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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I believe that a significant factor for this can be attributed to mental development and maturity of boys lagging behind that of girls of the same age, during formative years. And, please read on, if you assume my argument is “boys dumb, conservatives dumb. Q.E.D.”

    The second factor is an education system where this offset in mental development/maturity is further confounded. Boys don’t typically do as well, because sitting idle and being a “good boy”, is more challenging. This leads to a path for boys to start working earlier, while girls get higher degrees. (I assume the trends for higher education by gender, to be similar, if not, then that can falsify this hypothesis).

    What a person then observes they get from society, vs what you pay in terms of taxes, is skewed between these two groups, and highly correlated with gender.

    If this hypothesis has any validity to to it, then one could argue that a way to mitigate this is by correcting the negative causes. Where the fundamental root cause might be improved by revisiting how education is failing boys in particular.

    The challenge with this is that if the conservative parties’ policies are driven by what can make more people vote conservative, then this will be a negative feedback loop. The worse you make it for a certain group of people that vote for you, the more that group is willing to vote for you.




  • My biggest gripe is the lack of respect/understanding for the importance of data models and clear domain boundaries.

    Most things that end up as “technical debt” can be traced to this. Sometimes, it’s unavoidable, because what the data models changes, or the requirements of the domain, etc.

    And, it’s very innocent looking differences sometimes. Like “We know that the external system state will change from A to B, so we can update that value on our side to B”. Suddenly you have an implicit dependency that you don’t express as such.

    Or, things like having enum that represents some kind of concept that isn’t mutually exclusive. Consider enum values of A and B. Turns out this really represented AZ, and BP (for some inherent dependency to concepts Z and P). Someone later on extends this to include ZQ. And now, suddenly the concept of Z, is present in both AZ and ZQ, and some consumer that switches on concept Z, needs to handle the edge case of AZ… And we call this “technical debt”.


  • I did eventually yes. Thanks for asking. I was exhausted yesterday, and upon reading my comment again, I get the downvotes. Being a second language doesn’t fully explain the wrong tone there. The article was a lot more insightful and in depth than I had mistakenly assumed.

    After reading it tho, it seemed a lot more focused on performance than I think would be warranted. But that could be due to different concerns and constraints than where I’m used to working. I’d focus more on the mechanisms that best expresses the intent, and although they do discuss this well, the Venn diagram for the appropriate use of exceptions and error codes don’t overlap as much in my world.

    And, it’s not like I’m arguing that they are wrong. It’s an opinion on a choice for a tradeoff that I only think, while allowing the possibility of being wrong, might miss the the mark. Stack unwinding is by its nature less explicit for the state it leaves behind. So it shouldn’t be a question of either error codes or exceptions, but which are most appropriate to express what, and when.

    Even for Rust, where monads are preferred and part of the language to express and handle error codes, I would say that the statement of “newer languages like Rust don’t allow the use of exceptions”, seems incorrect to me. Something like panic!("foo"); coupled with panic::catch_unwind(|| { ... } }); I believe would unwind the stack similar to that of a throw/catch.

    Anyways. Thanks for reminding me to actually read the post. It was well worth it, and very insightful.