I think the difference here is that Penn and Teller are just as much historians of magic as they are magicians themselves. Accepting the honor is also accepting that the history is still relevant and worth celebrating. Making this into an ego thing misses the point a bit, I think.
My rule with Cursor is that unless I know exactly what I want it to do, I have it stay out of my way. If I have a general idea, I may turn on auto-complete. I reserve the agent for things like tests, UX, and rote programming that saves me time.
When I do use the agent, I inspect its output ruthlessly. The idea that pages of code can be written before being inspected is horrifying to me.
This game's dictionary is similar to Scrabble; it includes as many valid words as possible, even when they are obscure. It turns out that "asse" is a kind of fox:
It's a sticky wicket with these obscure words. I've made other word games before, and people get upset when oddball-but-valid words are rejected. It feels more fair to be permissive, but that's just me.
It's rather telling that you group substance abuse together with rather common and generally benign human conditions such as anxiety and neuroticism, and I find that your rather heavy-handed generalizations of people's capacity to help others based on their conditions and indeed their trauma dilutes your point.
It's as if you wish us to say, "I've figured everything out, let me show you the way." I don't find that particularly reassuring, and it's not exactly the kind of humility that I think you want to convey.
If your bar to helping others is ending all suffering within yourself, then I'm afraid we're all going to be living a very lonely existence if we followed your lead.
Now, I think your larger point is that folks in crisis should tend to that crisis, which I think anyone who has taken a plane ride would understand. Apply the mask on yourself first. But to extend that analogy, you can have a broken hand, or even a broken heart and still be able to help your neighbor.
You are right that he is making some heavy-handed generalizations, but then again, he is replying to the OP making a very populist generalization about people with wealth as well, as if he has figured everything out - and OP isn't getting any flack for that. It may be the difference between American culture / "the new rich" vs. European culture, but my experience with people with great material wealth is very different and not easily generalizable.
> If your bar to helping others is ending all suffering within yourself, then I'm afraid we're all going to be living a very lonely existence if we followed your lead.
Logically that does not make any sense. If everyone is able to relieve themselves of their own suffering (no one else can anyway, in an ultimate sense), which includes loneliness, then there would be no more suffering. This is a Buddhist mindset that seems kind of harsh at first, but it's a reality people benefit from once they accept it: you must become your own savior. And once you are in good place, even just mentally, it becomes very natural and easy to help out others.
Problems only start when people reject this idea, and think they have all the answers to all the problems, and start enforcing their beliefs on others using violence - which is a trend we're seeing more & more these days.
> but my experience with people with great material wealth is very different and not easily generalizable.
Same here, just FYI. There's a reason that I couched it in terms of "I have seen..."
I know multimillionaire high-school dropouts, and dirt-poor people with multiple advanced degrees from Ivy-league universities.
But the community of which I'm a member, stresses the importance of getting our own house in order, before looking to others, so people with means can do a lot of good (or harm).
Ah yes the Jordan Peterson movement. A very individualistic take on life. It's also hypercritical in that an opinion doesn't matter unless you are already in order. Who defines order and out of order though? Well he does.. or really only one thing could. Wealth. People forget that you can be part of a community and find yourself without it being a cult.
Who? Not familiar with that... looks it up ... Oh. No. Not that. Actually, about as far from that, as you can get.
Cult, schmult. Been called worse. Whatever creams your Twinkie. Our Fellowship basically has nothing to do with wealth, personal philosophy, or social standing. It's about helping each other out of some bad situations, and it's fairly common to have people from all walks of life, rubbing shoulders.
> Either way you are going to throw it all away once you have settled on what should be the final iteration anyhow.
I think this needs to be highlighted, because while I completely agree, I think it's often implicit, taken for granted, and neglected. Far, far too often I've seen code bases bloat because this never takes place. The sentiment at a lot of places seems to be, if the tests pass, ship it. Arguably, it may even be the right decision.
I find myself agreeing with much of your point, but I feel the need to nitpick a bit of your comment myself :)
I don't think your code base needs to be very large, or very legacy in order for comments to be valuable or even the best way forward. If the decision exists between a somewhat large refactor or a one-off comment to account for an edge case, I'm likely to take the latter approach every time. Refactors introduce risk, add time, and can easily introduce accidental complexity (ie: an overengineered solution). Now once that edge case becomes more common, or if you find yourself adding different permutations, yeah I agree that an incremental refactor is probably warranted.
That said, perhaps that comment could — and certainly one should at least supplement it — be replaced with a unit test, but I don't think its presence harms anything.
You are right; there are still many good people and companies in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately the Philip Morrises of Silicon Valley have outsized influence since they control major social media platforms, Web infrastructure and standards, advertising networks, cloud computing platforms, and other essential tech infrastructure. Locally, they are also large employers in the Bay Area, and due to the housing crunch it is very difficult for non-“Philip Morris” workers, even in tech, to compete for housing (not every software engineer makes $200k+ in salary and gets RSU grants), which is pushing some of them out the Valley, helping make the Valley even more of a “Philip Morris” shop.
One of the things that's often not considered with these kind of interfaces, is whether or not they're actually possible. For instance, arg3 might only be true if arg1 is also true. Or arg3 may not be false if both arg1 and arg2 are also false.
Using object arguments is a great start, and I think using enums can also be powerful (if you're using string literal types). But often times I reach for explicit interfaces in these situations. IE:
This provides semantic benefits in that it'll limit the input to the function (forcing callers to validate their input), and it also provides a scaffold to build useful, complete test cases.
I think they did care about flavor, as was mentioned in a news article interview about Pepper X. I don’t remember the full quote, but something like “you can’t just make it hot, it has to taste good”. But maybe it’s hard indeed to detect any flavor once you’re dealing with 2.6M Scoville units.
