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I was just going to comment, I have heard this before in a decade far far away


I have friends that work there. This was not a gift, the took benefits from the workers to pay for this raise. In fact they pulled all of the bonuses from the lower level employees as well as their share of stock in the company. This is a dog and pony show, nothing more.


No you can't do that either. If you are old enough to remember the 80's and 90's, these same people that are whining about plastic now are the ones that forced us to use it because paper bags were killing the trees. Oh fun fact they are also the ones that brought us trans fats as a "safe alternative" to using animal fat.


Well, the real solution is to reuse bags instead of killing trees or creating plastic waste. And people have been saying that forever.


Hmm, the problem was not that paper bags inherently kill trees, it was that virgin forest was being destroyed and not replanted in order to make paper products. So the obvious solution of using sustainable forest growth and recycling was rejected (however, maybe by "The Market" - aka refusing to accept responsibility for externalities) presumably because plastics were marginally cheaper.

Market forces just don't work for these things because the negative consequences are decades away and don't necessarily affect the producers/consumers at all.

Your position that people who didn't want rainforest destroying for one-time use bags are responsible for one-time use plastics is way off the mark. Such people use reusable bags from sustainable sources invariably, for example.

When these issues hit the mainstream, and the public don't fully understand the position, then it's easy for the Capitalists to shift to the 'next-worst most profitable' thing rather than shifting to a sustainable production.


I am not sure why this point is not considered more seriously (maybe it is and I have just missed it). I feel that this article and most of the literature being written around this topic is skating around the issue without naming it. The real question here is what are we going to do when the AI we create begins to self replicate/augment their code/control logic? What are we going to do when the AI decides that in order to reduce the loss function they must act outside of the control scope and simply makes changes to it?

Some will say "not possible, how will the code recompile?" to which this article clearly answers...another AI will do it. We have to be honest with humanity here and say that we are seeking to create artificial life of which we will have no more control over than we do any other human. Oh and this new artificial life will be orders of magnitude more physically and mentally robust than us.


I think it's because there is only one obvious solution:

prevent AI from ever being developed

And how we could do that is too pessimistic to talk about.


> Some will say "not possible, how will the code recompile?"

Read own code, make changes, recompile, redeploy and replace self (or not, just start new fork) with newly upgraded mind.


I have had similar issues on this site. I have had 3 high rep users of the site close a question I asked having never answered a single question in the technology I was referencing. That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that? I guess they could go look for a profile picture before they answer?

If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP. My experience in general has been that there are a segment of users on StackOverflow that think they are better than everyone else and take every little opportunity they can to impress upon the rest of us how great they are in their own little world.


> That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that? I guess they could go look for a profile picture before they answer?

> If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP.

Probably why the comments are disabled on that blog post. Doesn't want anyone pointing out the disconnects from reality.


> I have had 3 high rep users of the site close a question I asked

I have some mod privileges on SO and have been a user for ~8 years.

The best way to not have your question locked or deleted, is to ensure you're following the best practices for asking a question and include a Minimum Complete Verifiable Example (MCVE).

https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask

If you feel you've done both and still don't get a good experience, it's worth speaking out on Meta for more specific advice.

Most people on SO just want to help — it's easier to help on a question that meets these standards.

> having never answered a single question in the technology I was referencing

Moderator privileges are more about the style of a question/answer than the specifics of a particular tech. The moderation queues are irrespective of the tech tagged in the question.


I've never had a question closed, but do have to agree with JPGalt that there is a problem. A lot of power is vested in high-rep users who got to high rep by making lots of snap judgments. In the Qt tag, I frequently encountered high rep C++ developers guessing at answers. They knew the language, but were unfamiliar with the library and would make guesses at how things work. Then other C++ developers browsing the front page would upvote their answer because it sounded right (even if it was completely incorrect).

It's mildly annoying when wrong answers get voted up, but it's even more annoying when moderation tools are used that way. This new user got screwed over by high-ranking close voters who didn't actually read the question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/49847677/331041


That's an interesting point. I mostly answer in Python, HTML, and CSS, and haven't seen this happen over there.

It reminds me of when SO added the feature to make front-end code snippets in answers runnable. Perhaps an evolution of that is to provide the equivalent for backend code. Do you think this would solve the voting problem you described?

To the linked question - Do you know if it's possible to undo a "mark as dupe"?


It is possible to reopen, but it requires 5 voters with >3k rep to do so, or one voter with a gold badge for the tag.


> That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that?

People extrapolate from names. ESPECIALLY if your name sounds indian.


What names? You do extrapolate from the bad English. Loads of Indians using UK-sounding names and UK woman names.


I am aware of this theoretical law but never really considered it. I suppose this could explain why I encountered such push back against a distributed SOA architecture on commodity hardware at a large organization that was built around centralized systems using mainframes.

Ultimately after three years of justifying and re-justifying the decisions I made for which they explicitly hired me for I moved on. It was abundantly clear that though they brought me in to implement SOA and lower physical costs, the culture just did not support that decision. What struck me as odd was that fact that those who hired me to do it did not seem to support it either.

I should note that Conway's law seems like a reasonable assumption as to why due to the monolithic and centralized nature of communication there. It was considered "taboo" to walk in to an executive managers office to speak to them. The expectation was to follow this ridiculously verbose chain of command whereby response to even a simple question could take days or even weeks.


  > The expectation was to follow this ridiculously verbose chain of command 
  > whereby response to even a simple question could take days or even weeks.
oh so they already did SOA


I can't get a clear meaning of "SOA". Data and processes have been shared for many decades. Stored procedures are a common example of such before the Web era. Shoving stuff into JSON doesn't necessarily make it better, and often creates more maintenance work. Do things for a clear reason, not because it's in style.


cloud, deep-learning, robotics, augmented reality, computer vision, actionable analytics, RUSSIAN BOT, Internet of Things, big data, agile, design thinking, freemium, gamification, incubator, lean, SaaS, thought leader...this is enough because thinking about this is making me lose all respect for humanity.



Isn't it peculiar how this is only a thing to consider depending on which way the political winds blow? I wonder if this will still be such a concern when the winds change...I'll not hold my breath though.


I am in this same frame of mind. When I started out in development I quickly found how unwelcome my questions were. The thing these mods and many other higher rep users are forgetting about is that to the new person these not a dumb duplicate questions. If a clearly new dev(and if you are not new yourself you can tell a new dev from a mid or senior level) asks a question that is truly a duplicate in every way, a little good faith that they do not know what they do not know to the level that they did not realize I think is not to much to ask. Apparently for some of these higher rep people it is.

Further if it is actually a duplicate what harm is there to leaving it open with a link to another question that has an answer? How many times have you looked at multiple SO questions and answers to piece together something that fits your very specific use case? For me it happens that way more often then not.


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