"Corporate surveillance", data selling, and internet privacy concerns are somewhat overblown, at least for now. People will use hypotheticals or worst case scenarios to paint inaccurate view of systems that sometimes don't even really exist.

Creating fingerprints out of metadata is actually much, much harder to do in practice and at scale than you would think. And fingerprints have a much shorter useful half-life than you would think - 48 hours or less if you are on a smartphone.

And the problem scales exponentially the bigger the dataset you are dealing with. Cramming in more and more datasets actually makes weaker connections. And the data available in data brokerages are garbage and riddled with inaccuracies. Your old AOL account from 12 years ago is doing more to gum up these systems than you realize.

Even if these systems were as robust as they are sometimes portrayed, all of the investment and decision making is being handled by some Marketing Executive named Brent or something who thinks a spreadsheet is too technical and doesn't think much harder than "let's target this ad to young mothers". There's a reason you still see dumb, out-of-place ads even by the most accomplished tech companies.

On a website with a voting system, nobody is going to share real contrarian views. All you'll get are carefully chosen pseudo-contrarian viewpoints that people think they'll get some votes for.

Here's my carefully chosen pseudo-contrarian viewpoint: voting systems on any forum, including this one, create filter bubbles just as intense as the ones created by social media algorithms. You're in a filter bubble on this site just as much as on reddit, and nearly as much as on Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube. You'll never see any genuine discussion around contrarian viewpoints here.

Unfortunately, removing the voting system would massively increase mod workload, to an unworkable degree. This means the concept of a non filter bubble forum or website is an impossibility. We either get a filter bubble, or a spam and scam filled cesspool. There's no other options.

I don't believe the rule that you should deduplicate code when N=3, rather I think that people in the industry duplicate way too much and that you should deduplicate at N=2.

That said, I've done some side project work lately where I've let that slide, largely in cases where the code is really throw away (an importer script I'll run once) or when I really don't know what the hell I'm doing (a library that is partially compatible with python-arango for porting my personal arangodb applications to postgres/SQLAlchemy where I am learning SQLAlchemy as I go along)

IMHO: The average US tech worker is overpaid relative to other professions of similar training and difficulty.

I don't mean your superstar geniuses that singlehandedly design new algorithms and invent new fields, but just your standard lowly programmer or designer at some insignificant company. There's no reason people like that (myself included) should be paid more than, say, teachers, nurses, veterinary technicians, soldiers, and tradespeople -- who all require a lot of training and/or education and produce socially useful things that usually don't negatively impact their communities.

Meanwhile we sit in front of a screen, often turning institutional investment dollars into advertisement engines and engagement spam that makes the internet and society worse for everyone around the world.

I understand that our salaries aren't measured by social worth, but are instead a natural consequence of supply and demand in the market. I just wish that weren't the case.

I've seen tech salaries drive up costs of living in too many places and kick out locals and turn small towns into luxury playgrounds for the rich. I wish our field could just be another down to earth niche trade, done by people who actually have an interest in it and aren't just in it to get rich quick.

I also think we're vastly overpaid compared to international devs of similar skill, but that's a whole different topic. Mostly I'm just annoyed that tech salaries are so high here. It feels deeply unfair to everyone else who works just as hard if not harder, serves a social good every day, but goes home stressing about all their bills.

Windows is a good OS and Visual Studio (not Code) is the best IDE.

Also, I really don't like marine mammals at all. Possible exception for otters