donw

63 ms·

661.
by donw 6y ago
> Anecdotally, asking questions has become as "offensive" as making statements. I think it always has been. :) You are offering the other person a chance to convince you that they are right. Maybe they even have a good argument
662.
by donw 6y ago
Universities, in their current incarnation, offer a poor return on investment. When a degree was scarce, it was valuable. As was when a degree guaranteed a certain level of knowledge and skill. But that really isn't the case nowadays.
663.
by donw 6y ago
Just to make it very, very clear what you believe to be a great situation: you want to create a big group of underground neo-nazis, ideologically isolated from the rest of society, with an amazingly strong victimhood complex, their own in
664.
by donw 6y ago
It's a question of scale and monopoly. Imagine an Old West town. There's a street running through the middle, and right in the middle, a public square, with a saloon where everybody goes to drink and gossip, and a soapbox right ou
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by donw 6y ago
> An angry twitter "mob" isn't going to murder you. Sometimes they do. SWATting is a thing, and the targets of Twitter mobs are ripe targets for domestic terrorists looking to make a statement. But that's besides the
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by donw 6y ago
The issue is not about making a political statement. As an individual, you should always have that right. Both the New York Times and Breitbart are purveyors of propaganda for their respective political parties. They literally do nothing bu
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by donw 6y ago
I don't know the full details on Kapernick, so I'm going to speak in generalizations. He does not deserve to be fired for making a political statement. Full stop. At the same time, he did leverage his employer's platform (the
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by donw 6y ago
> I think this is where our conversation begins to fall apart because there are cases that warrant an angry mob, but usually not. There is never a case where the actions of an individual warrant an angry mob . Never. That is the tes
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by donw 6y ago
Hear, hear! Not only that: stand in the way of cancel culture. Commit to being an anger dampener. Don't share outrage porn on social media, and flag it when you see it -- from either side. Do like Monty Python. Whenever somebody you kn
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by donw 6y ago
tl;dr: In the 1950s, scientists and engineers had yet to understand the long-term effects of radiation, and looked at nuclear weapons as just super-powerful conventional explosives. Thus, Project Plowshare, in which we investigated using nu
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by donw 6y ago
I'm not sure that really fits. Her anger is the problem. She was going to work with Deloitte, where she will represent her organization in front of clients that regularly sign off on invoices that resemble less a major purchase and mor
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by donw 6y ago
> The problem is that a lot of crufty old systems evolved to deal with a crazy number of edge cases that no longer exist. Totally true! But it's usually a lot easier to factor those cases out than to rebuild the entire thing from ze
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by donw 6y ago
Love that quote. I think why so many people want to "dismantle the system" is exactly the same reason that less-experienced engineers push for rewrites: it seems easier to build a good system from scratch, than it does to build
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by donw 6y ago
How are those different in practice? (Genuine question, no snark intended)
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by donw 6y ago
A belief upheld by the supreme court: Warren v. District of Columbia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tow
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by donw 6y ago
The problem with Scrum is that most practitioners have no idea why their tools exist in the first place, under what conditions those tools apply, and what to do when their tools fail. Nearly every -- but not all! -- "Agile" enviro
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by donw 6y ago
Agreed. What happens when the genius leaves? Can other people extend or maintain their work? Is there a lasting benefit to the organization? Does their work enhance the capabilities of other contributors? From my experience in working with
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by donw 6y ago
After the SSC debacle, NYT is likely to learn itself a thing or two about boycotts.
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by donw 6y ago
The short answer is: don't design for future use-cases. Period. Instead, only build what you need to solve the problems you have in-hand, but do so in such a way that your software and your systems are as easy to change as possible in
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by donw 6y ago
There's a lot tied up in here, so I'm going to attempt to untangle. First, I don't think there is a universal model that we can apply to every possible case. Budgeting medical care, for example, will depend pretty heavily on
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by donw 6y ago
Honestly, this looks to me like a word salad -- I can't pull anything out of this other than "models are useless, so don't bother", which is a non-answer.
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by donw 6y ago
Generally speaking, if you are going to offer criticism, try and offer a solution or ask a question that would address that criticism. All I see here is "The value of human life is incalculable, so just give up." Am I wrong? What
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by donw 6y ago
This is part of it, but I imagine there was a lot of sunk cost in there as well. Imagine: you're in charge of Apple's new keyboard. You spend a bunch of time and money making the thing as thin as possible, because that's the
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by donw 6y ago
> This is a good sign, though. What we really want is the right balance of regulations for safety that don’t favor large businesses too much but are easy for small business to follow. And individuals, but yes, exactly. > Apprenticing
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by donw 6y ago
I think you're overlooking the cost of regulation and safety-first thinking on society as a whole. Especially as we have a wealth of recent examples as to why the American regulatory regime has failed. Candidly, this attitude is precis
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by donw 6y ago
As an aside, if you have not read it, you should chew through "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!"[1]. It's a fun read, and really gives you an insight into both Feynman's life, and they way that he approached solvi
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by donw 6y ago
I would say that most people have had little or no experience with violence, outside of perhaps the occasional dominance contest (mostly the realm of males under the age of 30 or so). There is a gross difference between a dominance contest
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by donw 6y ago
If there was an 0.4% chance of me being killed by being hit in the head by a comet, and if wearing a bike helmet would give me a 75% chance of surviving, then yes, I would want the choice to walk around in my stupid bike helmet. That's
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by donw 6y ago
Indeed. My fantasies don't usually involve me being a curious mixture of absolutely terrified, sleep-deprived, and (in retrospect) woefully underprepared.
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by donw 6y ago
(I) Context: I lived in Germany for somewhere around a year and a half, and have lived in Japan for the better part of a decade. Gun ownership is effectively banned in Japan, and the Japanese have an amazingly competent, well-trained, and

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