I would like to go even further and say: Those things, art, photography, video, coding ... They are forms of craft, human expression, creativity. They are part of what makes life interesting. So we are in the process of eliminating the interesting and creative parts, in the name of profit and productivity maxing (if any!). Maybe we can create the 100th online platform for the same thing soon 10x faster! Wow!
Of course this is a bit too black&white. There can still be a creative human being introducing nuance and differences, trying to get the automated tools to do things different in the details or some aspects. Question is, losing all those creative jobs (in absolute numbers of people doing them), what will we as society, or we as humanity become? What's the ETA on UBI, so that we can reap the benefits of what we automated away, instead of filling the pockets of a few?
3 or 4 can very easily accumulate. For example: HTML, CSS as must know, plus some JS/TS (actually that's 2 langs!) for sprinkles of interactivity, backend in any proper backend language. Oh wait, there is a fifth language, SQL, because we need to access the database. Ah and those few shell scripts we need? Someone's gotta write those too. They may not always be full programming languages, but languages they are, and one needs to know them.
It really depends. If under the guise of "best practices" and "patterns" a team creates an unmaintainable, not easily extensible mess, then all this community aspect was good for exactly nothing but shoulder patting. If instead pattern are used sparingly, where they actually make sense, then sure, it can help.
We need to keep in mind, that the most composable concept in computer programming is the pure function (or maybe a mathematical "relation", if we want to abstract further). Not a mutating object. Not some constellation of objects that constitutes a pattern. Those are merely special cases.
I am currently developing a GUI application. Most of the classes in my code are classes, that are custom widgets. The GUI framework is OOP, so that is kind of infectious for the rest of the code. Still I try to keep some stuff separately as pure functions. Probably will outsource more stuff like that into completely self sufficient functions. The only pattern I have so far in the whole application, is a mediator, which I use as a way to have objects register themselves as listeners to specific events and for other objects to send these events to anyone who will listen. That way objects don't need to know, which other objects are interested in learning about some event. Could I have built in some factories and whatnot? Surely I could have, but there would have been very little, if any benefit. Even the mediator only exists, because the GUI framework does not have a way to send events that include data, so I need a way to do that. Otherwise I could even get rid of that pattern as well.
In this way pattern are useful for when you really need them, but these OOP pattern by themselves, without context, don't really have a value. No code becomes better by building in more patterns, unless the situation requires such a solution.
Putting both contents (lists, arrays, whatever you have) into sets, and then calculating the intersection might be more expensive than building the intersected set right away sourcing both non-set contents, I imagine. Though it would probably be easier to read and understand. But that can be solved by naming of functions that process the 2 non-set things.
The visitor pattern is my go to example for patterns, that you don't really need, when you have a language that has first class functions, which implies among other things, that you can pass functions as arguments, like you can pass anything else.
The magical "visitor" pattern becomes nothing more than simple callback passing or passing a function, which is one of the most natural things to do in a modern programming language.
State machines at least are useful as a conceptual thing, to find a way to think about how one solves a problem, no matter how they are ultimately implemented in the end.
Probably only works for as long as you are not living in a dictatorship, authoritarian state, utterly corrupt country, or similar. Then suddenly we would want our anonymity back.
While anonymity comes with its own issues for society, I am not convinced it would be worth it getting rid of it.
The EU is very double edged though. It has great projects, undoubtedly. For example GDPR was a gigantic step forward, even if many people here, who are US-centric mostly, don't want to hear that. But on the other hand the EU also has loads of shit that members and lobbies try to push, like for example chat control.
Let's hope that this project you mention works out, if indeed it works like you describe.
To look past the "give up" post, it did have a good point about how children will get into contact with such feed monsters.
I think it will be a good idea to try and get other parents on board. Other parents of the kid's classmates. Maybe they are struggling with this too, but don't see the way forward. And you can show them the content of feeds and shit that kids consume. You can come up with some minimum age or other idea, which you suggest for children to have, before you as a group of parents allow them to access things. Or you can come up with a once a month special lesson or something, where you show what can go wrong to the kids, and cooperate with the school.
Here is the thing: It seems there are many people out there, who are so much influenced, that they worry about something like: "But how will I reach my child via phone, when they are at school! My kids need their phones!" Not realizing, that not too long ago, no parent had to reach their kid at school via phone, and if they did, they would call the school itself and have a message delivered or get the kid on the phone. This happened so rarely, that it was not common over the whole amount of students.
This assumes there is no added benefit to being able to reach your kids/be reached by your kids easier than it was historically. While I agree it's probably not as critical as many parents might make it seem, there are tangible benefits. Off the top of my head:
- Before cell phones, we were also in an age of far less mass violence in American schools. I completely empathize with parents wanting their kids to have an emergency contact device, given the relative increase in violence at schools.
- There is a long history of kids being abused, sexually or otherwise, by authority figures in their school. Having a lifeline like a quick text to a parent can easily be the escape hatch from a predator convincing a kid to do something unsafe.
Having a cell phone isn't going to help even a little bit if there's an active shooter at a school. The only thing a kid should be doing in that situation is hiding, or escaping if it's safe to do so. Likely it'll make things worse... some kid will get a loud notification on their phone, which will give away their location to the shooter.
The predator example sounds pretty flimsy and unlikely to me as well.
Honestly, your reaction to this just seems to follow the fear-based rationales that people put forth for a lot of things, when the fears are overblown or the risks are low.
In the United States specifically, deaths from violent crime have mostly been trending down over the past few decades, with the exception of a year or so.
> - Before cell phones, we were also in an age of far less mass violence in American schools. I completely empathize with parents wanting their kids to have an emergency contact device, given the relative increase in violence at schools.
A very US-centric problem that requires a very US-centric solution. No need to drag rest of the world into that sh*thole.
Anxieties of parents who can't manage their insecurities and other issues shouldn't propagate into how kids are raised in general, especially on families which can handle their emotions better. Some freedom, some unknown and yes some form of risk is part of it. I love my kids just like the next person but this emotional need to helicopter parent them is pretty toxic to their personality further down the line.
The stuff about abuse is so typical about any such topic - a slippery slope when there is no end on how many additional restriction on society should be applied just to prevent some potential next situation. If you live in properly dangerous place, then move and don't just follow money at all costs life is too short for that, much smarter and easy to solve than enveloping your kids in ever-increasing surveillance and security.
You have to realize that this approach really harms them in subtle but powerful ways. Then ask yourself - is the extra safety I am gaining not actually outweighed by extra damage I am making on them? I don't claim I know the objective answer, but gut feeling tells me they may be +-equal at best and at the end everybody loses.
Of course this is a bit too black&white. There can still be a creative human being introducing nuance and differences, trying to get the automated tools to do things different in the details or some aspects. Question is, losing all those creative jobs (in absolute numbers of people doing them), what will we as society, or we as humanity become? What's the ETA on UBI, so that we can reap the benefits of what we automated away, instead of filling the pockets of a few?
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