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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • Something that definitely separates me from some of my less experienced coworkers is that, when I sit down and start to implement a plan I came up with in my head, if it turns out that things start exploding in complexity then I reevaluate my plan and see if I can find a simpler approach. By contrast, my less experienced coworkers buckle down and do whatever it takes to follow through on their plan, as if it has now become a test of their programming skills. This makes life not only more difficult for them but also for everyone who has to read their code later because their code is so hard to follow.

    I try to push back against this when I can, but I do not have the time and energy to be constantly fighting against this tendency so I have to pick my battles. Part of the problem is that often when the code comes to me in a merge request it is essentially too late because it would have to be essentially completely rewritten with a different design in order to make it simpler. Worse, the “less experienced” coworker is often someone who is both about a decade older than me and has also been on the project longer than me, so even though I technically at this point have seniority over them in the hierarchy I find it really awkward to actually exercise this power. In practice what has happened is that they have been confined to working on a corner of the project where they can still do a lot of good without others having to understand the code that they produce. It helps that, as critical as I am being of this coworker, they are a huge believer in testing, so I am actually very confident that the code they are producing has the correct behavior, even when I cannot follow the details of how it works that well.






  • The root of the problem is that you think of momentum as being defined to be the product of something’s mass and its velocity, but this is actually only an approximation that just so happens to work extremely well at our everyday scales; the actual definition of momentum is the spatial frequency of the wave function (which is like a special kind of distribution). Thus, because photons can have a spatial frequency, it follows simply that they therefore can have momentum.

    Something else that likely contributes to your confusion is that you probably think that where something is and how fast it is going are two completely independent things, but again this is actually only an approximation; in actuality there is only one thing, the wave function, which is essentially overloaded to contain information both about position and momentum. Because you cannot pack two independent pieces of information into a single degree of freedom, it is not possible for position and momentum to be perfectly well defined at the same time, which is where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from.


  • I appreciate this sentiment a great deal in general, but sometimes it is difficult to uphold when I have to regularly deal with “time vampires” who not only require that I explain the same thing to them over and over again beyond reason but who also show no willingness or ability to actually learn the thing that I am explaining to them; at some point I just run out of patience and start ignoring them to the extent that I am able.


  • What I like to tell people is that I am as good a programmer as I am for the simple reason that I began when I was about 8, which gave me a very early start on making all of the mistakes one can possibly make when learning how to code.

    (It has been funny watching some of my coworkers learn a new coding technique and finding it to be so cool that they apply it everywhere regardless of whether it fits or not while I think to myself, “Ah, I remember when I went through that phase as a teenager!”)


  • Quoth the article:

    As spotted by iMore, this indemnification stems from how Epic Games breached the developer agreement it had with Apple when it tried offering its own alternative payment system in August 2020.

    In short: Epic Games pissed off the court when it consciously chose to violate the terms of its its contract with Apple before filing the lawsuit, rather than first filing the lawsuit and waiting for it to conclude. The court is taking the unusual step of billing Epic Games for Apple’s legal expenses precisely to disincentivize this kind of behavior in the future.







  • Wait… I just noticed this:

    [XHTML] never took off on the web, in part because in a website context so much HTML is generated by templates and libraries that it’s all too easy to introduce a syntax error somewhere along the line; and unlike HTML, where a syntax error would still render something, the tiniest syntax error in XHTML means the whole thing gets thrown out by the browser and you get the Yellow Screen of Death.

    This confuses me; don’t you want to make sure you are always generating a syntactically valid document, rather than hoping that the browser will make something suitable up to work around your mistake?