People have lost their homes and everything they own to a natural disaster that was not under their control. I don't care where you live in the world, this could happen to you. The lack of empathy and victim blaming in these comments is absolutely revolting. I am done with this site. It has been taken over by heartless people with zero intellectual curiosity. Good riddance.
It's always been filled with smug self-important techbro shitlibertarians (edit: with egos more fragile than literal snowflakes). Luckily, what's they've sent around is starting to come back and they reeeeally don't like consequences.
An hour in and nobody in these comments is addressing climate change? The risks of drought and the resulting fire or hurricanes and floods is much higher than it has been in recorded history in these areas because of climate change. Should people be forced to abandon their homes because the fossil fuel companies lied and misled the public and bought out our governments for the last 50 years?
IMHO we should be seizing the fossil fuel companies' assets and using them for disaster relief around the world due to the catastrophe they have deliberately caused.
The talk about insurance rates is a deliberate distraction.
We need a high per-ton carbon tax, with all revenue dividended out per-capita to offset the inflation. This would eliminate the green premium on a great number of clean alternatives and avoid the problems of the government picking where to invest, letting the market handle that instead.
And if those companies don't find other things to do (they'd be quite good at geothermal, or durable carbon sequestration, with all their drilling and fracking expertise), then they'll go bankrupt without needing to do anything so extreme as nationalizing/seizing/whatever.
If you ask Americans to vote to make gas more expensive to stop climate change (eg. the Washington carbon tax referenda), they say no. America burns lots of fossil fuels because it's what the voters want. If every private fossil fuel company shut down tomorrow, there would be riots in the streets, and then oil and gas would be imported from abroad.
Did you miss the part where I said the public has been lied to for the past 50 years?
I didn't say we shut off all the gas pumps tomorrow. It will obviously take time to transition off. I said we seize their assets and use the proceeds for climate relief. We can keep the revenue coming and using the profits for disaster relief while we transition off fossil fuels. It's not that hard to understand.
What evidence do you have that these fires have anything to do with climate change? They appear to be adequately explained by the known behavior of the region, and to the extent that they're not the radical increases in habitation and the systematic suppression of small fires is enough to cover any gap.
Ironically there is a great case that varrious environmental groups that vigorously opposed controlled burns are among the greatest proximal human causes of the current situation. If careful analysis concluded so, would you support seizing their assets for use as disaster relief?
The frequency and intensity of droughts in the area has increased due to climate change. The increased winds is due to climate change. It is obvious. It is not explained by "radical population increase".
Stop trying to distract with fossil fuel propaganda trying to distract with everthing else they can. Yes controlled burns still happen but it is also understandable that people would be jumpy about them with the problems fire has been causing in that area in recent years.
The underlying paper is the opposite of convincing.
Essentially they fit a logistic regression of climate measurements the amount of area burned by wild fires each year in the forested parts of northern California to try to express how much is burned as a function e.g. of humidity, temperature, max temp, rainfall, wind, etc. Then the took historical weather data and eliminated the trend in order to try to construct an alternative time-series without human influence then their apply their aforementioned coefficients to figure out how much fire would be had in the counterfactual climate conditions.
To their credit (or perhaps their reviewers credit) the paper does observe the most obvious flaw the wildfires don't work that way-- that fuel builds up over time then is cleared by fires and once an area is burned it can't burn again for a long time. While the structure of the model is such that that if the air gets dry enough it will tell you that will constantly be fire everywhere forever no matter how much has already burned. They constructed a number of dynamic models that attempt to account for that and the increase largely disappears, with a constant level being shown for the next decade. True that the dynamic corrections seem even more adhoc (they don't seem to have data that allows them to fit the dynamic parameters), but the model that ignores these effects is pretty obviously wrong in a meaningful sense.
Even without that correction, their model doesn't fit the last ten years of data with many times the number of acres burned than the model predicts.
Their approach also has the effect that if run on the data from the first third of the study or so, it would instead result in claiming that climate change was reducing wildfires. (because wildfire acres burned were decreasing over that period)
More fundamentally, you could instead run the same analysis using any other measurements that increased over the same period that wildfires in the region increased and the model would come back attributing significant levels of wildfire to it. E.g. plugging in metrics of internet traffic growth into it looks like it would probably work even better. (See also: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations )
In some parts of California, fires recur with some regularity. In Oakland, for example, fires of various size and ignition occurred in 1923, 1931, 1933, 1937, 1946, 1955, 1960, 1961, 1968, 1970, 1980, 1990, 1991, 1995, 2002, and 2008.
Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino County, and Los Angeles County are other examples. Orange and San Bernardino counties share a border that runs north to south through the Chino Hills State Park, with the park's landscape ranging from large green coastal sage scrub, grassland, and woodland, to areas of brown sparsely dense vegetation made drier by droughts or hot summers. The valley's grass and barren land can become easily susceptible to dry spells and drought, therefore making it a prime spot for brush fires and conflagrations, many of which have occurred since 1914. Hills and canyons have seen brush or wildfires in 1914, the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and into today.
Stop trying to muddy the waters, we already agree that wildfires do happen. Nobody disputes that. The frequency and intensity of what we are seeing in recent years is what is not normal. That is due to climate change because of the increased frequency and duration of droughts as well as increased winds.
Don't agree. Well partially. I also think the privatise the profits socialise the losses story is strong, and the coal and oil interests should pony up more remediation costs.
But insurance is one of the best signals we have to true risk/consequence/likelihood, which commercial interests pay attention to
The best long term outcome here would be rebuilding safer but the downside will be "which excludes the poor" -that's where I think state and federal policy should apply the lever: require socialised housing outcomes.
Price controls on insurance forces socialised losses. Better is some middle ground: mandate insurance, demand adequate mitigations and defences. But losing the price signal is bad.
The losses were already socialized without the controls. Look at how the insurance companies always behave in these situations. They always find a way to stick the public with the bill. Don't listen to the corporate talking points. The price controls may have been stupid but they are a distraction.
> The risks of drought and the resulting fire or hurricanes and floods is much higher than it has been in recorded history in these areas because of climate change
I saw an article on npr [1] which basically agrees with the chart on the blogpost. I 1980, there were 3 disasters a year that cost $1B, inflation adjusted. In 2024, 24. The second chart in the npr article is pretty terrifying.
Without accounting for population growth in high risk areas this is meaningless. If the population and housing units in a floodplain doubles, a $500M 1980s disaster becomes a $1B 2024 disaster. That's not to mention the above-inflation increase in the cost of housing which probably bumps these numbers up as well.
That is a red herring. The frequency and intensity of the wildfires has increased. Stop repeating fossil fuel talking points meant to distract from climate change.
I grew up in the US and I hated every single day of school. I don't have a favorite teacher I remember fondly, I don't have friends from school, etc. I absolutely hated it.
But I still am against home schooling. I still got social skills from going to public school that homeschooled kids lack. I still don't think your average parent is equipped to give their children a good education.
I have people I know who have homeschooled their kids. Without exception these people are narcissists with insane views who are using it as a way to indoctrinate their children into having the same worldview that they hold.
Homeschooling should be illegal. It is child abuse.
My mum never punched me in my face, followed me around the playground trying to put dog shit in my backpack, steal my books and piss on them or make rumours about me to ensure I was ostracised by the other children. All the while the adults were helpless and continually told me to be a man- and worse, the adults leaning in on it being my problem. A true hopeless feeling.
You will never know how much I can despise you for your presumption that my home-life could possibly be correlated with my school life.
Lots of kids home lives are worse than your school life. But that's not the point I was making. You are letting your personal horrible experience define the whole discussion for you. But that is completely beside the point I was making. Yes some kids are physically abused even tortured at school, some kids are physically abused even tortured at home. You don't make policy decision based on outlier cases that are already illegal.
As I explained in my initial comment, the problem is average parents are not equipped to be good teachers and homeschooled kids are being denied the variety of experiences that kids going to an actual school are getting. That's why I said all homeschooled kids are being abused by definition. Not the same type of abuse you got at school or I got at home. But they are being denied a proper education. They are being denied the opportunity to learn to make friends and socialize with different people. When it's time for them to finally go out into the world they will be poorly equipped to do so.
If I thought home schooling was a sure fire way to avoid violent abuse for any kids, maybe it would be worth the trade off. But we both know if anything abusive parents are also going to abuse their kids via home schooling.
I honestly think on the whole homeschooling is doing more damage to the kids being put through it and should be illegal. Obviously before actually doing that we should do scientific studies and surveys of adults who went through it and make a decision based on that rather than just my opinion. But right now we let parents do it just because extremist parents insist on it. And I think we are failing those kids.
If it weren't for homeschooling my autistic daughter would be spending her day in the headteachers office shaking and crying due to her cripping anxiety.
I'm glad that you have a way to help your daughter. But there are many kids with similar issues and homeschooling can't be our solution for all of them. Instead we need to figure out how to accomodate them at schools.
Not sure about USA, but here in UK there are special schools for people whose autism really makes it unviable for them to be in mainstream school (whether that's a failure of the mainstream school, or just level of anxiety etc of the student). Such special schools are often wonderful, with the most amazing, dedicated staff. Usually staff have specialist training (albeit not always to as high level as one might like, due to underfunding) and much experience of working with autistic people. So, able to provide things that parents with no prior knowledge of autism, and jobs to go to and bills to pay, are less able to provide.
I thought I read a comment somewhere in all of this where he said that he was actually doing coding, yes, but (a) I could well be mistaken and (b) he could well have been talking rubbish.
I think you misinterpreted him funding development. Read the linked article. Should clear you up. He was funding (via Automattic) an estimated 4k+ hours of work per week and is cutting that back to 45. Not himself coding but people that work for him.
If you are never getting good suggestions on your PRs that's a bad sign. Any team of more than 2 people should have some ideas sometimes for each other. Either this means everybody's too checked out to put in effort on PRs or they think it'll fall on deaf ears.
I've been a software engineer for decades and even so, teammates will have good ideas sometimes. Nobody can think of every good idea every time.
I said very rarely not never. I classify suggested changes in 2 flavors. The first is minor changes where someone suggests "hey this would be easier to read if you used syntax A vs syntax B here".
I get those frequently, and they are usually reasonable suggestions, and I usually graciously accept them. But I say it's not worth bringing up in a PR because 99% of the time it doesn't actually matter in the long run. Both forms will have been used in the code base previously, and which one you think is better really comes down to which one you use more. It's the kind of thing you could change with a sufficiently opinionated linter. And the kind of thing that isn't worth the cost of mandatory PR reviews.
The 2nd is where someone suggests changes to overall architecture or changes to the way the feature or code works large scale.
These are much rarer because of several reasons
1. PR reviews are almost always surface level and so are more likely to catch category 1 than category 2. The incentives at nearly every tech company push for this.
2. Very frequently one person isn't available to review all of the PRs that go into a feature, so the reviewers lack context.
3. It's very unlikely that even if someone wants to dig deeper, that they have the free time to spend even 1% of the time the person who wrote the PR spent on it.
But the biggest reason I personally don't get many of the 2nd category is because I talk through non-trivial problems with other experienced engineers before I get to the PR stage.
"changes to overall architecture or changes to the way the feature or code works large scale"
I'm not saying there's never a reason to go back and redesign something after a PR review, but in my mind getting a design to that point and then actually needing to change it is a huge failure.
Far more common the case where someone wants a big design change with no tangible benefits just different tradeoffs.
I just don't think the ocassional benefit is worth the cost of the process.
You're lumping big changes with small changes. If you really won't go back and change one function or one class because someone shared a better idea at the PR stage that's unhealthy and you will improve by letting go of that.
I never said I won't go back and change a single function. And I never said I wouldn't change things larger than that if asked. I would lump small requests like that in with category 1 (of which a syntax change wasn't meant to an exhaustive example).
What I said was those kind of requests usually aren't meaningful or impactful long term. They very very rarely make or save anyone a single dollar. Let alone enough money to justify the time spent on the review process.
If you've already spent the time to suggest the change, if it's slightly better, sure I'll make it. Even if it's not any better, as long as it's not worse, if you feel strongly about it, there's a good chance I'll go along. I just don't think the process has a positive ROI, and I've yet to see any data to convince me otherwise.
What? This is absolutely incorrect. There's be no point in PRs if it's too late to change anything. Part of the point is to reduce the number of synchronous discussions your team has to have about code before writing it. PRs let you iterate on actual code instead of endlessly discussing hypothetical implementations.
You’d kill your teams velocity if you did this for every PR.
I worked on a team once with… Perfectionist Petra. Petra would jump on an 1200 line refactor that was blocking the team and demand changes that would require it to be rewritten. Not changes that would save the code base from grievous error: Petra didn’t like the pattern used or didn’t approve of the design.
Sufficient tests? Check. Linted and formatted? Check. Does Petra approve? Big variable. I often wanted to tell Petra if they could just write the code out for me in a ticket so I could copy it for them. Instead I had to try and read Petra’s mind or hope they wouldn’t jump on my PR.
Sometimes you have to trust your teammate and not let the perfect plan interfere with a good enough one.
I'm not advocating for constant nitpicking or demanding perfection. But somewhere between that and "PRs are too late for changes" is where most good teams operate.
The point was that I'm a planner. I tend to discuss designs long before I begin writing code. By the time I get to a PR I don't expect to get feedback about the design. I'm looking for someone to check that the code is acceptable to merge. If you have problems with the design, it is too late!
However I work with folks who are not planners. They will write a PR as a proposal. Their expectation is that they may need to iterate on the code a bit based on that feedback; even the design and approach itself is up for review. If you have problems with the design, it's fine!
What has worked well for me in those situations in the past is to be up-front about what kind of feedback you're seeking. Mention in the PR description that you're looking for design crit, code review, etc. Whatever lingo works for your team.
Update: Realizing at the last minute that the design itself is wrong, and saying so, is a good thing -- and I do appreciate that. However it should be rare. My pet peeve is more with the folks who nitpick... whose design contributions are superficial and concerned with style more than substance.
I don't disagree some people have bad, overly nitpicky PR habits and they should be trained out of that.
That said, sitting down before hand and planning is useful for the big picture but one of the big benefits of PRs, as I explained earlier, is to eliminate lots of wasted time going back and forth in meetings about how to implement something and instead empowering engineers to go write code and then to iterate on actual implementations instead of endlessly discussing ahead of time. So there is a balance there where you make sure everyone is aligned on what you're building but also being open to suggestions on your PRs. Sometimes that may mean rewriting large chunks in exchange for drastically reducing pre-coding discussions.
I agree that balance is necessary and nitpickers should be steered away from that behaviour.
I think I'm more concerned with nitpickers which show up in different flavours.
I understand a functional requirement to rewrite a piece of code in a PR. Perhaps you spent the last 8 hours coding up a solution that passes all of the tests but if you use that data structure at scale it wouldn't perform acceptably. That's a rewrite and that sucks but it will be for the better.
The H1B system sucks. Open the borders and just let everyone come here who wants to. We have plenty of room and immigration has resulted in so many great parts of the US due to the intermixing of cultures. If you're worried about crime well all the ICE agents will need new jobs.
Societies are complex, and humans are still very tribal. Any large influx of new population changes everything significantly, for good and for worse. And there will be resistance to change. Intermixing of cultures takes multiple generations, if at all and even then you will see silos.
We just need to look at how things are even now, even with the supposedly local population - caucasians, hispanics, african-americans and native americans. And they've all been together for centuries.
(1) Canada has never had an open border policy and (2) our skilled labor market is extremely robust. We have significant issues with housing in metro areas that are related more to extremely NIMBY zoning laws than anything else.
This take is cynical to the point of wilfull ignorance. My spouse works in DEI and I guarantee you her and her coworkers are sincere and trying to instill better, less biased hiring practices and to make everyone feel welcome and part of the team. Not everyone is going to be the same but that's like anything else. Being 100% dismissive is as much of a mistake as being 100% unquestioningly accepting.
I believe the comment is implying that having DEI programs at all was a song-and-dance put on by the C-suite; not that your spouse is insincere in their work.
Put differently: the C-suite set up these programs (and hired very sincere people to work in them) but never really actually cared about the outcomes.
The C-suite are humans and as humans, many of them have ideologies. It's very cynical to think executives have no goals or ideologies beyond enriching themselves.
> but never really actually cared about the outcomes
To be clear, I'm referring to the outcomes of the DEI programs in and of themselves; not the outcomes that resulted from having those programs (and/or appearing to have them). And to be clear - some C-suites really might have cared about the programs because they believed in them.
> It's very cynical to think executives have no goals or ideologies beyond enriching themselves.
I disagree, wholeheartedly. The majority of executives have shown, time and again, that they primarily care about money. A close second is power. It's not to say that they don't have goals beyond enriching themselves, but rather that does appear to be the goal they overwhelmingly choose when said values are in conflict.
Companies are filled with workers, and plenty of them do care. But unless they work for a co-op employees are disposable, and ultimately they serve at the whims of capital.
When capital decides that equity doesn't sell, the workers striving to create more diverse workplaces will be discarded.
The only counter to this is government, but Americans just voted for a government that explicitly wants to increase disparities.
There is literally no counter to this in the private sector, save co-ops or non-profits that actually sell their principals as part of their brand (e.g. Patagonia).
I think both things are true: there are people who sincerely want to change things, but the organization and incentive structure for large public orgs means the corps will only do things that don't lower their profits.
Exactly, throwing the baby out with the bath water, but I have to ask the question , why did any of this happen in the first place? There must’ve been some need and catalyst for it outside of “libtardation”.
Git is not that complicated. If you can't grok git I am seriously concerned about your ability to be an effective software engineer.
Edit: I had assumed the OP was one of the many people I have met who have a Tech Lead title but are not really very technical due to the grandiose request to deprecate checkout. But looking into the blog more I realize that instead the author is more new in their career and I don't mean to be as harsh to someone in that position. Instead to them I would say; when you encoutner something established you don't understand, take it as an opportunity to learn. Git isn't beyond you, it won't take as long to fully understand as you think.
If your non-engineers have to deal with git you have an org or process problem. Git is pretty clear and easy to use to a competent software engineer. I'm tired of this meme that Git is hard. It doesn't get enough pushback.
I disagree that non-engineers should never have to deal with git. This may be true at large organizations, but at startups and labs, many people who are not software developers have to work with of code.
In the biotech startup I worked for, the biologists and the chemists absolutely had to deal with the code that we wrote, that was the only way we could get things done! I think maybe in very large organizations with people to spare, and large departments, and official policies, you can have rules like that. But at smaller places, you have to get scrappy and have everybody work with everything. That involves non-engineers using git!
While I strongly disagree with the conclusion of an org or process problem, I agree that basic concepts are simple and straightwordard. Plus majority (an assumption based on what I've seen) of those users use a GUI tool. GUI makes it simple to work with. A few clicks here and there and you're done. If something goes very wrong, there is usually a collegue who can help using CLI magic
> I agree that basic concepts are simple and straightwordard
I do too and I believe the problem with git is that it's somewhat usable without grasping even these basic concepts - until the day it isn't, as something goes off the beaten path and you just end up getting lost. It also doesn't really nudge you towards understanding as you keep using it; to the contrary - it happily lets you build some suboptimal mental models that are doomed to stop working at some point.
The only way to learn git well right ahead is to sit down and read. It isn't much to learn, but most people just skip this step and go straight to CLI. I can't blame them, I did the same many years ago, so it took me much longer to actually know what I'm doing than it should as well. But the thing is: I didn't know better back then, nobody told me that. Now you (the reader) know, so you have no excuse :)
If you work on a multi-disciplinary team, the consequence of not making your tools simple enough for others to use, is that you are forced to use other tools, which is why we have to use a horrible mix of sharepoint, teamforge, and github.
My dude it's not hubris. Git is pretty damn simple compared to many problems you will have to reason about as a software engineer. If you can't understand file versioning, branching and merging then you aren't going to be able to think effectively about much more complicated problems.
If you think it's simple you don't really know it.
It's not that the supposed concepts that are hard, it's that it has one of the messiest interfaces and set of documentation ever devised for a software.
And there are hardly any settled concepts, the terms it used came to be as it was developed, and can have different definitions in different parts of the documentation.
If you consider it simple I'm very seriously concerned about your software engineering output
If git was aimed at regular peope I'd agree it's not well designed. It's not. It's a tool for software engineers to do a job. It is not flawless. But it was massive improvement over the code management tools that were in use before it and I haven't encountered a replacement I prefer.
A lot of the problems people have with git are actually problems with bad workflows. You can argue that git should support arbitrary workflows but that's like arguing a garbage truck should support offroading.
What about them? That they exist? No one disputes that. That illegal immigrants cause crime? We have hard data on that; it's not true. That they are a drain on society via social programs? We have data on that too; they get taxes witheld but cannot claim refunds and cannot enroll in social benefit programs due to their lack of SSN.
On any topic you want to pick it's typically the radical right wing who have their fingers in their ears.
The people who think illegal immigrants shouldn't be illegal don't think anyone should be illegal. What's the double standard? It's not like they think black people should be allowed in but white people shouldn't.
What's hard to grasp is how you think this applies to a discussion about differing facts based on political leaning. Nobody disagrees with the facts here, only on what should be done going forward. So, not really relevant to the discussion.
