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I think the UK has been handling their end shockingly well, fwiw

Arresting Andrew does kind of indicate that they're taking it seriously...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test

The problem (like with voter ID laws in the US) is that it's a very slippery slope to voter suppression, and in the US we have a very creative history when it comes to voter suppression. You'd have poll workers who would present incredibly hard passages to read to voters based on a personal judgement call (read: black voters).

I (not OP) agree that dumb people voting is a problem but the alternative is to have arbitrary suppression of votes, which IMO is worse.


I don't know why objections to voting tests usually pretend we're in 1850. We have standardized tests, already, nationwide. It's a solvable problem. We wouldn't contingent a vote on a random poll worker's choice of passage to read.


A solvable problem, but someone chooses and implements the solution. Now imagine that person is from a party that you disagree with, and is highly motivated to find a way to tilt the playing field.


>We have standardized tests, already, nationwide.

And voting is legislated by individual states, that would theoretically implement their own standards though this may be intervened upon by the federal government). Heck, even standardized testing for students is done at a state level. The SATs/ACTs are privately administered. What example of a nationwide standardized test for literacy do you have?


What state do you live in, and what is the density of your neighborhood (e.g. urban, suburban, rural)?


California rural.


I've similarly wondered if I could get a pre-2024 Wikipedia if just for the "fact based" flavor LLM


Do you think Wikipedia starting in '24 was polluted by AI slop? This is certainly possible, I'm just not aware of it happening.

Wikipedia periodically publishes database dumps and the Internet Archive stores old versions: https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22enwiki%22%20AN...

Plus you could also grab the latest and just read the 12/31/23 revisions.


It was already slop, let's not pretend it is significantly different today.


What happened to wikipedia in 2024?


It's beyond disgusting to me that the "News Bias meter" on the bottom of the article claims this is "unfairly" biased towards the left. Just because it doesn't reflect well towards your side doesn't mean it's biased.


I think that's just a poor UI choice. That seems to be its default position until you vote. Once you've voted for how biased you think the article is, it shows you the "Most Popular Rating" which is currently "Center/Fair".


My pet conspiracy theory is that leetcode is used to exploit imposter syndrome in candidates. After going through an hourlong session where you came up with the less-than-optimal but correct solution, I think it's easy for the interviewers to seem "disappointed" and lowball the candidate with a worse position/salary.

I think this partially explains the phenomenon of external candidates at Google entering Google at the college-hire tier when they may have been repeatedly promoted at their prior employer. Of course the comp is usually more so it's not a big deal...


My heuristic: If you have 5 or more arguments, you should use a config object.


My heuristic is to not be dogmatic like that. A constructor for a triangle class may reasonably want to take 6 arguments (3 x- and 3 y-coordinates). In other cases, even four arguments might be better as a config object if those 4 are all very rarely used.


I always got the impression that downdetector worked by logging the number of times they get a hit for a particular service and using that as a heuristic to determine if something is down. If so, that's brilliant.


It's brilliant until the information is bad.

When Facebook's properties all went down in October, people were saying that AT&T and other cell phone carriers were also down - because they couldn't connect to FB/Insta/etc. There were even some media reports that cited Downdetector, seeming without understanding that they are basically crowdsourced and sometimes the crowd is wrong.


I think it's a bit simpler for AWS- there's a big red "I have a problem with AWS" button on that page. You click it, tell it what your problem is, and it logs a report. Unless that's what you were driving at and I missed it, it's early. Too early for AWS to be down :(

Some 3600 people have hit that button in the last ~15 minutes.


The one true hybrid work model for tech (in my opinion anyway) is to just have everyone meet in-person in some cadence for sprint planning/PI planning/whatever your cycle is. Everybody syncs up every so often, and then you leave everyone the fuck alone while they go work. Zoom can handle one-off meetings for pairing or other quick questions, but planning out work/carving out architecture solutions is something better done face to face.


The odds are overwhelming that you do not and will never work on the kind of problems where such a minute advantage (if it even exists, which I doubt) makes any kind of difference to the bottom line. Most business related coding is at the end of the day exceedingly trivial. Requiring any sort of on-site time is a thought that belongs in the past.


I agree most business related coding is trivial, but all of the things that a software engineer does that surround the coding are not trivial. All of the best software engineers I know recognize this, and all of the less effective ones depend on them to fill in these gaps.

I’m sure this varies by company.


> Most business related coding is at the end of the day exceedingly trivial.

It is technically trivial. Building business software is fundamentally a communication/knowledge problem with technical aspects.


Definitely this, in fact I suspect that some larger organizations that get this right might become more competitive to smaller firms than before the pandemic, simple because meeting happy people will have their opportunities to steal focus curtailed and actual work time for people will be more clearly boxed out.


I've been more and more of the opinion that hobbies are what drive our sense of meaning and no so much work, but occasionally it's hard to remember that when you're dealing with the shittier aspects of work (for me recently, debugging infrastructure issues with limited visibility and just no progress at all).

We (mostly) make enough money to do pretty well, might as well use it to enable ourselves to enjoy _something_ in life. For a while it was improv for me, now it's more powerlifting, but literally anything you can enjoy that's not work.


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