Can you give me some thoughts on what you enjoyed about the book? I read it several years ago after reading many many glowing reviews but I just couldn't get much out of the book at all. What did I miss?
I think everything in it is fairly subtle (relative to modern television at least) and there are a lot of them. It'd be reductive for me to refer to it as a coming of age story, but I often do that despite knowing it's wrong, but coming of age stories generally have to hit me over the head with their point before I stop seeing it as a character piece.
For me, the themes in Goldfinch are about art (and the power it can hold over us,) how messy relationships can be despite good intentions (and how much care they require,) the role of beauty in the world, and the search for identity.
In the book. That start… the writing had me feel stress and despair in a way that no other book has managed. I think the technique it used was giving you a heads up on what will happen but then glimpses of hope that would make the hopelessness even more evident. I am not a writer, so cannot distill it fully, but the experience was palpable.
bit of revisionist history going on here if they think that those products weren't sleek enough or stylish from the start. It was the functionality that people got used to, but those products were always relatively stylish enough to not be branded a "nerd <x>." For example, a quick google search on the first CNET iPhone review shows it was considered stylish from the start -https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/original-iphone-review/
They are referring to Cellphones, Portable Music Players, and Wearables. None were "sexy" until Apple came along and became the trend setters.
It's going to be harder for apple to do it with VR or AR tech, but it is possible. It probably won't catch on until Gen 3-4 once the ecosystem is up to speed, consumer price drops, and the true function emerges beyond perceived hype.
There were plenty of cellphones that people loved the "sexy" design of, which did well commercially. Motorola RAZR for one, particularly the v3 "Noir", Danger Sidekick/Hiptop, especially the 2 and 3 with teens. The modding/customizing scene was a sensation at one point, was big with the hip-hop scene. Lots of celebrities made it a desirable thing.
This is without even getting into the obvious of BlackBerry.
The headline makes it feel like you're going to go into the dependency struggles of JavaScript tools, which you do, but not until the end of the article after mentioning struggles with database dependencies and operating system dependencies...
Seems like this is more of a rant against tools upgrading themselves and breaking previous dependencies which causes this kind of domino effect of dependency issues when trying to upgrade the initial tool, not the "JavaScript ecosystem"
I think the author should invest in learning the keyboard shortcuts and search more often. They’re great and allow me to move around slack with ease. Also reminders for things you don’t want to think about at the moment work well too
The noise issue seems tool agnostic to me, if you converse with noisy people who are sporadic with posting and put important messages in threads/channels with less visibility then you’d have issues no matter what tool you use. Does anyone ever read a company wide email longer than 1 paragraph anyway? At least with slack you can search it
The comments so far seem pretty negative, but for a pause of (what the article says) of 15 minutes I'd say that sounds like a pretty good call on the FAA's part for what reads like a moment of uncertainty with the risk of being wrong very great?
Personally I'd think 15 minutes of inconvenience would be pretty petty of me to prioritize over protection from a potential national security threat
FWIW, it isn't 15 minutes of inconvenience. It's far, far more due to the traffic propagation. A 15 minute pause can result in hours of delays due to a traffic wave[0], which affects airliner takeoff scheduling as well. FAA definitely knew this and took it into account, which makes me even more curious as to the validity of the threat and what made them issue a ground order.
Flight schedules always have slack built into them, I'm betting 15-20 minutes is probably the upper limit of what would not cause a large waterfall of issues.
Yeah, a strong wind could literally cause an average delay of 15 minutes for all flights in a given area. It's not a big deal.
Anyone who knows US aviation knows that its foundation is "safety over time," precisely because it's such a multivariate problem and trying to be overly fixed to a schedule gets people killed.
I can't count the number of times I've been on a flight where the captain said something like, "Well, we left a little late, but we'll make it up on the way there, and expect to arrive on time."
I've had international flights leave an hour late and still arrive on time.
By default, flights are optimized for cost. Pilots can fly faster and burn more fuel to arrive at a destination (depending on reserve and bingo fuel of course) sooner. The goal is to use the minimum amount of fuel to get somewhere however and incur the most profit per passenger as a result. When you look at it, life really is an engineering problem.
Decades ago, before all of the routes and scheduling got to be more of a mesh than an ideal hub-and-spoke, this was an absolute. But now, being late can cost far more money than what would be spent in fuel.
Now, very often the airlines would rather burn some fuel and keep a plane on time than delay or cancel a dozen connecting flights at the destination.
I was noting the fact that they are able to change the speed of a plane to optimize for the specific key performance indicator they deem the most necessary at the time.
I used to work in IT for delta a touch over a decade ago as a systems engineer.
It means, the FAA agrees with the GP. Safety is never convenient, it's always a balancing act. For example, simply pulling out your keys (or your phone) to lock or unlock your front door is more of a hassle than leaving it unlocked. But less of a hassle than getting robbed.
Article says a Cessna pilot was told to land. That is not just a little hassle in the name of safetyism, it is a diversion from the flight plan for no rational reason.
From article, '... captures the controller telling the pilot of a Cessna to land ...'.
It's a bigger hassle to the Cessna pilot than going about his business and flight plan, and a smaller hassle than his getting caught in the middle of a jet scramble or other military response perhaps.
Also, it's not necessarily entirely about the pilot's safety/inconvenience tradeoff. The Cessna IS a hassle, for anybody trying to scramble jets or launch an anti-missile interceptor or who-knows-what. The Cessna, on the ground, perhaps with its pilot quietly bitching about his ruined flight plan, is a smaller hassle.
This was limited to airliner taking off from a few west coast airports. That said it does take a little while for slack to get things back to normal, but no individual should have been inconvenienced by more than 15 minutes.
The words "national ground stop" are quoted a few times in the article. If that terminology got back to various airline dispatchers, it may have been more broad than a few airports.
It's possible that controller may have just misspoken or been fed words from another controller and said 'national' when in fact it was for the west coast centers (ARTCC) only (Los Angeles, Oakland).
The original article makes it seem like a very local event from “a regional air traffic control facility” mentioning a few individual conversations with pilots. I guess in theory pilots could have said something to their airlines but that’s not a big window for the airlines to actually do anything.
Doesn't that depend very much on the variables encoded in "inconvenience", "protection" and "potential"?
I mean, I can spend 15 minutes putting on a full ABC suit every time I go outside, and would certainly protect me from some possible national security threats, but the extent of the inconvenience, the limited range of protection, and the very low potential would make that an unnecessarily foolish habit.
In more of a real-life scenario, millions of people have spent the last 20 years wasting way more than 15 minutes standing in line to take off their shoes and get x-rayed every time they fly in an airplane to protect against a "potential national security threat" when the only thing that actually needed to happen was locking the cabin doors while the plane is in flight.
A hostile nation with nuclear weapons launched a missile. If you're going to take precautions, that's approximately when the cost/value proposition starts making sense.
Sure, I don't actually know the threat level here, and you could well be correct that this was an appropriate calibrated response. My only argument is that the US have strayed very far into "inconvenienced" territory (forgetting we had any compunctions about torturing people, spying on everyone in the developed world, attempting to entrap entire communities of people based on their religious affiliation) by using the "it's for national security" excuse. Americans would be well advised to be skeptical each and every time that excuse gets used.
> In more of a real-life scenario, millions of people have spent the last 20 years wasting way more than 15 minutes standing in line to take off their shoes and get x-rayed every time they fly in an airplane to protect against a "potential national security threat" when the only thing that actually needed to happen was locking the cabin doors while the plane is in flight.
Where the unstated goal is to prevent hijackers from turning airplanes into aimable missiles? Yeah, I like your argument, what are the counterpoints?
Option 1: After 9/11 the airlines were desperate to get people to fly again, needed some theater to comfort people (because evidently "still orders of magnitude safer than cars per vehicle miles traveled" wasn't convincing), and this let them offload what security they needed to do onto the federal government.
> AT THE TIME, NORAD had 20 fighters on armed alert throughout the North American continent. Only 14 were in the continental U.S. at seven bases; the rest were in Alaska and Canada. Within 18 hr., 300 fighters would be on alert at 26 locations.
It's not saying they sent them all to Alaska. They're saying of the 20 alert fighters - pretty standard numbers in peacetime - six were in Alaska and Canada.
That's an interesting article. But no fighter-jet will ever be useful at stopping an ICBM once it hits Mach10+.
It seems like the F35 anti-nuke idea is to fly the F35 into enemy territory, and then shoot down the missile _BEFORE_ it reaches those speeds. I don't know what kind of situation would give us advance-warning of a nuclear launch, enough time for F35 to scramble into North Korea (violating the DMZ) and then effectively shooting down an ICBM before it reaches top speed, but... hey... weirder things have happened.
Weird contingency plans are basically the military's job. Maybe the situation will come up. Or maybe that situation is aimed for some other nuclear-armed country with a space program (China, Russia?)
What about something like this rather old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT ? There should be some updates meanwhile. Anyway. Assuming NORAD or similar has the rough ballistic track of the potential intruder, and can thus determine the entry ellipsoid, why wouldn't some jets on air patrol in or around that ellipsoid be capable of intercepting it with an air launched system?
As I understand it in my utter ignorance, you don't have to race with something coming in and down at Mach 10, or more. You just have to be in its way at the right time. Which seems doable, in this case, coming from NK, high over the Pacific.
Given the amount of infrastructure modern air forces require, it doesn't matter if the jet is alive and well in the air if all of the supporting cast is incinerated.
Good point. Although, if there's any chance of these difficult to replace assets surviving you'd probably want to take it. Any local airfield with a strip just barely long enough would do.
Deterrence from opportunistic attacks by other parties is also something that comes to mind, but I'm not sure if that makes any sense in these scenarios.
> Personally I'd think 15 minutes of inconvenience would be pretty petty of me to prioritize over protection from a potential national security threat
I can’t buy into this anymore, it’s the new think of the children. Used and abused. I’d rather live life like a normal human and if I perish, well, I had to die from something.
If anything, it served as a great test of that system. But from the sounds of it, NORAD declared this a non-issue and yet a portion of the FAA still proceeded with the shut-down. So whether this was a pass or a fail depends on who has the final authority over shutting down airspace.
It's asymmetrical though right, accidentally not shutting down when it's unclear has a small likelihood of a massive loss of life. Accidentally not shutting down results in some eocnomic loss and lots of delays, but in a real way you know there's seriously limited downside. I don't know how the US is doing right now, but in other countries airlines are running way under capacity at the moment anyway, so they can recover from down time much better than usual.
NK does not announce where their missiles are going, and NORAD probably wanted to clear some airspace to better track the missile, especially given that NK has missiles that can reach the west coast. The military also probably wanted to avoid dangerously confusing situations, like a civilian aircraft failing to squawk as expected or even a civilian plane crashing (just imagine what might happen -- NK is launching a missile, and suddenly NORAD is also tracking another object that seems to be an airplane without a transponder heading directly toward the Bay Area or receiving a call that some kind of explosion was just reported in LA following the object rapidly losing altitude...). It is not as if confusion during a tense moment leading to needless death is unprecedented in the history of aviation:
> NORAD probably wanted to clear some airspace to better track the missile
I can't see any way planes in Western US airspace could possibly interfere with tracking an NK launched ICBM, even by clutter, except maybe in the last minutes of the terminal phase of warhead descent at which point any defense (active or civil or both) would already have to have been committed to do any good.
Grounding planes is to mitigate risk to the people on the planes, and maybe to clear lines of fire for anti-missile systems (which is mostly about protecting people who aren't on the planes, but incidentally also protects those on the planes, too.)
Like I said, what if one of those planes had a malfunctioning transponder? It is a somewhat stretched scenario, but the NK military might have gotten bold and decided to shoot a missile all the way to the boundary of US territorial waters or airspace. In the middle of nervously tracking a missile that seems to be headed directly toward the west coast, NORAD suddenly sees another object that looks just like an airplane heading toward LA or SF, but it is not identifying itself. Now NORAD personnel have to take time to figure out if this airplane is just a malfunctioning civilian plane or some kind of NK attack.
Sure, NORAD probably tracked the plane from whatever airport it departed from, but during the missile test they probably want to have their personnel focus every second of their attention on the missile and not on checking some flight path.
Maybe it was because we have a secret Anti-Ballistic Missile system that "throws darts" at inbound missiles and we don't want any planes in the cross fire ?
The radar signature, altitude and speed would be completely different than any civilian aircraft. That was a mach 10 missile. For reference SR-71, the fastest plane that entered service (at least of those we know) has a speed of 3.2+ mach.
This is it. Look at how often this happens, recently in Iran and before that in Ukraine. Anti-missile and anti-air systems are extremely dangerous and reckless machines. Civilian flights get blown up all the time and being extra cautious makes a lot of sense.
Me too. Was thinking same thing. Don't want planes getting caught in the crossfire considering we would probably throw a drag net of intercepting missiles at it.
Looks like they may have launched a hypersonic missle that reached speeds of ~Mach 10[1], and the US (publicly, at least) seems to be lagging behind China and Russia in Hypersonic R&D - at least as of 2019[2].
How long would it take for a missile traveling at Mach 10 to reach a point where a high-altitude EMP attack[3] would cripple the west coast of the US?
Is that time longer than it would take for aircraft to return to a place where they could land? If NORAD spots a bogey moving that fast, is the rule right now just... everything stops until we understand what's happening?
Would love for someone who knows about hypersonics, NK missle capabilities, EMP attacks, etc. generally to say more.
I'm not an expert, just a rocket enthusiast, but "hypersonic" really just means "near orbital velocities".
There's a lot of noise about admittedly really impressive low-altitude air-breathing scramjets, but - as your articles point out - those are still a long way away. The war hawks like to complain that we're not spending sufficiently many billions on developing futuristic hypersonic scramjet missiles. They point to our lack of a working scramjet as evidence that we're doing poorly. And look! North Korea's launched a hypersonic missile, China's launched hypersonic test missiles, Russia's launching hypersonic missiles; we're behind in the next war and it hasn't even started yet!
But those are just orbital or sub-orbital rockets at 50-100km altitude. Of course they're hypersonic, but that's not really that difficult - just build a big rocket, go up for a while, then turn sideways. We've been doing it since the 50s, tech is good enough now that relatively small companies like Firefly Space are launching small satellites to LEO with Series A fundraising of just $75 million. Tada! Hypersonic! The main point is that everyone has the capability to launch lots of these simple rockets, which can be devastatingly effective. Not as effective as highly steerable reentry vehicles or hypersonic scramjets, but enough that no one wants to be a target.
It's not about the risk of your aircraft. It's the risk to your aircraft. In an actual emergency involving airspace violation, anything in the sky becomes a potential threat for interception.
Exactly. If you're potentially activating missile defenses, you probably want all civilian air traffic out of the sky. For their own sake.
Give the timing, uncertainty, countermeasures, and consequences of not intercepting... "Your flight leaves 30 minutes later" is a small price to pay vs "Passenger airliner shot down."
Airliners carry less than 1,000 people. Usually a lot less.
Nukemap says 10kt on downtown LA would result in about 71,000 immediate casualties.
Would you want to be in the air when someone at NORAD has to make a call on something that may or may not be a passenger airliner?
I'm not an expert or even novice on military weapons or defenses, so this response might just be Hollywood talking, but couldn't taking the planes out of the sky allow for a clearer shot of any deflection missiles/anti-air missiles or something like that?
That sounds pretty plausible. Also, how far does the EMP wave from a nuke travel? Would it minimize the potential damage to flying aircraft if they were on the ground compared to in the air? Or would it be a moot point and if in range of the emp, the blast itself would do more damage?
> In July 1962, the US carried out the Starfish Prime test, exploding a 1.44 Mt (6.0 PJ) bomb 400 kilometres (250 mi; 1,300,000 ft) above the mid-Pacific Ocean. This demonstrated that the effects of a high-altitude nuclear explosion were much larger than had been previously calculated. Starfish Prime made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 1,445 kilometres (898 mi) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a microwave link.
I guess that's the smallest of your worries if you are hit by a nuke.
> I guess that's the smallest of your worries if you are hit by a nuke.
Well.. from what you posted I guess it depends on if you are in the plane or not. It sounds like you could be at a distance where you survive the blast but are impacted by the EMP and it would probably suck to be at 30k feet in a plane that is hit by an EMP.
I don't think an EMP from a ground explosion would be significant. At least for a something 30k feet above it as I believe the pulse to be shaped horizontally and weak. To generate a significant EMP you have to detonate a nuke at high altitude as to cause a secondary EMP due to Earth magnetic field.
Even if a plane is hit by an EMP I believe the engines will keep working and the plane will have backup controls. Unless it's a Boeing of the newer generation where everything is electrical/digital. And even if everything stops working it will keep gliding unless at an odd angle/speed at the moment of the hit. That said loss of instruments and radio would be painful. Components getting damaged depends on the magnitude of the EMP and a weak pulse might cause only transitory malfunctions.
Note: my knowledge on this subject is superficial and I'm probably wrong.
> I’m not sure what possible risk there was to our aircraft. Specifically from a missile launch in NK.
NK nuclear armed and, has the estimated ability to hit the West Coast of the US with ICBMs, and is believed to be able to make warheads small enough to mount on its ICBMs now. (The first two have been true for quite a few years now, the last is more recent.)
The threat to people in planes is at least twofold:
One: EMP from a nuclear blast is not a good thing for aircraft.
Two: People on the ground can shelter to mitigate some of the risk from a confirmed incoming attack, people in planes cannot.
I’m not sure what possible risk there was to our aircraft. Specifically from a missile launch in NK.
It's not exclusively about the risk of a jet being hit in the air. But you don't want to route a bunch of jets to land in a city that no longer exists.
Realistically, what are the odds that a NK launch could hit US aircraft traffic?
In fact what are the odds that any nation except perhaps Russia could? Could the UK? France? China? I guess they have the technology, but I bet they couldn't deploy it from thousands of miles away. For example, the somewhat heroic story of the UK bombing Port Stanley from from the Ascension Islands on the equator during the onset of the Falklands War ... (yeah, ok that was 1982, but still).
If NK had a sub off the coast of CA, then maybe, just maybe they could shoot down an airliner, although I'm still skeptical they could hit it with something that wasn't a sea launched Buk (i.e. built by Russia).
Why would it be a problem to write code in a way that's easily understood by others reading it? If your code is so complicated that a little bit of documentation can't explain it or at least help get people started then you're probably being too "clever" with your code and need to simplify it a bit. Simple code doesn't mean it has to be under-engineered or non-performant, and creating a culture that doesn't take the time to help others understand what's going on is how teams get to the point of depending entirely on 2 people to do all their enhancements/fixes.
Because sometimes the clever code may be easier to understand by an experienced developer even if it is less accessible to a less experienced developer. Non-coding example: "Two plus Three times Five" is easy to understand, because you don't need to know math symbols. But to anyone who knows math, "2 + 3 * 5" is easier/quicker to read.
For a coding example, in Javascript you have things like arrow functions that make the code more concise. But that is also harder to read for someone who hasn't picked up on them yet (which may have been the case when they were first introduced).
"There is no ambiguity because my context is the only context"
I learned a few years back that lawyers will give you a bunch of "ands" and "ors" in an expression without any concept of precedence. That doesn't necessarily mean left to right works, either.
We can have an argument over ternary operators and new users and I'm going to argue that they're part of the common vernacular of computer science and everyone needs to sit down and learn them.
But nested ternaries three levels deep are horrendous. Stick with one level and simple expressions and keep it readable (assuming the background of just understanding the operator). Don't overuse it.
Similarly lambda functions are part of the vernacular, everyone is going to need to learn that necessary amount of complexity. But at some point nested lambda functions containing lambda functions are going to get difficult to read and reason about.
I agree with you on language syntax choices, but as far as the articles examples are concerned it seemed like the "clever" solutions to them were more about OO architecture choices via abstraction for example. In which case, if it's not a codebase that you have experience in, then those architecture choices can get very confusing if not properly documented
The real problem is that the while the same code might look obvious to John Carmack, it might not look obvious to $outsourced_bodyshop_ressource_0443434.
Then you start coding for the lowest common denominator.
Recently we hired a consultant for our infrastructure.
I wrote the code for that infrastructure using best practices I learnt from books, workshops etc.
While some ppl from my team have huge issues understanding it, the consultant read it ONCE and knew everything. He was simply a good dev that had a pleasure working for other big shops that wrote the books I read and lead those workshops I attended to.
So its like always a matter of „Do I hire cheap HR resource or an expert?” question.
Nothing more, nothing less. The issue with writing smart code is that there is not a lot of smart devs. Thats why we always derotate to lowest denominator.
Are you the good guy in this story? Writing code that no one else can understand unless they've read multiple books to push through the complexity? Do you write in Java by chance?
But where do we draw the line? If someone does not understand the idea behind interfaces or proper exception handling, who is to blame? If you write Java and Streams are the natural solution, but the developer you work with never bothered to look them up, because they are "complex" and "FP-something"?
These are polemic examples, but there is a line where sticking to the lowest common knowledge will hurt your best developers by either sucking the joy out of their work or by forcing write them a lot of boilerplate code. And I've heard of teams, where the whole team would ban features of a new standard of the language, because they've written code for 20 years without them before.
Well, we can draw the line based on who is going to maintain the code after we are gone. If we know that the organization is only going to hire rockstar ninja experts, then we can make code that is readable for rockstar ninja experts. If we know that the organization is going to hire mediocre developers, then we need to make code that is understandable by mediocre developers. If you think mediocre developers can't understand streams, then don't use streams. (Personally I think your examples of interfaces, exception handling, and streams, are all things that have their time and place, so it would be fine to use them when needed, and just expect that developers after you will know/learn that stuff.)
> There's a secret third option: The organization could just hire good devs.
That's rarely up to the individual developer to decide. If you cook a complex bowl of abstraction soup, knowing that mediocre developers will maintain it after you, that's on your conscience.
The evaluation objective for those medicore devs should be to „get up to speed” or the company will never improve and soon become overrun by competition.
I dont know a corporation in IT that doesnt have evaluation programs. All management expects you to get better over time.
So using the opportunity to learn from a better dev is a great objective that positively will impact not only you but also the company you work for.
On the other hand if developers stagnate and dont improve -> this is a red flag for company growth. And each corporation wants to grow. Such dev is just a bad hire and will tank the company.
Of course developers should learn and improve. Nobody is arguing otherwise. Yes, people can improve, that doesn't change the fact that the average company employs average developers. If your company hires average developers, then you need to maintain your codebase complexity at a level that is manageable by average developers. All this talk about "bad hires" and such is really missing the mark here.
IMHO If the company hired you for your superiour knowledge and expects you to deliver. You should deliver. Its really not your problem they opened hiring for someone out of their league. Even worse if managers agree to your improvement plan.
Dont you think that someone before or after hiring of a real expert dev should check whether you really need that ?
They can always fire someone for being „too good” or like you say „decreasing own standards”.
Thankfully those experts sooner or later leave those medicore companies but they are not responsible for the mess that was left - its always the management that did not create clear expectations towards hires…
The average corporation doesn't go bankrupt, so you moved the goalpost from "corporation" to "startup". Ok, sure. So, in your view, a developer who leaves behind over-architected complexity to "mediocre" developers is a surefire recipe for going bankrupt... and this was supposed to be in defense of overarchitecting complex codebases? To me it sounds like going bankrupt is bad, so we as developers should strive to prevent our employers from going bankrupt, no? So if you work for a startup that you know is going to hire mediocre developers after you, surely you should strive to leave behind the kind of codebase that doesn't bankrupt the company after you leave?
> The average corporation doesn't go bankrupt, so you moved the goalpost from "corporation" to "startup".
For a lot of corporations, making the jump to software is effectively starting a new company within the company.
> To me it sounds like going bankrupt is bad, so we as developers should strive to prevent our employers from going bankrupt, no?
Bad hires tank companies.
> So if you work for a startup that you know is going to hire mediocre developers after you, surely you should strive to leave behind the kind of codebase that doesn't bankrupt the company after you leave?
That's a red flag right here. It means sell your RSU as soon as you can.
We weren't talking about bad hires, we were talking about mediocre hires. It seems like you expect all companies to higher above-average developers, even though that is mathematically impossible.
What if the NYTimes had journalists that described the news in their specific prose or worse, poetically. Speak plainly, it’s the news, report it as plainly and accurately as possible.
Often many people like to attach mathematics and science to Software Engineering to signal elitism, but truthfully this profession is a lot closer to writing. Write clearly, first and foremost, and above all else.
$outsourced_bodyshop_ressource_0443434 needs to be able to read the news too.
I'm starting to notice a correlation between my prose and my code. Writing has not been my strength and I've quietly worked on it. Learning to organize my thoughts to best communicate with others has enabled me to organize my code for others to read. I've found this has improved the maintainability of my code. I wish I had put more effort into writing through out my schooling and early career.
I've noticed that the most successful business people I know are good at written communication. Much like programming often the better communicators write less to achieve more.
That is not what I am suggesting, but alas, you seemed to have proven my point. I did not write clearly enough, and behold the outcome. Now imagine if we all do this in a codebase.
The problem in these discussions always comes back to "others" aren't a monolithic entity. Different people find different things to be readable vs not. Different people will even use the exact same phrases (e.g. "as concise as possible without being opaque!") but still mean different things due to having different interpretations of key words in those phrases.
IME, writing code as concise as possible (semantically and syntactically) is almost always the best route. I don't believe superfluous assignments, parenthesis, braces, visibility modifiers or comments make things more easily understood by others. In time, experience and mastery of the language will reveal superfluous code as something that does the opposite as well as much cleverness as mere utilization of the language or abstraction.
You're making my point: the period being there or not does not matter, what matters is that you were able to parse my sentence and understand it without issue, and without needing to think about its grammar, thanks to the pattern-matching abilities of your brain.
Well, there’s events and there’s events. Bitcoin depends on there being at least some digital-industrial infrastructure being functional. Whereas if that all collapses, you can at least eat your gold bars.
Why does that involve accepting payments in Bitcoin instead of accepting payments in fiat and converting some amount of their choosing to Bitcoin after the payment has gone through?
Are they doing the Tesla method of handling refunds for Bitcoin purchases? That seems like a great way to hedge. e.g. if someone pays in Bitcoin, the seller reserves the right to either return the original BTC OR the original cash value. That way if BTC goes up you can issue refunds in USD, and if BTC tanks you can issue refunds in BTC
Why is that better than accepting payments in USD only, sending refunds in USD only, and converting some of the USD into BTC after you received it?
The number of people who a) buy a Tesla b) in BTC c) and ask for a refund has got to be so small that this doesn't seem like an effective way of hedging against BTC losing value relative to USD.
Accept payments for what though? Considering Palantir's business model and clientele they may have some ulterior motives in their eagerness to accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment. Peter Thiele has no problem with 'black swan events' as long as it benefits him.
