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What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk?
  • Nope. I only learned to use computers as an adult, and only learned programming incidentally as a tool for other work.

    The truth is that it's actually much faster to learn as an adult, you just have more momentum if you start as a child.

  • Recommend me a programming language
  • Ada particularly the SPARK subset. It's approach is quite different than most languages, focusing on minimising errors and correctness. It's fairly difficult but I like to use it to teach people to actually understand the problem and how to solve it before they ever write the code.

  • Users without a CS degree, what aspects of SWE or IT do you feel like you are missing by not having studied CS
  • Basically in-depth computer science knowledge; graph theory, automata, aspects of system programming.

    I technically have a physics background coupled with a bit of self-study of pure mathematics. But those 3 categories I feel hold me back in application (in physics primarily, I don't do real software development).

  • If cannabis gets rescheduled to III, how can it ever get the state - federal differences resolved when it comes to the recreational market?
  • You've had plenty of time to prove your claim that marijuana is an important medicine and anyone who disagrees must be citing Fox news, and yet all you have been able to do is act incredulous that there might be a more effective methodology for finding relevant research than a keyword search. The amount of relevant high-quality papers is not in the thousands, it's not even in the hundreds. You arrived at your conclusion by the most useless and sophmoric methodology and are acting smug because you (supposedly) teach an introductory class to highschool graduates. Guess what dipshit? We don't use your shitty lessons.

    "Then we can talk"

    You already admitted that you don't understand pharmacology so what exactly do you think you're going to talk about? How you still don't understand how to perform graph traversal to find related studies?

  • Is the right to abortion a "negative right" or a "positive right"?
  • This attitude is why you're still a moron.

    When you encounter a lengthy description of why something is true or false, your response is "OMG so many words!"

    Guess what buddy? Life isn't about punchy one-liners and vapid analysis.

  • If cannabis gets rescheduled to III, how can it ever get the state - federal differences resolved when it comes to the recreational market?
  • "the past 30 days"

    So you literally don't know how drug tests work? Marijuana clears an oral test in about a day, most jobs that test for it simply tell you to come back the next day. This is in legal state, and covers the vast majority of jobs. If you can't be sober for a full 24-hrs before a pre-employment check you're an addict. This would be like if someone admitted to being drunk the morning of an interview.

    "Neither of those details speaks to sobriety at work"

    Again you're confused by the efficacy of drug tests. If you can't be sober for 1 or 2 days to get your job that you applied for, it's far less likely that you are going to be sober on the clock. (Few places do uranalysis, and I've literally never heard of a blood or hair test which are the ones that actually can reliably test that far back).

    Strictly speaking you cannot prove that the person who shot heroin during your interview, is also going to do drugs on the clock. It is however a very good indicator that they are unprofessional, will be a bad employee and are quite likely to drugs on the clock. Companies don't just spend thousands of dollars a year to be cruel to employees.

  • Is the right to abortion a "negative right" or a "positive right"?
    1. Weak arguments aren't going to be effective in leading to any train of thought. They are going to be immediately refuted.

    2. Your arguments are popular and extremely stupid. This is because the vast majority of people spend little time on ethics, ontology, and formal reasoning. This is like producing a theory of QM, when you flunked Calculus. Anyone can do it, everyone makes the same serious mistakes, and I have to hear the same arguments every single time.

    "Once we acknowledge"...

    How do we acknowledge something that isn't clearly true? (i.e not a tautology) First we must prove it to be true, then we can draw conclusions from it. As I already pointed out trying to prove that "human tissue only has value if it is thinking" fails because it's actually false.

    Here's a formalisation of your reasoning.

    1. An entity has no value unless it is thinking. Or less value than the mere desires of a thinking entity.
    2. Fetuses do not think, therefore they have no value.

    Problem is first premise is false and we can see that by determining what "thinking" is. Thinking or consciousness is a categorisation of intermittent and emergent behaviour. No human continously thinks, and even if they did it would not make sense to be able to classify them as thinking at any specific point of time. Individual firing of neurons is not thought, it is required for thought but it is not consciousness itself. It requires a system of neurons engaging in electrochemical action that meets some definition of thought (the exact definition doesn't matter, what matters is that it is emergent not instantaneous).

    Your assertion leads to the claim that human moral value must collapse when they are in a non-thinking state. But as already shown every human regularly satisfies this condition, so it must therefore be permissible to kill them. In other words if abortion is permissible by your criteria, so is killing the mother.

    Of course we can avoid this clearly immoral conclusion by changing the criteria by which we value humans to "members of a rational class". (Cancer cells clearly aren't this). This completely avoids the problems of killing people arbitrarily, killing people who don't solve a puzzle as fast as a rat, eating babies because we eat pork, all of which are logical conclusions of systems that only value thinking. (If you think this is motivated reasoning, simply research how moral systems are constructed and analytic descriptivism. You also used analytic descriptivism, you just horribly botched it by assuming that unproven premises were true).

    Of course the only problem with this new system is that it doesn't permit killing fetuses (except to save another human life), which you really, really want.

    "Just because cancer cells..."

    I can't believe people delude themselves into thinking that this is a strong argument (again a very trite and silly argument). I fervently believe that we need government-mandated academic philosophers screaming into people's ears every time they say stupid shit like this. Or maybe get shocked by their keyboard.

  • Is the right to abortion a "negative right" or a "positive right"?
  • Or maybe protected status is based on species membership, and not level of thought.

    Keep in mind that infants have a lower level of thought than pigs. If it is permissible to kill and eat pigs based on their low capacity for thought, then it surely applies to infant humans as well? After all anything otherwise is "specieism" which is totally the same as racism Singer argues. (Referring to Peter Singer who makes the same dipshit argument albeit more effectively than you).

  • Did racist use the "biological advantage" argument when Black athletes started competing alongside white athletes?
  • It's a funny story, I just don't know why you give it any credibility given how many highly improbable things have to be true. It's far more likely that it was a story told solely for humourous reasons, or it was a minor fib that became more humourous over time.

  • If cannabis gets rescheduled to III, how can it ever get the state - federal differences resolved when it comes to the recreational market?
  • Nope. It's been 2-3 years, but I read every single research paper on the subject.

    You're confusing blog posts with actual academic papers. Just a heads up the the effects of medicines are no where near as clearcut as people think. Cannabiniods have fairly weak evidence for efficacy.

    Imagine thinking that journalists have the capacity to analyze papers. Try getting a degree or atleast taking some classes on biostatistics.

  • Is the right to abortion a "negative right" or a "positive right"?
  • Exploiting a double meaning; nobody claims that a fetuses right to life is greater than the mothers. You are conflating someone's lifestyle choice with a right to life. Guess what? Society is based on restricting lifestyle choices, you can't just scream and yell at everyone you meet. You'll face repercussions that deter such behaviour.

    "It doesn't have thoughts or feelings to protect"

    And you think this is why killing is wrong? You realise that these are emergent properties of neurological behaviour? You can't even possess thoughts or feelings without some time interval, so by that criteria you should be killable so long as your brain hasn't established a pattern sufficient to be considered a thought? In other words you can be killed at any moment so long as it is fast enough.

    "That's scientific"

    You say to a scientist. Boy do I love when lay people try to incorrectly appeal to abductive reasoning.

    FYI, also an atheist, another hilarious intellectual faux pas on your behalf.

  • Would nuclear reactors be feasible everywhere?
  • "Dealt with Chernobyl for years..."

    You realise that all the estimated premature deaths are less than respiratory issues from air pollution. We could have a Chernobyl every year and it would be an improvement.

  • Did racist use the "biological advantage" argument when Black athletes started competing alongside white athletes?
  • "I'm not trying to be pedantic"

    You're just being wrong.

    "That's just racist"

    No. Claiming that there is a historical reason behind why black people are better athletes isn't racism. It's an attempted description, it's no different than describing environmental pressures for sickle-cell. (I personally don't know if the description is correct, but I hear it predominately from very pro-black activists, primarily trying to prove that all black reproduction was actually rape).

    "Eugenics and racism"

    That's not an endorsement of eugenics, and eugenics is not the same as racism.

    "They're bigots and like having racist thoughts because it serves the bigotry"

    What do you think racism and bigotry are? Isn't racism a subset of bigotry? How does this statement make sense? Or any of yours for that matter?

  • Did racist use the "biological advantage" argument when Black athletes started competing alongside white athletes?
  • There are some gullible people in this world as well.

    How on earth is someone supposed to know details about the Hitler salute and not know that 1. The US was a war with him 2. That he was only the ruler 60 years past.

    Not only that but addressing someone as their head of state isn't a thing. Nobody calls Indians Modi, or British people Sunak.

    Your story is either that of a cruel joke or completely fabricated.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)JA
    jasory @programming.dev
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