Viewing profile — aphelion

iPhones are being built with slave labor. Some guy wrote a satire of Silicon Valley in an exaggerated tech bro literary persona. Guess which one triggered the strenuous denunciatio…

The most striking thing here has got to be that for some people being told they worked at a company riddled with white supremacy and racism would have been a relief. I know the sto…

The great irony with these terminology changes is that those most tripped up will be learners with access to fewer up to date resources and autodidacts who lack access to the usual…

What passes for AI ethics research is akin to a "Hiroshima ethics research" that focuses on the carbon footprint of the Enola Gay and the lack of BIPOC representation on the team t…

'Look, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. Professor Galilei said something gross, but nobody is silencing him. The Inquisition is just going to exercise its right …

'Look, freedom from speech is not freedom from consequences. Nobody is stopping Professor Galilei from continuing to insist that the earth revolves around the sun, and besides the …

That it is incorrect to say that personal bias or subjective interpretation has never played any role whatsoever in search results is a vacuous truth. It's a meaningless tautology.…

In the real world, what's going to make Python less accessible to PoC new to programming(and new programmers generally) is the arbitrary change in well-defined industry-wide termin…

Passing over the politics of this decision, is there any plausible outcome that doesn't involve every organization with any sense at all forking or abandoning Lerna?

Had he denied the application it could just as easily be said to have shown his expertise in the regulatory approval process by detecting and rejecting a dangerous drug. And yet, I…

An algorithm understanding enough about the text to infer the correct emotional inflection to give a speech may edge into the category of strong AI, but I would have guessed that i…

Case in point. Social Security is OASDI - old age, survivors, and disability insurance. It's not a guaranteed income for the general population, it's meant to provide support to th…

I'm always a little mystified by those who believe there is some vast pool of people receiving something called "welfare" that pays them munificent sums to sit around all day not w…

The influence journals like TNR and The New Criterion once had were wholly unrelated to their tiny readership numbers and instead depended upon the fact that they were for a time c…

You say this as if the 20-something libertarian software engineer isn't just as pissed off when he gets screwed over on equity or stock options as is the 50-something manufacturing…

So generate immutable ProductState objects that contain all parts of the domain model that can change over time, and maintain a mapping from SKU to the correct object. So GET /prod…

It's things like this that make me wish Silicon Valley invested less energy and resources in nutty utopian schemes like artificial islands and more in lobbying for liberalization a…

People who hate Silicon Valley do so because they think it's full of narcissistic social climbers who just want to get rich quick but talk like they've joined up with the Peace Cor…

I'm very impressed by the technology behind Meteor, I just wish it weren't quite so "opinionated". It relies on standard parts of the node/js web stack, it would be great to have a…

Low pilot salaries are due partly to the dismal state of the airline industry and mostly due to the fact that while flying a 747 may be an immensely impressive skill it's not one t…

This seems like a good time to point out that every study of tipping I've come across fails to find this sort of incentive effect.

What happens? They get fired. I'm all for workplace policies that give a greater amount of discretion to employees as to how, when, and where to work. But "set your own salary" is …

The appropriate analogue here is not literacy, it's carpentry. That everyone makes use of furniture does not imply that everyone would benefit from taking the time to learn to buil…

It's not particularly surprising when you think about it. Users of stenography keyboards are far more "productive" than users of QWERTY keyboards. But everyone knows how to use the…

It's my fervent hope that developments like source maps and asm.js will eliminate what it basically Javascript's sole competitive advantage; that it's the only language that runs i…