Assorted Links

Vaniver explains different modes of communication, and the different levels of gifts: Communication is not always about information, and gifts way more by than an inefficient economic exchange.

There is no such thing as just one SSC post.

Are you a worthy member of society? Scott Alexander calls this an ill-posed question: modern society, technology and the total focus on economic output mandates that ‘The System’ should be accomodated. Humans were here first.

On fixing this, let’s hope that Finland’s basic income plan (via MR) will be well executed and successful. Why? We need to find affordable ways for supporting an ever broader share of our population: As almost 2/3rd of our current jobs seem automatable in the not too distant future, we simply won’t have the luxury to just vote ourselves a social democratic heaven. As a personal aside, I doubt that even my profession (software development) will have any need for people like me in 30 years. Let’s see how this bet goes.

While we discuss how we shift taxes and benefits within citizens, and whether or not to mandate burning crops for cars, around 800 million people in the world still go hungry. The good news: The share of people having chronic hunger is going down..

In the world of geography were people cannot fly like superman, comparing least and most densly populated areas each amounting to 5% of the world population gives a nice demonstration why a rising waterline might not be good.

In the great world of collapsed geography, Microsoft continues being the open Microsoft and open sources the core of Edge’s JavaScript engine. Via arstechnica. See also HN.

Some people will be even more happy to get access to a slightly less cumbersome C++ compiler in Visual Studio. Sadly, C99 support, better const-expr, better compiler lints, warnings and errors, and a front-end compatible with a real cross platform tool will rather prolong the undesirable life of C++.

On reddit, a post bemoaning the impossibility to teach coding got very popular. It complained about the much worse status of software developers to those in any other white-collar profession. It complained about the lower 90-percentile pay than those in other white-collar profession. I agree with some points. I liked it. It even made an important point: Programming is among the most open and most cheap things you can learn (complains about it being exclusive to rich white people and in need of more tax subsudied study opportunities are rather… politically opportune than anything else). Tools, books, examples, discussion forums are free, and there is no licensing as a barrier to entry (unlike in medicine or law).

If I like all those arguments so much, why don’t I link to it? Because 95% of the article went into the likely incorrect details that most people are just not cut out to learn programming. Programming is a high aptitude task, or so they said. So I better promote this article about the retraction of programming ability having a non-gaussian distribution.

In unrelated news, if you want to buy any kind of GPS watch, @fellrnr is doing the best reviews out there. If you want to see why I’m unhappy with my Garmin, see his GPS Accuracy page. Let’s just say that I didn’t expect a two year incubation period for firmware, even though +xro did warn me about that.