This is actually as bad as citizens united. They’re trying to end free speech entirely

It means that you’re asking for a metric that will not inform the subject at hand. Even worse, it will muddy the issue even more and mislead people

Math is a tool, and if misused it does damage, like any tool

What are you talking about? What numbers?

Numbers are a tool. This is apples and orange drink, you can’t reduce this to numbers

Come on… Things have been getting worse for a while, but this is a huge turning point

Recently I met someone in my dream, where I was on vacation with some friends. The rest of the characters in the dream kinda faded into the background as we started talking, and I made a comment about how absurd the dream situation must seem to them, which shocked them and they asked me to repeat myself

Then I said, “I’m only here for a couple days, but-”, they interrupted me to say “Yes! But I have to go home soon” as the dream collapses

I woke up with the distinct impression they weren’t a dream character. I couldn’t look at them, I didn’t know anything about them, and they didn’t respond normally. All I have is a vague memory of their voice

I think I surprised some kind of dream walker and asked them out

Pfft, skyscrapers? In this stage of capitalism? No, you get huge office buildings, 3 floors at best, and you’ll marvel when they have the exact same marble floorings in the lobby, which is just rows of elevators and hallways. They will have huge windows and be the building equivalent of a cubicle inside. They will all be grouped together on the outskirts of cities replacing green places, and there will be no public transportation between them and residential areas. If you’re lucky you can get a cafe within walking distance, but you probably have to drive for lunch

Oh, and that reminds me, you really need to get more proactive about making public transportation worse. No one should use it by choice, it needs to be slow and dirty. Only the poors should use it, to motivate them to become billionaires somehow

Also, the Chunnel is now just for freight. If you want to go somewhere, you’ll use cars and planes exclusively

Yep! Look forward to bleached meat and widening all your roads to accommodate pointlessly enormous trucks you currently need a CDL to drive

You’re going to have to rip up everything and redo it all just for that

Damn, I thought we had another year or three… That’s already in production

Don’t worry, Trump is over there to teach you how to do things the American way. See, you use the cheapest lumber, plywood and pine boards, and then you cover it all in plastic sheeting. Then you put up drywall, which is about the weakest material known to man, and cover the interior walls with no plaster or anything

Then what you want to do is really crank the plastic up to 11. Plastic siding, expanding plastic foam in the walls, just fill up the attic with it

And you want to make the designs very basic, they should all look nearly identical

And now you have a house that will require constant A/C or heating, because it’s a plastic bubble with terrible air circulation. Also, you have to worry about the whole thing rotting if it gets too damp

But if you do everything right, it might last 50 whole years

I think it’s because we get excited super early, and by the time it goes mainstream we’re tired of seeing it shoved into every place it doesn’t belong

And it’s probably still not being used for what we looked forward to about it

I had a nice teacher who gave us IRL clients over the course of a full year, and basically guided us through the process while teaching us methodology theoretically as we went through the process

I don’t think there’s a better way, honestly the theory is important, but methodology is learned by doing. I really benefitted by learning from my brother… He taught me best practices as he went through school and the workforce. So I pay it forward

I think courses should focus more on teaching how to use libraries and debug tools… Past that, you get into skills that can’t be taught, only learned

It’s methodology. Basically what you need is the correct amount of process - you can pick agile or scrum or whatever, and then you follow it to the amount that it makes sense. If you over-adhere to it, it slows things down to a crawl

Once you get up to 10 team members, you need to do things like feature branches, code reviews, and rigid style. You should also add in tests… At 10 you don’t have to have full coverage, but you need to be able to exercise your system enough to know when something breaks immediately

You also need ownership. You need one primary person who is the heart and soul of the code base, and they’re going to be the one who knows the whole thing and gives everyone direction. You can spin off another team at solid interface points, like an API or a plug in system, but you need one person who owns the core system and holds the code debt back

You also can add in code pipelines, enforce docstrings to generate documentation, you need diagrams so people understand how things flow through the system, etc

Ultimately, a lot of it comes down to mentorship. You have to be very hands on teaching people how the code works, and really hold their hand until they gain proficiency over an area. Then let them be secondary owners over that part of the symptom… And you have to make sure to stick them in a place where they’ll be a benefit - as you grow in numbers, it gets easier for each new person to be a drain on progress.

I’m not sure about academic sources…I dropped a lot of keywords in there that might help search, but ultimately it’s about team culture. You can’t just shove it all in at once, you have to slowly add new processes and make sure everyone is moving in the same direction

I don’t understand this at all. Computer science is based on theoretical foundations that were developed way before any actual computer existed. This goes back more than 100 years.

Yes, it’s code. We studied and iterated on that code long before the first computer, we came up with architectures that influenced the creation of the hardware to run it

The way they teach it has probably changed since I went through, but we had software engineering as a concentration. I actually picked networking and just took the all the software engineering courses because it had less math requirement lol

But it was mostly theoretical, with hands on homework to demonstrate it in practice. Everyone had certain courses they had to take, like at least 3 semesters of programming, discrete math, data structures, and a few others along with gen eds.

You just had to get a certain amounts of credits from different levels, so you could go through and pick what you wanted to focus on. You could dive into more theoretical or practical, high level or low level, but everyone had to study the full stack enough to understand it at a basic level

But it’s all castles made of sand. Even before the first computer, we’ve been iterating on these ideas… Studying them and building higher

The line between the science and engineering is blurry…Hell, our jobs are blurry and usually cross-discipline

Here’s the thing…all of computer science is based on the practical, and software engineering is based on the theoretical

The data and computation being studied? We made it up. We don’t need to do it any particular way, we’re playing with ideas to interface to computers. Computers we made up too

Software engineering is using the lessons we learned by studying how others did things and how it works out in practice

We teach students computer science to make them into software engineers. You can still study how things are done as a separate career, but the two ideas are like an ouroboros. It’s a cycle of creation and analysis

Lol what? We’ve been taken over since citizens united

They just don’t care anymore. They’re going mask off, just public bribes and concentration camps

Computer science is basically the study of software engineering, because computer engineering means hardware, which has grown into a separate discipline that computer science only touches on

Programming is writing code for the ticket, architecture is designing the system that gets written into tickets, and software development is the whole process

But all these disciplines grew faster than language, so really the titles are whatever you want them to be

Great!

So with your example of buying equipment… So you’re now saddling your business with debt. Why wouldn’t you get a second loan when you pay off the first one? You take another loan to open up another location, and once that’s paid off you could open up two more.

But uh oh…One of the stores was in a bad location, but you’re still on the hook for the loan. Now you’re dragging the good, successful businesses down for the next 30 years

But uh oh… You’re too old to manage all this anymore, so you sell it to an up and comer. But they took a loan to buy it, which the business has to pay back

But uh oh… Your success exploded, and because you took all this investment you’re now required to become publicly traded. Your shareholders demand you become as big as apple or die trying, and if you refuse they boot you out and put a consultant brained CEO at the helm

That’s how it works in America. You have to grow at an every increasing rate if you ever take the money, and the end result is always enshitification. And it happens fast - in my lifetime we went from zero national debt to $40 trillion, we’ve had 3 boom-busts, homes are up like 10x, and what happens? People are financing a single meal over several pay periods and going further into debt.

On the flip side, inequality is growing exponentially. Because basically everyone, at every stage of doing anything, has to add in the cost of interest

I just don’t see any upside beyond “this is the way things are done”. I also don’t see a path between here and a different form of money without a total economic crash, but I think that’s inevitable regardless, even the world bank is coming up with alternatives

But I think the first step is we treat debt as immoral. It’s what got us in this mess, even if they exist in some form we should treat the concept as shameful

Yerp.

But then that’s not history, is it?

You could argue that the housing market should be 100 % regulated (I’m not necessarily opposed to this idea), but that again breaks the premise of not drastically changing the society. We’re talking about whether loans are a necessity (or even a positive thing) in our society as it exists now.

Oh… No, this is fundamentally impossible without drastically changing the system. All our money is just made out of debt, when people stop taking loans it’s deflationary. If everyone paid off their loans today, the money goes poof

As for just keeping the Nordic model? I mean, you guys are widely held to be the best system currently…But you’re still just holding the wolves at bay. You’re not immune to the same forces, from my understanding you had a more communal starting place, were already developed, and have fought to stay where you are, but even despite all that there’s been erosion around the edges

Beyond that, at the end of the day, a system based on debt creates exponentially growing boom-bust cycles. Fractional reserve banking is just insane, it’s using a powder keg as a candle

Maybe the small loans with tight regulation juice things up and don’t cause too much harm… but IDK, I just think any other option would be better. Hell just print the money and give it as grants, don’t gamble and borrow from an uncertain future