He could empty your bank account with just one pin? Was it not traced where the money went?

> one might even call the act of accepting generosity a type of compassion. The compassion of being kinded.

When reading this, I can suddenly relate. There's a colleage who always smiles but I know she's hurt inside. Sometimes in a quiet moment I try to comfort her with careful listening, kind words and genuine advice. She's very receptive and thankful to this act of kindness and I find it a pleasure to be kind to her. The reward is so high that it almost feels compassionate towards me.

I had a business trip with someone who very easily started talking to strangers, but he wasn't even a very fast or smooth talker, but he felt very agreeable when communicating.

Back then I felt jealous of that trait. I said to myself I want to be like that, just be able to do smaltalk with strangers.

And I simply tried, within weeks I was able to do just that, even with people much prettier or confident than me, and I never looked back.

Over time a feel i need to hold myself back even. Often I have to say to myself: there's no point starting a talk now other than my own feeling good about it, so I hold it in.

This conversation is interesting, as well as it is socializing. You understand where i am getting at?

Yes, and IMHO this kind of conversation is superior to the average IRL conversation. It is asynchronous (allowing you to return to it as you like), it places few demands on your time, and when it’s over then it’s over. You can enter just the interesting part of the conversation and then exit just as quickly. No need to drag it out or pad the ends with filler. No need to explain your departure.

IRL conversation is an art, and few people are even halfway decent at it. Maybe that’s the true source of my complaint. To make an IRL conversation entertaining you need expressiveness, creativity, as well as a good variety of topics and tolerance for differences of opinion. Not many people can check all these boxes.

For me, how entertaining or interesting a conversation is, depends a lot of the personality of my peer. Open minded people who are not being stubborn, who try to see things from different perspectives are good candidates, as I learn from them and provide a basis for further thinking. Still I prefer to talk IRL, as there's so much extra info in intonation and physical expression. Even calling with camera on makes a big difference. I find it interesting and even puzzling to know there are (apparently) smart people out there who don't find that having much added value.

I would have expected more numbers originating from physics, like Reynolds number (bad example since it is not really constant though).

The human-invented ones seem to be just a grasp of dozens man can come up with.

i to the power of i is one I never heard of but is fascinating though!

To prove something is transcendental we would need to know how to compute it exactly, and I’m struggling to see how that would come up frequently in a physics context. In physics most constants are not arbitrary real numbers derived from a formula, they’re a measured relationship, which sort of inherently can’t be proved to be transcendental

some constants that may or may not be transcendental: - Percolation Thresholds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_threshold - Critical scalings in 3d: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universality_class#Ising_model

Yeah I'd expect Bessel function zeroes and such

In fact this is a counter argument to the point of the article. You're not making 'just more throwaway software' but instead building usable software while standing on the shoulders of existing algo's and libraries.

Well yes. To me industrial software is hardened algorithms, not throwaway slop like the author is arguing. LLMs are very good at porting existing algorithms and as you say it’s about standing on the shoulders of giants. I couldn’t write these from scratch but I can port and harden an algo with basic engineering practices.

I like the article except the premise is wrong - industrial software will be high value and low cost as it will outlive the slop.

"real programming" hits a "true scottsman" snare with me.

2013 was pre-LLM. If devs continue relying on LLMs and their training would stop (which i would find unlikely), still the tools around the LLMs will continue to evolve and new language features will get less attention and would only be used by people who don't like to use LLMs. Then it would be a race of popularity between new language (features) and using LLMs steering 'old' programming languages and APIs. Its not always the best technology that wins, often its the most popular one. You know what happened during the browser wars.

The hording and eliteness is not a property of the capitalistic system. It might be an unwanted side effect. Imperialism, greed, urge to expand control, subordination of others are unfortunately human traits. You might attribute that behavior to any system, why single out capitalism?

Because capitalism explicitly encodes transactionalism into the social structure by alienating labor from the fruits of the labor.

There’s no period of time where that has not been true for some portion is society, but we reached a point to which there are no places where that is not true.

If this is the best we can do then we do not deserve to survive as a species

Perhaps it's merely the best we have been able to achieve, thus far.

Deserve, by whom's standards?