Absolutely brilliant and engaging explanations of some difficult to understand topics. Especially lesson 22 on Emergence and Complexity has been an eye opener.
What engineers mean by debt toughly falls into two buckets. The first is actual debt, coding done on borrowed time, either consciously or unconsciously. The second is when a lack of experience, knowledge, laziness or other bad habits cause the code written to not be adaptable/agile enough to later have a low cost of change when the world changes.
Many reasons and excuses for each, but the first one is usually due to business reasons (why polish and mature one feature when you can develop five) while the second is due to engineering reasons.
Maybe this is a hot take, but… I like being validated? It feels good to receive positive feedback, and a ton of my life is structured to ensure positive feedback loops for things I want to incentivize myself to do.
I’ve definitely contributed more PRs during Hacktoberfest to get a t-shirt. I’ve done Strava runs when I might have otherwise skipped a day and been excited to see a new achievement.
I was really desperate to contribute to an open-source project in high school, specifically an iOS or frontend web one, and it was hard to find projects that I could make a substantial contribution to. Many with `good first issue` tags were not very active, and the ones that were active were hard to get my foot in the door.
I was able to do a variety of "good first" things: readme updates, typo fixes, adding small features -- but it was hard to feel really _validated_ that my work was valuable, or that contributing to open-source was an impressive thing to do, because I (felt like I was) was surrounded by engineers, and nobody ever told me that OSS was "cool", until I met a company 3 years into college who valued OSS (more than just "wow, great job, you fixed a typo!")
Just an FYI, readme updates, typo fixes, etc are "good first" things, but also very important, so while you may not have contributed to the code, you contributions are very important still.
Here's my hot take. I work for a small company, I'm the solo programmer. Our company's code is important, so it's all private. I work full-time and it is stressful enough, and don't have interest in working longer. Because I'm solo, I don't need Pull Requests for my own work, among other things that a team needs.
Under this system, I get no badges. I appear as though I have nothing to show. Even though I have arguably done more and been responsible for more than many people with badges have. That's irritating.
The way they are named and designed is rather juvenile, so just think of it like not being handed Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck badges at the fair because you are an adult.
Except it's also a professional forum, so it's more like you showed up at the office one day and it's full of kids and the project managers are spending their time handing out Disney badges and replacing the Kanban wall with memes instead of, y'know, managing the projects.
Isn’t this true on a private repo, or any non GitHub repo, solo or not? It’s been this way for a long time; if you cared about showcasing your contributions you would work on public projects, blog, or make a bunch of noise in some other way.
At the end of the day, it's either proof of work or proof of force. You can't have a good society build on force, implicit or explicit. In a perfect world we could go with proof of stake, but the world is what it is.
All this causes is a massive amount of busywork just to have a shot at maintaining the value of your previous work. This is not necessary for a good economy, not to mention all the externalities it creates.
You don't sound mean, rather, I would appreciate enlightenment. I'm familiar with some of them, such as the Hebrews (I'm a Hebrew), Greeks (studied a bit, but not in an academic setting), Ahmans (which I call Persians for a modern audience), but I don't pretend to be an expert.
I called them nations because they were a people of a common race. For instance, the ancient Greeks have described the features of the Perisans whom they fought at Marathon - and from this description it is clear that a Greek could identify another person as Greek or Persian. Hence, they are different nations. And even today the Ethiopians retain very distinct features. My country (Israel) has many Ethiopians, I believe that we are the only Western nation to welcome African immigrants as equals. And would any Westerner argue that the Chinese have physical features distinct from those with European heritage? Does that not qualify - for you - as a different race?
If you are referring to the Proto-Indo-Iranian ancestors, then I counter that their descendants have diverged.
If you meant something else, I am always grateful for corrections or enlightenment.
I'm no expert on the time in question, so I may have some things wrong, but here's how I understand the situation.
I agree that the Greeks who fought at Marathon were a nation, but they were not a state; they came from Athens and Plataia, which were different states, allied with the Lakedaimonians, another state, also of the Greek nation but missing in action that day. The Persians, by contrast, were a state but, as you surely know, they included many nations: Datis was Median, Artaphernes ruled the Lydians (though he himself was also Median), and Hippias was actually Greek; the Persian forces also included Thracians, Mysians, Phrygians, Hebrews (!), Macedonians, and so on, though I don't know if they were present at Marathon. You can surely forgive Herodotus for not dwelling on the internal ethnic divisions among the Persian troops his interviewees were facing. (However, he did mention the Sakai alongside the "Persians" (Persai), Simonides called the Persian force the "army of the Medes" (Medon), and Aiskhylos also spoke in his epitaph of facing the Medes (Medos) at Marathon rather than the "Persians".)
So that's the sense in which neither Greece nor Persia was a nation-state at the time: Greece was a nation but not a state, while Persia was a state but not a nation. Or, rather, there was a Persian nation, but the plurinational Persian state was immensely larger than the Persian nation to which its rulers belonged.
If we consider Homeric Greece instead, the Greeks look more like the Persia that fought at Marathon: Homer's Akhaioi are, perhaps, all ruled from Mykenai by Agamemnon, but they worship different gods, speak different (but related) languages, and have different descent. And, although we know many things in Homer are historically wrong, modern archaeology does back up this plurinational picture of the Akhaioi. So Mycenaean Greece, like the Persian empire of Darius, was a state but not a nation.
As I understand the situation, we can make similar arguments about most of the ancient history of the Hebrews: beginning with ethnic and religious unity with neighboring Canaanite peoples subjugated by Egypt (despite the later invention of myths like Abraham and the Exodus, which are not supported by the archaeological evidence) and proceeding through many historical political divisions --- not just the division between Israel and Judea of which the Torah makes so much, but also, at various times, Samaria, various city-states in Palestine, the Maccabee state, and the Phoenician cities, as well as subjugation by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, and finally Romans. The Torah narrative of 117 years of a united monarchy preceding the Israel/Judah split is generally not accepted by modern scholars, though the debate is certainly open, but even in the Torah most of the historically plausible action happens at times when the Hebrew nation was either divided into separate kingdoms or suffering under the yoke of foreign powers.
So I don't think it's accurate to describe any of the ancient Israelite states as nation-states.
After a day digesting the ancient and modern situation, I've come to a conclusion that might be comfortable.
I don't know how diverged e.g. the Scythians were from the Amyrgians (of whom I'd never heard of until yesterday), but it is clear that they distinguished one from another. However, would an Athenian distinguish between them? Would a Scythian distinguish between a Spartan and an Athenian?
It seems to me that there are no clear boundaries between "peoples" or "nations". For me a Han and a Manchu are both Chinese, but they might see a Polish Jew as no different than a Lithuanian Jew. And yet the Polish Jew from Loz will see his identity distinct from the Jew from Warsaw.
So back to the conflict at hand, from the perspective of Slavic history there is merit to considering the Ukrainian and Russian peoples as the same people or nation. From the perspective of wishing to live under different systems of values and authority, there is also merit to considering them as distinct. Note that the gift of Crim to Ukraine during the 1950s was "a gift from the Russian people to the Ukrainian people" so at that time the Russians were making a distinction between the two.
As usual when considering human relationships, it's complicated )). There's an old joke about the Irishmen talking about how close they are - until the end. You've probably heard it.
To me it seems like we haven't reinvented the same thing, but semi-adapted an existing process of communication to the technology available. It's almost like emoji's are the next step of pictograms, however they're mostly used to provide (extra) context to the existing form of commucation.
It's a bit like doing this:
"It was a very sunny day." <- regular sentence
"It was a very [sun emoji] day." <- same thing
"It was a very sunny day. [happy face emoji]" <- v3 pictos that (implicitly?) communicate extra context
"It was a very sunny day. [高兴]" <- same thing, but v1 pictos
In the western context they evolved from the attempt to convey emotion in text form. Writing systems are mostly meant to convey facts, while the emotion that we encode in intonation is completely lost. That lead to problems in pure text communication, so we invented emotes to convey the difference between
"It was a very sunny day :)"
"It was a very sunny day :\"
"It was a very sunny day ;)"
Some web forums started replacing them with images which lead to designers inventing more emojis, and due to Japanese carriers wanting the same for SMS those got incorporated in character encodings.
What seems strange to me is that most emoji that exist are completely useless for the purpose of conveying emotion, or encoding any useful information that can't be expressed in a word. It's like some designer had to fulfill a quota or someone wanted to just "have more emojis". Yet the most popular emojis are clearly still used to convey emotion [1].
So we hope that customers eventually stop using their services, hurting their bottom line.
I've been following some drama in chat/user interaction in modern games. People are getting banned in Forza Horizon 5 for funny decals. One guy got an 8,000 year ban for a Kim Jong-un KFC paint job (https://i2-prod.dailystar.co.uk/incoming/article25686363.ece...).
EA is banning entire accounts - access to ALL games on an account - for swearing in Apex Legends. All of the major studios are in the process of severely restricting and even removing chat in their games.
The latest Battlefield 2042 game doesn't even have voice chat, and they removed the global scoreboard altogether because they didn't want poorly performing players to know how poorly they were performing.
The list goes on and on. To me, this is all a serious reduction in the enjoyment I have in games. I grew up playing Counter Strike, and s**-talking and competing was a big part of the experience. I just won't play games where I'm not allowed to interact with other players.
The market will solve that. People will stop giving crazy companies money when their products become "not fun". See: Battlefield 2042 failing pretty hard.
That being said: I specifically only buy entertainment products that do NOT require me to listen to some 14-year-old describing sexual activity with my female family members in great detail because his nonexistent skills make me keep winning. Different strokes for different blokes.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D
Absolutely brilliant and engaging explanations of some difficult to understand topics. Especially lesson 22 on Emergence and Complexity has been an eye opener.