In the end, they both end up learning effectively the same lesson

I tend to think people shit on Musk more than they should, but holy shit does it bug me when a CEO talks about engineering problems with such bravado.

I agree. I think we elevated Computer Science’s importance early on in the industry, and that has stuck around. If you’re a University researcher trying to make a better compression algorithm or whatever, then yeah you’ve got a lot of overlap with mathematicians. But if you’re out in the industry building CRUD apps to fit some business use case, all that theory isn’t going to matter much in your day to day.

It’s still just one of those mostly-bureaucratic hurdles where you need a CS degree to get your first job, and you need to be good at math to get the CS degree.

That said, there are definitely crucial moments where regular projects can still hit scalability boundaries, and a solid understanding of math and CS fundamentals can get you through that. Every single developer doesn’t need to know that stuff, but it’s occasionally good to have access to somebody who does.

Depending what you don’t like about math, it might or might not be an indicator. If you like problem solving and understanding why math works the way it works, but hate the rote repetition a lot of schools use to teach it, then you’ll fit right in. That’s how I was at that age. (Disclaimer: I’m old now. They’ve changed the way they teach math a few times I think. I’m not sure if my experience is directly comparable to kids in school these days)

Similarly, don’t look at schools that teach Computer Science and conflate that with what it’s like to be a developer. Most real dev work is totally different. CS fundamentals help at times, but aren’t as big of a deal as CS programs would have you believe. (Again, I think there’s a wider variety of educational options these days too. In my day you had to get a CS degree just to get a recruiter to talk to you, even though it was mostly inapplicable).

Why are you interested in learning lisp? Some hobby that requires it? A potential career? Tell us more about the career and maybe we can share knowledge about how mathematical it is.

I’m a lot more worried about a DC/Star Trek crossover than I was about a Marvel/Star Wars crossover. The DC people are stupid enough to try it.

Also, there were some candidates who managed to get 95% and above — but would then just be absolutely awful during the interview — we would later discover that they were paying someone to complete the technical test on their behalf.

Yeah my company shot itself in the foot by replacing technical interviews with an online test and hiring a bunch of cheaters. After a while we started doing a zoom interview where we’d go over the code they supposedly wrote and ask them to explain it to us. Even that simple step made it obvious who had or hadn’t actually written the code they were talking about. I’m pretty sure a few candidates had somebody talking in one ear and/or typing to them on a separate screen.

Total BS. Nearly all TLDs are just meaningless letters that anyone can sign up for.

Things like .gov, .mil are still reserved for official uses, but anything accessible to civilians can be bought for roughly the same price regardless of the user’s intention or credibility.

Kinda bullshit, kinda not. It was always an urban legend until Batterygate a few years ago.

The nuance a lot of people missed there, was that older batteries would just completely shit the bed and shut the phone down if the phone pulled too much power from them, so Apple throttled the CPU down to prevent that power draw. On the one hand, they could/should have just alerted the users that it was time to get a new battery (as opposed to replacing the whole phone). One the other hand, if convincing you to buy a new phone was the goal, allowing your old phone to fail catastrophically probably would have been a better play.

I’m watching on my phone, and couldn’t unmute it. I tapped the mute icon and nothing changed, so I assumed that was telling me it had no audio

Looks like lots of people's year end bonuses were contingent on them releasing something related to AI by the end of the year.

JavaScript is a language that runs on a user’s computer, when they visit a web page. It is often used for dynamic functionality, ie when you click “like” on a comment… JavaScript running in your web browser will make a request to the server letting it know that you liked the post, then the server will respond with a total number of people who liked it or something.

But, the server needs to know how to authenticate which user liked the comment (so you can’t like it twice etc). There are various authentication mechanisms to do this, with their own trade-offs. Over all, there’s secret information that the browser and the server have to share with each other, and we don’t want that information being accessed by the wrong people.

There’s also a common problem with web apps called “cross site scripting”. Basically somebody might craft a cleverly formatted comment that exploits a bug in the web page and causes the attacker’s code to run. One trivial example might be if every time a person read a comment thread, the attackers code caused that person to “like” a request. A more serious exploit would be one that finds out that secret authentication information I mentioned and shares it with the attacker. They can then pose as the victim user and do anything they want as that person. This would be bad.

So, on to the different approaches and their tradeoffs.

• HttpOnly cookies. Basically when you log in, the server gives your browser a cookie vouching for who you are. Each subsequent request to the server will include this cookie automatically. The browser handles attaching it to the request, and the browser hides it from any JavaScript running on the page. One trade off is that it requires some authentication to happen between the user and the service (ie enter your username and password), to generate the cookie in the first place. This is likely what OP’s customers want to avoid.
• bearer tokens: basically, when JavaScript code makes a request to the server, it can optionally add some tokens in the request headers and use those to authenticate the user. I’m assuming OP’s scenario involves his company providing a service that is used by another company’s web site. They want to log in the user on their system, then forward some info along to OP’s system describing that user. They can’t just set an HttpOnly cookie for his domain, since it would be private to him; so instead they store a magic token in the browser’s local storage or somewhere and send that on every request. The down side is that JavaScript has to be able to read that token, so it enables that malicious user we talked about to steal it if they exploit some other bug.

Anyhow, one common solution here is to set very short expiration dates on those bearer tokens. That way if somebody steals it, they can’t use it for long.

Another strategy is to limit what each token can do. OP needs to make it so you can like a comment using one of those bearer tokens, but more dangerous actions like purchasing things, deleting content, etc, should be guarded by a more secure mechanism. Then the damage is mitigated if the bearer token leaks.

I can agree that this movie wasn't suited for kids, but it's sad that they had that kid read that scripted criticism against it.

They did this weird thing where they interspersed an episode of that with an episode of Jack of All Trades, IIRC.

Nah, the Prime Directive is all about staying out of other people’s business.

There's no way DS9's bathrooms are that clean.

I think the problem is that unions are famous for fighting for equal pay across the board for the workers they represent regardless of individual competency or market demand. For this example they'll give COBOL developers a raise to 120K and give web developers a pay cut to 120K.

Or best case scenario they give the COBOL developers a short-term raise to 150, then raises across the industry stagnate in coming years to offset the fact that employers feel like they're overpaying for some people. But sure, a few years later the union can come in to look like a hero arguing for a fraction of the raise the web devs could have already gotten.

Nah, they’re going to “solve” it by paying web developers less, not paying cobol developers more

You could spruce this joke up by saying something like “I put ketchup in my eyes and now I don’t need glasses”.

“Heinzsight is 20/20”

My desk has a desktop with two monitors, a laptop, an iPad, and a phone. I use each of them for different reasons throughout a day.

TBH the only reason I have so few devices laying around is because they’re expensive. If I lived in a post-scarcity society, I’d have a lot more tablets on my desk.

Ritual Night. She’s a 10 year old, barrel aged Texas funeral cake stout.