Spyke

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What are your thoughts on Medium.com?

Please continue running your own blog. Don't give some other company "free" content.

I hate that the entire modern internet is controlled by a few corporates.

The downsides to running your own blog are lack of technical knowledge/interest, and reduced monetization. Since you've already overcome the problem of technical knowledge, and you aren't looking for monetization, please continue running your own blog.

As for visibility, maybe your could start sharing links on lemmy? Perhaps you could start a dedicated community of your own if you're hesitant to post it on other existing communities.

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Has google stopped working for finding anything?

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An example of search engines failing me miserably last month:

I wanted to hire a photographer, so I started searching using keywords like "wedding photographer MAJOR_CITY_NAME", "photography MCN", "event photographer MCN", etc. The top results I got were all mostly along the lines of "top ten wedding photographers in MCN" i.e. listicles with links to a few photographers who probably paid the listicle creator? There were maybe one or two links to a photographer's website itself in the first page.

I'm okay with ignoring the first page of results and moving on to following pages. But rather than giving me individual photographer's websites in subsequent pages, I started getting listicles for "top ten wedding photographers in OTHER_CITIES". I'd click through multiple pages of results to find maybe 5 direct website links.

What actually helped me find a photographers eventually was entering the exact same key words on Instagram. Almost every single one of them that I found on Instagram had an excellent website and the city name, and their addresses were mentioned clearly on their websites. So, it wasn't a case of them not having enough information on their website. It's just that search engines chose to prioritise listcles of photographers from other cities rather than giving me links to individual websites of photographers in my own city.

In this case, I got lucky because photographers have a presence on Instagram which has a functional search engine. What if I want to find a plumber, or someone else? I'm forced to just trust a listicle creator because search engines don't want to give away links to single purpose websites and only want to keep us on websites with a shit ton of content (that may or may not be what you need) and ads.

/rant

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Should we stop splitting sports by gender and just let everybody compete together?

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do you think every sport is about strength?

A lot has been written about why chess has separate tournaments for men and women despite physical strength not being a consideration for the game. Presumably, similar logic holds true for other non-physical-strength based games. I'd recommend you to look it up yourself, but the TL;DR (with some potential inaccuracies since it's been some time since I read it all) is as follows.

Historically women weren't even allowed to participate in chess tournaments because men considered them to be inferior and incapable of thinking as well as a man could. It was considered "ungentlemanly" to defeat a woman who "obviously" couldn't keep up with men. This led to a cycle of women not even learning the game because why bother, eh?

Now the thing about games like chess is that you can definitely learn it at any age and master it. BUT - doing so at a very young age tends to give people a huge edge over someone who started later (all else being equal - memory, effort etc etc). So, the same person starting at age 4 who'd probably be level 9000 Goku by the time they are 23 might never get to that level if they only start at age 35.

So, when women were allowed to participate in chess tournaments, there were very few of them who had started at the right age and could hold their own. This led to a need for a women's tournament to grow the sport.

How does that grow the sport? A little girl watching a woman on tv after winning a tournament might get inspired to pick it up. The girl might be able to point at the other women and tell her parents that she deserves to play chess too and that it's not just for boys.

These gendered leagues also give a "safe space" for women to participate in communities where people of different genders interacting is frowned upon. Etc etc etc.

Please do fact check me by looking up things on your own though -- it has been years since I went down this rabbit hole.

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isBooleanTooLongAndComplex

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I've had at least one code reviewer ask me to put all the logic in the if ... line rather than use a variable or two in order to "simplify code by reducing the number of variables."

At the very least, this article helped me confirm my own bias of "that guy is a moron" and I can send this article to him the next time he reviews my code.

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Flowchart for STEM

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I've had this thought for a while and I definitely agree that a lot of software I've built is a net negative to society as a whole and the only reason why I get paid as well as I do is because I'm helping rich assholes suck value out of society more efficiently.

For instance, I've worked on CMSs that automated 90% of the processes for medium-large insurance companies. Sure, it may result in a marginal price reduction for insureds (lol), but it almost certainly has led to fewer staff being hired to the benefit of the overlords. If more and more middle-class white-collar jobs gets replaced by software, that helps put downward pressure on wages. At the end of it all, are the marginally lower prices worth it to society, when everyone has a lower wage or no well paying job forcing them to participate in the gig economy and such?

It's a depressing thought, and I've been trying to break into research engineering roles or something of the sort to get away from my current role but it's been an uphill task.

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Multilingual folks: what are some odd idioms in your language(s)?

ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada): ಶಂಖದಿಂದ ಬಂದ್ರೇನೇ ತೀರ್ಥ - shankadinda bandrene teertha.

Literally: it's holy water only if it comes from a conch.

Meaning: people are only going to take things seriously if a specific person says it.

Example scenario: you tell a friend that a cab to go somewhere costs X amount, but they don't believe you and check with a different friend and then accept that it's going to cost them X.

You'd then say this idiom to tease them since you gave them the same water (information) but it wasn't holy water since you weren't a conch (someone they trust/have faith in).

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How medical insurance works

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You do need some checks and balances because what's to stop a hospital from profiting off the insurance companies by asking for a CT scan/whatever of every single patient just because they can.

I suppose we could have the government run the hospitals too. But noooooo, that's never going to work out because communism or something.

Maybe we should try effective altruism and accelerationism instead? Let's just hand over all our money to a few tech bros and then we can go beg them to pay for the scans. And if they don't pay for it, surely someone will come up with a cheaper technology to do the same. Yes, that'll definitely work.

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People Hate the Idea of Car-Free Cities—Until They Live in One

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I live in Toronto, and I don't have a car. I use buses and subways for most of my commute in winter. Along with these options, I use bikeshare (public bicycle rentals) in every other season. There are people who bike even in winter but I'm nowhere close to that hardcore.

I've spent maybe $250 on uber in urgent/lazy situations in the last one year - that would've been a monthly auto insurance payment.

I waited for a bus for around 20 minutes in -18°C a few weeks back. The biggest problem was that I had overdressed so I started sweating and had to unzip a layer.

An important fact that people who have only ever lived in suburbs miss is that you don't have to commute thaaat far thaaat often when you live in walkable cities. My cousin who lives in a suburb, drives for ~20 minutes to get to the closest big box store. I have 5 options for groceries in a 1 km radius and one of them is just one block over. So, I don't even need a bus for groceries, let alone a car. We have seniors who definitely shouldn't be driving walking around with grocery carts on the sidewalks. So, reducing car dependency improves mobility - not the opposite.

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another windows zeroday, the repo text is hilarious

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Your comment reminded me of this moment I had at an office lunch table:

Someone from sales: I've been having a terrible day, the P-O-C at {client company} is being annoying yadda yadda.....

Someone from HR: glaring, and taking mental notes.

Me, a dev: wondering how things could've gone wrong considering that we hadn't even shipped anything for them.

It took us all a moment to realize that "PoC " meant different things to each of us - Point of Contact, Person of Colour, and Proof of Concept. Somehow the salesperson could've been talking about any of those and it'd make, so none of us questioned ourselves first.