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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • I think it’s unfortunately a tragedy of the commons/prisoner’s dilemma problem

    Simplifying, a single store is not going to be able to improve pay for all the underpaid members of society, but what they can do is run thinner margins while staying in business (pay employees less, spend more on security, etc). Paying only their own employees more also does little to reduce the overall chances of theft.

    Perhaps a better global equilibrium exists at higher wage rates, but there are limited options at local levels. For low-end wages, I think the downward pressure exceeds the upward wage pressure of the “free market” b/c the negotiation is between someone making a less profit vs someone failing to make a living – the negotiating power is not balanced. This is why IMO minimum wage to some degree is important.












  • If you used good objects, you’ll only have to make the change in one place

    IMO that’s generally a retroactive statement because in practice have to be lucky for that to be true. An abstraction along one dimension – even a good one, will limit flexibility in some other dimension.

    Occasionally, everything comes into alignment and an opportunity appears to reliably-ish predict the correct abstraction the future will need.

    Most every other time, you’re better off avoiding the possibility of the really costly bad abstraction by resisting the urge to abstract preemptively.




  • IMO mathematical/logical/abstract thinking is critical for programming well, but IMO that’s different from “math degree” math.

    Software as a means to an end can be used in almost every domain, so proficiency within that applicable domain is often either useful or necessary. That is to say, “math degree” math is likely needed for 3d rendering (certain games), scientific computation (incl machine learning), etc, but maybe not, otherwise. It depends on what software you’re trying to build.

    To be more specific, general programming is definitely and specifically different from trig and calc. However, because math is also broad, “mathy” concepts like type theory, relational algebra, set theory are considered important for programming, even if only informally or indirectly so.