Viewing profile — mikebenfield

I think I’m pretty skilled, or at least I was, but much of my work now looks like this. The fact is in many cases Claude can diagnose and fix the issue quicker than I can even read…

There are a lot more Americans than immigrants moving to California. And the number of people moving to California combined with Californians’ pathological resistance to building a…

Having worked at two big tech companies, I’d say one was the most laid-back, stress free environment I’ve ever worked in, and the other was pretty middle of the road.

I'm all in favor of talking about drawbacks of AI coding and potential future problems. No problem. But at this point just the blanket statement that you'll never use it is not rea…

> What is hard about it? Young children seem to pick it up with ease. It cannot be that hard? They do? I've known plenty of kids and young adults who utterly failed to become even …

> artificial deadlines preventing me from writing proper unit tests, or the requirement for code review from people on my team who don't even work on the same codebase as I do on a…

You've missed the point. The point is that the women in question demand it. There is no shortage of women on social media ranting about how lazy or cheap men are who want to do cof…

Practically that would be very likely to be the case to the reader, but grammatically no, it's still ambiguous. > They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid and a cook. Betty could be …

What's much more sensible than taking an IQ test is looking at your experience with math to date.

Or more. Actually some of them seem inverted. Simple compiler takes 3 months but a GameBoy emulator takes 2 weeks? That’s not my experience at all.

C++ has indeed added many features that help with memory safety, at the cost of getting increasingly more complicated and harder to work with.

I think the idea that Lisp was so much more productive than other languages originates from a much earlier time. But now the most important features of Lisp - like garbage collecti…

I always thought calling it Xbox One was the most bizarre choice in the history of branding and marketing. Given how common it is to retroactively refer to the first item in a seri…

I tried to use a CPAP machine for a while. I honestly could never figure out how I was supposed to breathe with it. At all. It seemed to be physically impossible. I'd try for a whi…

Big O notation deals with asymptotic behavior of a function - in other words, as N goes to infinity. If we're accepting the premise that N has an upper bound, the rest of the discu…

> Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there} Working at an office sucks because it is a massive constraint on …

I think I'll grant that there are more educated and competent people than there used to be. But broadly the gap between scholars and "the public" is as massive at it's ever been. M…

> driving through mostly forested areas Yeah, well that's just not the case at all here. The drive from Stallings to downtown Charlotte is almost entirely on Independence Boulevard…

The only additional point I’ll make is that places like Stallings (the first link I posted) are absolutely considered suburbs. For instance the Wikipedia article on Stallings calls…

So there's a pretty big push for urbanism the last few years. There's lots of YouTube channels and other social media stuff dedicated to the idea that the US needs more walkable ne…

To be honest this is one of those Internet comments where I feel like the commenter is in a different reality than me. None of the dozens of suburban US people I've known has ever …

There are sometimes apartments spotted around in a suburby area, but due to the nature of US suburbs they don't really get many of the advantages density should bring - everything …

I don't really see how you can choose one without at least a rough idea of the other. How do you know what data structure to use if you have no idea how you'll be accessing the dat…

> Is this deep deep flaw endemic to humanity across cultural lines? Yes, almost certainly. > Are millennials/ Gen Z the first generation where men anre (perhaps?) allowed to be alm…

> Talk to your local politicians about fixing service so that is an option. Lots of people have been trying to get decent public transit in US cities for decades. There is so much …