There is an overwhelming level of nihilism in society. It's even more apparent since most have decided to use their occupation to define their purpose in life.
I don't see how we can continue down this path and see positive results.
Readit NewsThis is the great fear of many come to pass - censorship by algorithm. Facebook didn't outright ban sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop stories like Twitter did, they instead tweaked their algorithm to prevent the story from spreading. We found out about it this time because Zuckerberg owned up to it, but what about next time? For all we know, Facebook, Google and Twitter are doing this right now on a range of other subjects.
It's scary to think that just 2 to 3 corporations have the power to construct a false reality around us, in a way that's virtually impossible for us to detect.
Speech is free. Reach isn't.
FowlSoft2013 commented on Health care is turning into a consumer product economist.com/business/ho... · Posted by u/brimnes
I don't know how any American can accept the pile of trash that the US healthcare is. The only good thing is that in some cases you will get state of the art care, this is "rare" and may not result in better outcomes.
1. The cost is insane. It doesn't matter how much money you have, if you stay long term in a hospital your bill will be insane and more than an average cost of a house.
2. Single ER visit? 10 different bills over the next few months. Apparently, there is a new law trying to tackle this but hospital can opt-out by having you sign paperwork.
3. If you have an illness and need to see many doctors and have many tests in a short period of time get ready for your insurance to fight you and deny claims. You will be calling them all the time.
4. There are now 3rd party businesses set up to "VERIFY" no other party is responsible for the care you received(meaning you did not have an accident). If you fail to respond to their letters, your claim will be denied.
5. MRI, X-rays, dental work, physician visits are SO MUCH more than other developed nations. It is a joke. I'm talking without insurance here, just going to a private clinic and paying out of pocket as these also exist in Poland even though it has socialized healthcare.
6. The insurance prices are out of control, and the insurance company don't give a shit. In fact, they welcome the high prices. Obamacare capped insurance companies profit margins at a percentage of money spent, this is the result. The more they pay out, the more they make. The cost falls on the policy holders.
7. Covid is really showing cracks in for-profit healthcare. I have friends who work in the field and are complaining about people coming in with positive covid tests because they are asymptomatic. If they don't want to come in they risk getting fired, and in some areas large hospital networks own many smaller clinics and being fired may result in not being able to find a job without relocating.
The problem from my point of view is conflating ongoing healthcare with catastrophic coverage. Outpatient care should absolutely be a free market (prescriptions, lab tests, specialist visits etc.). Catastrophic incidents/diagnoses should be a simple lump sum payout (Cancer, Hear Attack, Stroke, etc.).
Alternative options I've seen being offered for ongoing healthcare is Direct Primary Care where essentially you pay a membership fee to have unlimited access to a primary care physician.
I think the root of the problem is subsidization and the patch work of legislation that gets piled on year after year to "fix" the issue. The entire price function is completely out of wack and as long as the patient is stuck between the provider, insurance carrier, and government debating who has to pay, they will lose.
Scala gets a lot of hate, but honestly it's a great language. As fast as Java with all the great tooling and ecosystem and compiler/IDE help, as concise as Python and just as usable for fast prototyping and rapid development.
How many Python developers would like a 10-20x faster version of the language with better parallelism and concurrency, or Java developers a more concise language better suited for rapid development on top of the huge ecosystem they built their systems on? Scala provides both.
There are a bunch of confusing frameworks from Scala's early days that leant it a bad rap, or niche tools that do not fit everyone's use case, but you don't need to use them. I've personally never used Shapeless/Akka/Scalaz/Cats in my entire career and I've gotten by OK. I haven't used SBT for years now. You can use these things if you want, and some people do, but only if you really want to. The Scala community is a Big Tent.
Really, every language is converging on Scala: a concise, hybrid OO/FP language with a rich, inferred static type system it uses for bug-catching, tooling support, and performance. Python has got static types and case classes, is getting pattern matching and type-driven compilation. Ruby is getting static types. C# is getting pattern matching and case classes. Java got lambdas, is getting type inference and pattern matching and case classes. Haskell is getting OO-style dot-syntax for records. Go is getting generics.
This is a spot in the language design space everyone is trying to get to, and Scala is already there and works great. I use it professionally to implement programming languages, distributed systems, websites, etc. and it really works as well as you'd expect "Superfast Python with static types" or "Java without all the Java-verbosity problems" to work. A true general-purpose high-level language
I agree, I picked up Scala a bit over a year ago and have loved it. I believe there is a happy medium between the functional and OO aspects. Finding this sweet spot is where the language outshines others. Using classes as decomposition components and then using Scala's functional aspects such as immutability and the large offerings of classic functions (map, reduce, fold) give you a powerful and productive language.
FowlSoft2013 commented on A Theory of Software Architecture danuker.go.ro/the-grand-u... · Posted by u/nreece
I think software architecture is the wrong word for this. It’s module structure, architecture to me includes all the surrounding bits concerning the “ilities”. (Availability, Interoperability, Modifiability, Usability, Testability, Security, Performance). I say this because getting the module structure right is important but not the only factor to a successful application.
My favorites in regard to the topic of module structure are David Parnas and Juval Lowy
FowlSoft2013 commented on Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? aeaweb.org/articles?id=10... · Posted by u/fovc
There are still millions of ideas. You just need to look around a little more and massive problems (opportunities) are everywhere. In my job (tech leadership consulting, dev, etc) we deep dive on a new company/industry every few weeks when kicking off new projects and it seems like every niche industry or business has like 50 grotesque inefficiencies and incumbent crappy solutions providers just waiting for someone with the right design and software skills to come by, make the investment, and grab the business.
If you are lacking in inspiration, go work for a consulting company for a year and your idea bucket will be full to overflowing.
Agreed, I joined a consulting company earlier in the year for this exact purpose. I believe technologist have to be more willing to get out of their comfort zone in order to apply their skills to underserved industries. It's a risk and a great outcome isn't guaranteed but they have to be taken at some point.
FowlSoft2013 commented on What are the most indispensable books for indie hackers? indiehackers.com/post/wha... · Posted by u/ChanningAllen
Doing your own research, visiting libraries, reading reviews, etc. These are the best way to find books that you never would have found otherwise.
Otherwise you're going to end up with the same old stuff (SICP, Release It!, GEB, Code Complete, blah blah blah). Those books are actually good but they are on every single list and even worse, some "modern classics" are actually complete dreck. You might impress your developer friends but you won't advance yourself.
For example when I was studying for my PhD in signal processing and machine learning (before machine learning became popular again) I had to learn a lot about functional analysis. I also needed to learn a small amount of measure theory; and to go appreciably deeper in to time-frequency analysis, probability, and statistics, than I had before.
I discovered many masterpieces of my own accord. I never would have seen them because one lesson I learned during my literature review and actually doing research is that very few people actually read the books and articles they cite. They merely copy bibliographies from one ancestor article to another without knowing why.
I had an epiphany the other day. These books offer expansive references to where the author found or sourced their material. Looking through there is a great place to start once the standard books have been completed.
A job is a means to an end.
These discussions regarding which jobs are pointless vs meaningful don't do anything to address that people lacking purpose are more likely to call their job pointless.