> I do not think learning about evolution (and we should credit Wallace too!) had that effect. It created a hierarchy of the fittest, and guess who is at the top? Social Darwinism interpreted it as justifying elaborate hierarchies.

I don't think that's accurate at all. Before Darwin, the thought was "we are special, we were born special, we were CREATED special". Darwin made it clear we weren't created special... we were apes before we were humans. There's nothing _special_ about a human as compared to an ape, other than some time to change.

"For you are dust, And to dust you shall return."

There were many beliefs before Darwin. Spontaneous generation was a commonly accepted theory. Augustine of Hippo suggested life was created as a potential.

The other problem with "were were created special" is that so was everything else, including beings superior to humans (angels).

> Nobody has taken me up on this offer, because I think they know that they aren't going to have the extreme discipline to do the hard thing of understanding "someone" else's code and sign their name to it.

That seems lazy to me. "I'm not willing to see if I can do a better job by using this tool, because I don't want to bother analyzing it's work".

And both of them are wrong, because they _should_ be trying to figure out what works best for the person; not what worked best for _them_ and forcing it on the person.

Eh, there could be some people who prefer WFH but would benefit productively from RTO. It's about what as a policy is best, not for individuals.

I think the issue is when people conflate best for them with best ad policy

There main problem, at least in my experience, is that there's a direct conflict in it

- There are people that work better from home and get more done there

- There are people that work better in the office, with people around them

Regardless of which you pick, you're going to make one of those groups less productive.

I do agree that some people who want one thing but work better with the other. It's on the manager(s) to figure out which works before; for each individual and for the team.

> I understand there are sites for whom this causes problems, but I think these are rare and could be optimized not to do unreasonable things.

There are. They're not. They can't (without significant effort)

I keep my new computer glasses at the computer, and the old ones downstairs for "other" uses. Then I keep my new driving glasses in the car, and the old ones downstairs for "other" uses (tv, etc). Basically, I keep the new ones where it matters and accept that my vision will be mediocre in other cases. And also, I'll see 2 of everything because I have double-vision (corrected with the glasses - but "older" ones don't work very well for it).

I have to choose each year between paying for (main) glasses or contacts, so I usually opt for contacts and that means my glasses are a few years old. When I wear them at night, I definitely see double. Hate it.

I'm a -20, so small differences really magnify.

Wow, that's a wild prescription, presumably ICL would be a huge quality of life difference for you! You could get within a diopter or two. I've been contemplating it at only -6, my commiseration on the multiple focal lengths.

Yeah, I've wanted ICL for years, but I could never afford it out of pocket, and all insurance considers vision correction aesthetic. Which is freaking stupid: There's a huge difference between me and someone who's a -2.

I might be able to stretch it now, but I'm coming up on my presbyopia years, so I'm not sure it's worth the money if I'm only going to get a few years of stability.

At this point, I'm hoping I take after my mother and get some really early cataracts because then I can just pay for the lens and the insertion/replacement will be covered.

If you can afford it, I would go for it, though. Personally, even for people who are candidates for PRK, LASIK, etc. I think ICL is still worth considering because it has some benefits. Less risk of dry eye and the ability to change the lens if your prescription changes. Longer recovery period, though.

I know I'm not a candidate for PRK/LASIK/LASEK due to dry eye (curse you programming!), so ICL was always my fallback, but like you I'm approaching the point where presbyopia is going to be a concern.

Holy fucking shit. I am -11 contacts, -13 glasses, and you are the first person I have ever heard of that is more than one diopter stronger than me.

Ophthalmologists will bring their newer assistants in to look at my eyes to see what a severe myope looks like. I got contacts at age eight, so they also use me to show off what a scrupulous contact user’s eyes look like after >40 years. I’m a physician myself, so I’m happy to oblige - some things you can’t understand until you see them.

Yeah, the only people I've heard of with worse vision than me are those with some sort of associated eye condition (e.g. kerataconus).

For the most part, it's...fine. Insurance has no idea what to do with me and that's frustrating, though. Somehow, I have eyes this bad without any associated pathology, and companies don't understand that the needs that such severe myopia presents on its own. I wear custom made RGPs; they can custom make softs but they're horrific (or at least they were 13 years ago when I gave up on them).

Isn't it hilarious every time you go to a new eye doctor? It's actually really cute: I like watching them get all giddy. They get so excited when they can't use the machines (a lot of them will only go up to a -15) and have to measure my RX manually. You can just see how they're like 'oh my God, I learned about this in school!'

They learn about me. You are a class on your own.

I did have to do a lot of advocating/educating back when I was younger and too poor for insurance. It was good practice for when I was diagnosed with MS, though.

Now I usually look for practices that work with keratoconus patients. They usually have practice with strange prescriptions and unusual contact fittings.

> battling with AI, trying to get it do what I wanted

I rubber duck with AI a lot, to go over my understand, my plan, etc. I get all the benefits of putting my thoughts to words, plus some feedback.

And sometimes, I let the AI write the code, too. It really depends on if I feel it understands the problem and solution well enough. And it's entirely possible that the answer is no, even if it helped me come up with the solution. But I always review the entire plan it puts forward and review the code it wrote. [1]

I don't "battle" with it, unless I'm experimenting with letting it do ALL The coding. And I've done that. And it sucks. It's downright painful. I don't do that for work.

[1] Unless it's a simple utility I'm doing for myself, like "write me a bookmarklet to find all the code in this page and open up a dialog with it formatted easy to read". Because, if it turns out it got that wrong, I can just change it later; it's for me anyways.

The courts are either ignoring the problem, supporting the problem, or just being ignored. They courts themselves have no power to enforce their rulings. The ones that would enforce the courts decisions are doing what the Trump tells them to.

Skipping code reviews and the bugs it causes can be a problem, or it can be easily solvable later when the bugs are found. It varies a lot.

Skipping code reviews and the poor code that can happen because nobody took a second look - that's more of a problem. Because 6-12 months down the line, there's not a few bugs that need to be fixed. Instead, there's a horrible code base that causes all _future_ development to be a lot slower.

> It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons

It's impossible. No matter how good of a job you do, there will _always_ be people out to watch it all burn.

When underlying problems are left untreated the number of unreasonable responses increases as a symptom of that. For sure, you'll always have that tiny minority who are just misanthropes. But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with. The modern world incentivizes creating underlying problems because not only can you profit from the unreasonable responses, but you can sell protection against them as well. A large portion of the economy actually revolves around this as a consequence of the shift towards service rather than production.

> But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with.

I think solving the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and religious tensions that lead to plane hijackings is a much harder problem to solve than simply putting doors on cockpits and forcing people to do body scans.

But it the long run we should maybe still attempt to solve it, before there are mandatory body scans everywhere and cars only start, if you do a mental examination first?

Exactly. That's treating a symptom, which creates more and more extreme symptoms. After a while though it's far more costly and complex to keep treating the wide variety of symptoms than it ever would've been to treat the cause, but because so much infrastructure has been built around treating those symptoms it's too difficult to dedicate resources to treating the cause.

How do you stop the hijacker blowing up the TSA queue instead?

Well that's easy, just add metal detectors and a pat-down at the entrance of the airport, before people queue up for TSA!

Just because it's impossible to solve a problem 100% doesn't mean that it's impossible to improve the state of things. Perfect is the enemy of good. There aren't that many people doing random chaotic damage, and it's not worth it to protect against all their potential harm.

This seems like a poor example, because we _also_ made it illegal for minors to buy (and smoke?) cigarettes.

It's also illegal for minors to watch adult movies. It's already illegal. Age verification is just an additional step that won't stop minors that really want to watch porn, while creating a 1984 style database of people and their sexual interests.