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Difficult. I will attempt to answer this in a way that won't upset people and may be informative?

Here are two ways of looking at it:

a. People in the USA* have massive fights about things that no-else cares about, and software projects put up a statement about those. This is off-putting to everyone else.

b. The USA is ahead of the curve on some political movements, and the article is expressing conservatism/anti-conservatism/a reaction towards being expected to act according to morals that aren't majority accepted in their country yet.

To decide for each particular movement whether it's (a) the wave of the future or (b) a passing fad? Who can say? You are supposedly an autonomous moral being, so use your own judgement.

*This is true of any place and any people, but everyone else has to put up with the USA's quirks because rich influential explosives. You could substitute Twitter for the USA here. Hey, who gave Twitter all those stealth bombers?


I think the short answer is that the US is the dominant soft global empire (which is to say this is not merely military, but also economic and cultural). What happens in Rome ripples outward into the broader realm.

But I also believe that another contributing factor is that Americans, regardless of political affiliation, often demonstrate a presumption that their own provincial squabbles, concerns, and anxieties are shared by everyone else on the planet. This is not categorically unique to Americans, but such presumption is reinforced by boorish imperial egocentrism.

And, of course, some people simply don't have the sense, consideration, and social grace to know what the appropriate time, place, and means are for expressing political convictions, and as a result, obsessively pollute all manner of social interaction with the aforementioned topics.


Honestly I guess it's just a difference in taste/demenour.

My background was originally in C# then Java (plus JavaScript on the side, since most of us have to do that), and when I first came to Python I found it to be a lovely language and a breath of fresh air.

I guess I would say to me it feels neat and tidy, thoughful about interface design, and gives me a sense of quality. I get a similar feeling from Clojure (perhaps even more so).

I don't find static typing as valuable as you do, and additionally I find the cost in verbosity and in time wasted solving type-checking puzzles quite painful. Perhaps if I'd spent more time with one of the more sophisticated type systems I'd feel differently (Java and C# are quite limited here), but not convinced enough to try.


Why would you ever leave a voicemail when you can leave a text message?

I think I disagree with all the advice in your comment, but this part has me particularly baffled.


I was hoping people would use it to explain what they wanted to talk about, since with Slack and SMS people just go "hey" and don't explain what they want, and speaking is easier than typing. But I guess I forgot that people on voicemail just say "hey it's X, call me back when you get this".

It would be nice if Slack had an away message that was sent back to the user when they message you, rather than a status that nobody ever reads.


> since with Slack and SMS people just go "hey" and don't explain what they want,

So you reply to that with a link to https://no-hello.com/ every time, and they eventually catch on.


Because I can convey more complex information with less effort with my voice than a phone keyboard.


Assuming the other person hears you clearly and assuming the other person listens to it at all.


I often write out callstacks/dependency chains on paper. I find that makes it stick.

Try actually using the program as an end user would.

Read error messages, read code, make predictions about what the code does, find out if your predictions are true.


I've had two climated-related jobs, and I would recommend it.

I find it very motivating personally. It also means you'll be working with decent people who care about their work.

Don't expect to be paid top dollar though!


Not knowing anything about how Google works internally, this is very much how it looks from the outside.

They just don't seem to be able to make products that anyone wants. And the products they made before which people did want just drift in a generally worse direction as they fiddle with them randomly over time.


They have no coherent vision. As a consumer I have no idea what I'm getting with a Google product, or what their ethos is. Their products and features are always randomly baked together, without any coherent story. Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. I can't rely on any of it. This is why I moved to Apple eco system last year. Google as a company seems analogous to the Linux eco system; TON of duplicated work across different teams, none providing an actual complete solution for day to day use. Such a waste of talent.


I was originally just going to link to a Colugo, which I think are still pretty cool, and probably good evidence of what early stages of vertebrate flight looked like. Functionally they're not doing full flight like a bat, but their flight is still quite a bit better than a flying squirrel, a sugar glider, or one of the assorted other gliding mammals can do. You can see them flapping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIgv8Qw--kk

Like the flying squirrel example given by another poster, they're not closely related to bats. Actually quite closely related to us though.

Bats: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@CHIROPTERA=574724 Colugos: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@DERMOPTERA=987673 Flying squirrels: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@Petinomys=43434 Sugar gliders: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@Petauridae=323245

But the bat transitional fossils is also an interesting question. And some Googling finds this, which you might enjoy: https://arstechnica.com/science/2008/02/earliest-bat-fossil-...


In that Colugo video the speaker says “they actually built a show around this shot”. Any idea what show he’s talking about?

Also tiny cameras have come a long way since that video was made.


I don't, sorry, just found it by Googling.


The people in the past who broke from mainstream culture and went experimental faced disapproval too.

Maybe you just need to hang out with weirder people?


Still gutted they never made Grand Theft Auto: Weston-super-Mare.


When the 1969 expansion came out it too was rated 18. I was 16, went into Manchester and bought it. Felt like a rebel.

Then on the metro back with my child ticket (valid upto the age of 15) I got stopped. My friend didn’t even have a ticket and he got fined, but they let me off as I at least had a ticket.

Felt like such a rebel that day.


You could play it for real any night in WSM :)

Plus, if the tide was way out you could take your stolen motor down on the sands for some donuts. Not that I'd know anything about that....


> This is true despite the fact that you know exactly when the market will hit a bottom. Even God couldn’t beat dollar-cost averaging.

I'm a bit unconvinced by the studies that say this, because I don't think the "buy the dip" strategy they're talking about is the same one that people are running.

The studies describe waiting for a low point in a given year (or even across multiple years!) then lumping in all your money then.

Whereas I think what people actually mean when they talk about buying the dip is shifting their dollar cost averaging buy-in by days, weeks, or at most a few months, while they wait for the market to get spooked.

I don't do this at the moment. I had a "wait for the US president to say something stupid" strategy which seemed to work for a while, but of course I don't really have enough evidence to back that up.


Even an investor who just waited for 5% or 10% dips would have underperformed an investor who bought on a fixed schedule each month, historically:

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=6196749#p61...


But even if you're just modifying a DCA schedule slightly (buying a little early/more when things feel particularly cheap, or buying a little later/less when things feel expensive) -- doesn't the same problem exist: that those adjustments typically cause a worse outcome than if you didn't apply them?

Maybe some people have a better crystal ball than others, but if we just look at the average case where studies favor vanilla DCA, I have to imagine that the reasons (why DCA wins) will prevail regardless of the extent that they're applied. But if your skill is enough above average that it's helpful to deviate, go for it...


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