel developed its nuclear capacity.

the CHIPS act is the grift that keeps on grifting

These problems are often presented by Americans a cultural but in reality they are the problems of global capital.

Taiwanese and Chinese Bosses think that the US system of bribery is too inefficient and that US workers are too expensive compared to their lack of skill and dedication. (See American Factory, it’s really good at laying this out)

These economic realities are different in China and Taiwan because they are not the imperial core. This experiment was doomed to fail because reindustrialization is fighting against the direction of the market and regardless of who controls the coin purse, nobody is going to take on that risk. The CHIPS act and things like it, give away free money which incentivizes failure because in order to derisk the proposition the US government has to make it profitable regardless of the success of the venture. It’s almost like reindustrialization of these key industries needs to be based on a nationalized industrial capacity, especially if we’re going to view it from the basis of national security.

But alas Americans are too capitalist brained to even understand 20th century nationalist logic anymore.

Denis Prager was one of the advocates of the immigration regime in the 60’s (first Soviet aliyah) and late 80’s early 90’s (second Soviet aliyah) that allowed Jews from the Soviet Union to apply for asylum to the United States. The second Soviet aliyah was based on the idea that violent/systemic antisemitism was drastically increasing after the fall of the Soviet Union. Something that didn’t actually happen when revisited by scholars decades later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_Struggle_for_Soviet_Jewry

If he dies, I’ll be excited to piss on the grave of the man who was ultimately responsible for my ability to emigrate to the US from Post-Soviet Ukraine.

Audiobooks aren’t really a good solution to be honest. Reading / writing literacy are the basis of scholarship. We have centuries of research and examples that we’ve turned our back on that efficient learning happens only when you can unlock good literacy skills. Specifically the aspect of reading/physical writing/sublingualization is a cornerstone of comprehension of complex ideas. With something like Marxism that’s based on understanding both technical and archaic language and social constructs it becomes really hard. There are tons of self professed Marxists that couldn’t tell you what commodity fetishism actually means in simple terms.

Great example is the Communist Manifesto itself, meant to be a pamphlet for factory workers in the 19th century, but is typically a mildly difficult text to approach for the average person today.

Audiobooks can replace something like pleasure reading where you’re just reading pulp garbage, but they’re not really a good replacement for learning.

The parentposting is the worst with math.

My favorite flavor is the “THIS 5th GRADE HOMEWORK IS TOO HARD” when the adult clearly has never learned basic concepts like order of operations (PEMDAS) and cardinality of logic (e.g. how you solve sudoku where you order working through the solution always taking the smallest number of unknowns, first solve places where only one numbers missing until there are no first rank order problems, then move on to second rank order problems where two numbers are missing).

But there are definitely parents answering ‘she was looking for Romeo when she said “wherefore art thou Romeo?”’.

You can 100% see this degradation with adults in real time if you look at popular reality TV shows that have puzzle/knowledge/trivia components like Survivor and The Challenge and just binge watch the whole back catalog. You’ll see things getting harder until the game hits its stride and identity but then at one point just simpler and simpler and simpler.

Survivor is actually pretty bad now because the entire show started cheaping out and reusing things over and over again. So people just started 3d printing the puzzles and memorizing them. Literally No Reality TV Contestant Left Behind style pipeline. The other thing is that they completely devalued the actual survival aspects of the show, and it’s a game of attrition where it’s who can think straight on the lowest amount of calories. The only reason to know any actual survival skills on that show anymore is just in case of tie breakers where they have to make fire from flint.