There was a stretch when Elon Musk took over twitter and started charging for blue checks (lmao) and some of his sycophants started talking about “Veblen goods.”
A Veblen good is something for which demand increases as price increases, in contact to the neoclassical orthodoxy that demand decreases axiomatically with price.
Veblen goods are things that rich people buy to signal their wealth and status. Jewelry, fancy watches, yachts, Ivy League degrees. Things that cost many thousands or millions of dollars.
The idea that an $8 verification on twitter would ever be a status symbol for the rich was fucking ludicrous.
+100 to this: Git is the most user-hostile piece of software I've ever tried to teach (and I've taught people Emacs). It's a significant barrier to entry for many people who really want to learn to program, and those who claim otherwise are textbook examples of survivor bias. https://mastodon.social/deck/@tess/110856324920882032
@gvwilson Hard agree. Network effects and GH's monopoly means it's just one of those things you somehow figure out how to live with if you want to code for a living. 🤷
For example I would be nowhere without magit and gitk.
I’ve been pretty thoroughly radicalized against Template Haskell. Static introspection sounds great! This is not that. I’m not sure TH brings anything to the table that justifies the complexity over generating source files. Not the way it gets used in practice, anyway.
@ttuegel the last I looked (~3 years ago) doing anything with the parsed source was pretty tedious because the syntax is so rich both TH and preprocessors looked easier. Another advantage with pp’ers is they generate only once so build times beat TH. The big disadvantage is if you’re writing a custom one the Cabal build type can’t be Simple which I think made Stack even clunkier to use.
Forgive me if I don't buy the "AI changes everything” given that cryptocurrency, the metaverse, and self-driving cars were all proclaimed to be the next big thing. People make huge money off the hype so a good dose of skepticism is necessary.
Do you know what changed everything? Electricity. The automobile. The telephone. Air travel. The microprocessor. The computer. The internet.
Joining this rarified group requires more than a declaration and hype.
@scottjenson@tperfitt from what I hear it is at the quality of low effort human written content so at the very least it's saving a lot of time and money for the same outcome
@tperfitt unlike the others ai is immediately helpful today. I know at least 2 small business owners who are generating all their marketing copy with it.
@ross@tpolecat I typed on a Sun keyboard once, it had a bank of keys to the left of the keyboard that were like 'yank' and whatnot. Suddenly emacs made a lot of sense.
my current boss does an excellent job of helping people grapple with change. i’ve never seen a manager do it quite as effectively. he’ll take uncertain info and openly guess at what will happen. like, “they’ll probably do a hostile takeover of us and our jobs will suck”. the magical thing is that when bad stuff pans out exactly as he said, it registers in your head as “status quo” instead of “instability”. it’s been fascinating to watch him at work
@jack I get the sentiment but where I live this would be impractical to quite uncomfortable about a third of the year. I am hoping ebikes lead to a tuk tuk revolution. Those are much better situated vehicles for non major cities.
Coding boot camps are to education what cryptocurrency is to finance: poorly designed money grabs with no oversight or integrity who'd sell their own customers down river as soon as actually help them.
Maybe you find a good one, or maybe you just time it right, but they only exist because you hear about a handful of people (who might even be real!) that do well.
@penryu what's the alternative for someone trying to get into tech as a second career? Not rhetorical, the exploitation bothers me but I do think we need the diversity.
Make states which were legal but are now illegal (because business)
debuggable
... then migrateable
... then illegal
... and then maybe legal again (because business).
Who wants to get rich and famous with ☝️ conference talk.
