kdmccormick

13 ms·

91.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
*large businesses. Plenty of small businesses sometimes act against their own self-interest because they genuinely care about their community and their workers. See: retiring restaurant owners who sell to someone who will keep the tradition
92.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
I mean, yeah, I was exaggerating a bit. I do make eye contact before walking. But I swear, I am able to make myself seen to drivers almost immediately at this particular roundabout. Maybe it's the design, or maybe just my neighborhood&
93.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
why would someone in a single-lane roundabout be checking their mirrors?
94.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
It does get close to deadlocking traffic at rush hour. Wait time for cars to enter is like 5 minutes at 6pm. And you know, I'm OK with that. There are plenty of other ways to get around my city, so if you want to do it in your own pers
95.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
(Warning: Anecdata) There was a multi-lane roundabout near me with traffic signals and pedestrian crossing signals and all. It was an absolute nightmare to drive through, bike through, or cross on foot. Cars pressured one another to drive a
96.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
Please do! I like the idea a lot, and I'm really interested to hear about a real-life engineering decision you apply it to.
97.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
https://archive.ph/Typim The article says Big Health, which is defines as the middle-men between providers and consumers (such as perscription benefit management system), takes the biggest slice of the cake.
98.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
> I have made the conscious decision to do nothing but 3 things with very rare exceptions such as meeting friends, which I luckily do not have many of. If you're trying to shut out the world in order to achieve some massive technica
99.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
These are all "marketable values" for software engineers that CS classes don't teach: * being able to write prose well * creativity * genrally being interesting and fun to work with Yeah, the mountainous cost of 4yr college s
100.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
> mindless drones who suppress their own ambitions and interest and toil away until they die I... don't think European youth culture is exactly known for that?
101.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
> insistence on general education requirements. > step directly into their major field of study These need not be mutually exclusive! My (US) alma mater required a specific number of unspecific non-major classes, the only stipulation
102.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
I work on a certain other open source LMS that stores some of its data in Mongo but has been gradually moving it all into a relational db. It is true that the (home-baked) ORM we use on top of Mongo provides an abstraction layer which makes
103.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
This is always pointed out, and it's cool and great, but as soon as you're reading anyone else's code, you either need to read the whitespace yourself or convert to and from it. Idk, maybe that's not as bad as it sounds.
104.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
It does, unfortunately, have significant whitespace. (I'd be curious to hear from a blind person whether sig whitespace is as painful to them as it sounds like it would be to me.)
105.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
Everything you're saying sounds great, but afaict VAT doesn't have the power to rework a society the way income tax does: * Marriage is incentivized via the advantageous married-filing-jointly option. * Donations are deductible. *
106.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
> I'd say if the government creates inefficiencies, such as for basic tax filing, it should remove them if possible The complexity of the US tax code is certainly inefficient from the perspective of someone trying to get through the
107.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
Here's a better / more nuanced standard: If an industry exists because of the government and it can be replaced by a public service, then it doesn't deserve to exist. FWIW, public defenders are a public service used to inte
108.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
That was added in an edit after downvotes and my comment :)
109.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
Okay, rake them up then?
110.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
> I don't see a path where citizens come together to agree on a UBI. In a convoluted, bureaucratic way, we have many of the pieces of UBI (welfare, unemployment, social security, minimum wage). We just lack the "universal&quot
111.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
Flipping a coin 1000 times and getting >=700 heads has a ~1/10^24 probability. There's got to be a reason, even if it was as simple as "it was arbitrarily chosen and then became standard practice."
112.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
Yeah, I am not saying you're wrong, I am honestly just confused by it. Perhaps it's that few pols are willing to roll back restrictions and then be "responsible" next time there's a terrorist attack. Kinda like how
113.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
This confuses me, because it seems like almost everyone I talk to, across the political spectrum, thinks airport security is overkill. Conservatives could argue for reducing it because it might save money, and liberals could argue for reduc
114.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
Not the original commentor, but I'd say two things: * Airport security got much more invasive post-9/11. For decades before that, people flew safely without these tight security measures. So, how much of the intensification is act
115.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
Yes
116.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
Just curious, would you need something completely new to show up, or would a well-funded, openly-governed fork of Firefox work?
117.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
Not an economist, but I imagine that the job market for child care workers would be less distorted, even if the general service market for child care is more distorted.
118.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
I fail to see how this makes us different from LLMs. LLMs are a bunch of computation running on silicon in order to predict the next word, and out of that all sorts of behavior arises, including intelligence, insigt,creativity, humor, and c
119.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
Yeah, sure, I do in fact think it is virtuous to be aware that we don't always have complete information and that we should be willing to revise our opinions when new information is encountered. Is that controversial?
120.
by kdmccormick 3y ago
I think this is OK as long as you keep your mind open to situations that you have not considered. Imagine someone is working in a relatively niche new programming language ecosystem which is dynamically typed, allowing the language to have

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