I'm 52. For me, there was a time when it was considered impolite to talk about sex, religion and politics. Then it became super fun when done with open/questioning/rational/critical minds, and a lot of progress in my own thinking was achieved from the usually non-threatening but lively debates and fights among friends and family for ideas. Then it shifted in the last ten or fifteen years. When social media started having friends of friends, the tribalism kicked in. It was explained very well in a talk between Maria Ressa and Jon Stewart. She is brilliant, and well worth listening to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsHoX9ZpA_M
Everything is because of increasing wealth inequality, it is the root cause of almost every societal problem. It was easier to have non-threatening debates because everyone felt more secure. When people are stressed and afraid, the debates aren’t just intellectual exercises but things that could mean the loss of real opportunities in their lives. This is a trend that has been going on for a very long time, Pikkety showed mathematically that it’s easier to make money when you already have money and this runaway process is nearing an extreme.
I firmly believe that if wealth distribution today was the same as it was in the 70s-90s, the culture wars would be significantly dampened or non existent. If people could still buy homes, afford to have kids and healthcare, we would all be able to talk about religion, sex, and politics without this extreme tribalism. It’s happening because there are way more “losers” in the economic game now, it’s become a life or death issue, and people are looking for who to blame.
I largely agree. Recently I'm somewhat minded to think the issue is actually about the huge expansion of the rentier class. The problem began with the adoption of neoliberalism and the mainstreaming of the idea that you could reasonably "earn" money by simply having money. Prior classical and Keynesian thought railed against such rent seeking and sought to eliminate it as a parasitic drag on the economy.
Since the decision was made post GFC to bail out the banks and protect capital over the normal person that just wanted a house to live in, the position of the rentiers has been consolidated hugely. We have Rachel Reeves thinking we in the UK can build a growth strategy on the back of financial services (which generally means "rent-extraction services"). A rational system would separate the GDP from the real economy from the income from rent extraction, and seek to eliminate the latter.
To the common man, they see themselves working longer and harder than they used to and getting a smaller and smaller slice of the pie. It turns out when your real outputs have to support a sizeable portion of the population who have dedicated their lives to the art of rent extraction to live like kings, you don't see much of the gain.
I have many contemporaries that have gone into finance. A vast pool of intellectual capability, shuffling money around playing zero sum games, and ultimately protected from loss by the power of the state.
> It was easier to have non-threatening debates because everyone felt more secure. When people are stressed and afraid, the debates aren’t just intellectual exercises but things that could mean the loss of real opportunities in their lives.
You’re right that people feel less secure, but that doesn’t mean that they are correct when they feel that.
By pretty much any measure, I believe that people in 2025 are far more secure than they were in 1975, 1985 or 1995.
All of these can be more elastic. See: zoning reform and prices in blue cities vs red cities, single-payer healthcare in every developed country other than the US. Inequality is not the distinguishing factor.
Very much this. The world has changed. It used to be that assuming
other people have a low capacity for political reason was itself a
"political position" - namely elitism. Folks like Orwell come from a
long, long tradition of the educated and socially astute working
class. Social media turned the joy of everyday political banter,
rational scepticism, and good-natured disputation into a bourgeois
pissing contest with seemingly life-or-death stakes.
> Then it shifted in the last ten or fifteen years. When social media started having friends of friends, the tribalism kicked in. It was explained very well in a talk between Maria Ressa and Jon Stewart.
> but lively debates and fights among friends and family for ideas
The missing ingredient is "intellectual honesty". It used to be the case that when you talked to people on the right they would
- refer to events that actually happened and true statements about the world
- accept them in the context of wider events (although there's always been a risk of making policy from one exeptional incident)
- make an argument that followed logically from those
This did end up in duelling statistics and arguments over what mattered, but that's a reasonable place for discussion. Nowadays it's much deeper into making wild arguments from conspiracy theories with no or highly questionable evidence. Pizzagate. Birtherism. And so on.
On reflection, my attitude to books like these indicated where I was in my understanding of programming. They used to be useful life-buoys that one clung to for dear life early in one's career in a fast-moving and often-changing industry. Then they become an interesting side-note reminding one of what they clung to as the good precepts that served them well stand out from the rest of the books. And finally they become unnecessary and seemingly dogmatic when one has become adept at swimming. In other words, essential reading depending on where you find yourself :) Disclaimer: out of these two, I only read Clean Code.
I will more likely believe a blog or website if I know it has been made by a real person, and not some hallucinating AI. The style of the prose is usually a giveaway of when AI is used to generate blog articles or websites.
I am starting a Masters in Computer Science, and going to learn Java for the first time. I wanted to know how to use default method parameter values. I searched for it and found this near the top of the results:
Java developers will know that the language does not support default method parameter values. I only found that out when I tried to implement it in a test, was surprised it didn't work, thought maybe my version of Java was too old, etc.
But there is no syntax like
"void coolFunction(int x=5){};"
that other languages have.
One more reason that I will value a human-written article, blog or website. Please keep writing them!
An example from one of "those who've shifted from established careers to something entirely different"
I used to be a software developer, now I cut up meat at an abattoir (combination choice/circumstance.) In one sense, I traded "work at a desk, go to the gym in my spare time" with "workout for work, sit at a desk in my spare time."
Upsides? Fitness, don't take your work home, redundancy less likely.
Downsides? Less pay.
Samesides? RSI in both jobs.
It's kind of weird. It brings the gap from what you eat to what you do in life a lot closer. I accidentally became more fish and vegetables as an eater :) The actual gross-out part was not the fact the processing happens. It's the volume.
I heard first-hand years ago of a bug in VMWare that was _CPU-Level_ for the company that rolled it out in an effort to replace their PCs that had software locally installed. The failure would have been catastrophic for a company that had just replaced all its PCs. However, they hadn't shipped the old PCs away yet for destruction, and managed to keep the lights on by putting them all back out again until the problem was fixed.
Over twenty five odd years, I have found the path to a general debugging prowess can best be achieved by doing it. I'd recommend taking the list/buying the book, using https://up-for-grabs.net to find bugs on github/bugzilla, etc. and doing the following:
1. set up the dev environment
2. fork/clone the code
3. create a new branch to make changes and tests
4. use the list to try to find the root cause
5. create a pull request if you think you have fixed the bug
I'm probably old, but still curious. You seem to have so many social contact routes on your website but I couldn't find an email address. Did I miss it?
I try to limit my contact routes to as few as possible so I don't have to process so many interruptions.
I have a twitter link on my website, so that may cater for people who don't use email any more :)
> I have a twitter link on my website, so that may cater for people who don't use email any more :)
I wouldn't consider Twitter a replacement for email, though. The one thing about email is that everyone must have one. It's the one common denominator, and I believe it is the reason why email is still a thing.
Twitter, on the other hand... I mean just the fact that you apparently refuse to use the new name says a thing or two about what you think about it, right?
I don’t directly link my email, but people still find it pretty easily because I’m not trying too hard to hide it. Even the folks who can’t find my email managed to get a hold of me quite easily. I am not famous enough to be at a point where people wanting to talk to me is a distraction. I even have a Calendly page if people really want to hop on a call with me. I probably get five requests a year which is not unreasonable.
Maybe not so much a blog, but I believe a developer should maintain their own website, whether that includes a blog or not.
It lets you define yourself and organise your own projects. And (I believe) most importantly, you learn how to maintain a project over many years, which informs you of the most important decisions that need to be made at the start of a new project.
Does this help you get work? Who knows?
In my case, I have been approached by people who saw my website after reading an on-topic comment on this one :)
It is not aesthetically pleasing at all, which is important to me, for whatever neurological reason. Also, I consider a laptop stand as just a device to raise the screen to a better ergonomic level on the understanding that an external keyboard and mouse will be used to operate the device.
Otherwise, in a laptop stand, ergonomic keyboard use requirements pull the incline towards level, and ergonomic monitor height requirements pull the incline upwards, so there is no healthy angle for a laptop stand.
As already mentioned by andrei_says_, typing fingers should be below the wrist (as correct piano playing has proved for centuries).
I use my glasses case to raise the back of the computer.
It adds a gap between table and computer. The rubber nobben on the underside of the laptop prevent the glasses case from slipping.
This raises the notebook to a nice angle and the keyboard is still usable for me.
You can't get ergonomics with a (modern) laptop keyboard. Reaching over the touchpad is at best, a compromise. Unfortunately keyboard at the edge + sidemounted trackball is long dead, and keyboard at the edge + pointing stick didn't last a lot longer.
Last I used a laptop at a desk on the regular, state of the art laptop stands were reams of printer paper. Worst case, you need to actually use the paper in the printer and you're out a stand until you restock.
I often observe people at my office using the laptop keyboard and monitor exclusively, while sitting at their desks, even though we are all given external monitors, keyboards and mice.
I guess they are young and their bodies don't hurt yet.
I've been doing that for the last 18 years and I started when I was older than most people here. I never liked the mandatory external monitor and keyboard at the company I was working for before becoming self employed: I preferred to look down to a screen, not up or level.
