I think you are conflating the notion that, at a given time slice, a majority of the popular sentiment about the future may not have always been positive, with your own opinions of modern engineering.
For vast swaths of human mind, popular opinion tended to see the future as bleak and the past as filled with greater men, accomplishments, etc - the good days are behind us. Post industrial revolution thinking and adoption of science has mostly changed that opinion to hope - the good days are ahead of us.
As for people who can optimize code like back in the day: I am not sure where you work, but I bet if you look at the best engineers in the best tech companies today (google/ Facebook / Netflix / amazon / Uber / palantir) you’ll find a lot to be impressed with.
Rewriting is a very healthy part of software engineering. Sometimes you just didn’t anticipate what the company or product was going to do. The solution you wrote for 1k/qps probably won’t work at a million qps, and it is kind of silly to expect it to.
Agreed. There’s a reason the most educated and capable Chinese move the the US and become Americans. America’s cultural and technological dominance comes from its flexibility borne from a willingness to take in hard working immigrants from anywhere. America is exceptional in that it is a country of immigrants.
Yep it’s called brain drain. Many people come to the US to pursue school with intentions to go back home and make things better there, but just fall into life and work and never look back.
Correlating brain size to intelligence or complexity is a common amateur mistake. Let’s for a second pretend all animal’s brains are black boxes, and we can neither see nor measure them. Instead, let us say we can only judge brains by their impact on the world. Would you then not put humans so far above the other animals as to make it almost silly to compare?
>> can only judge brains by their impact on the world.
So bacteria? Plankton has a massive impact on the world too. Insects ... the planet is arguably dominated by insects.
Mammalian brains are, plus or minus a few percent, equally as dense/complex. There are aspects of dolphin brains that are far more complex than ours. A dog's brain has far more connections dedicated to smell than ours. There is some evidence that Orca brains have similarly more connections dedicated to emotions. Each brain is tuned slightly differently, ours perhaps more to vision and problem solving, but our biology isn't any more evolved or complicated.
Think of what these places offer. Schools provide structured education, parks provide nature, libraries provide knowledge, and recreation centers encourage physical fitness.
Now think of being barred from all of these opportunities. Yes, they committed a crime, and yes, it may not a good idea to allow them to mingle with other people sharing these facilities (especially if these people are children) but...where else does one go to improve oneself? You'd think, especially after being charged with a heinous crime, anyone who truly wishes to reform themselves would benefit from these places. But it is those exact people who are barred from doing just that, and the cycle repeats, because there is no way out.
I'm not saying there's an easy answer here, and it wouldn't be feasible to rebuild these places for criminals only. But these restrictions absolutely make it difficult to integrate and become a productive member of society again.
Of course they should not have committed those crimes, and their victims deserve justice.
But justice isn't served by making someone homeless and then preventing them visiting a library.
Importantly, that also doesn't help with rehabilitation or with preventing reoffending.
If you have a sex offender at risk of re-offending you want to know where they are and what jobs they have. That's made much harder if they're homeless.
Do you think that's an effective deterrent? Do people go "better not download that inappropriately underage video, they might not let me in the library anymore"? And, if a punishment is not an effective deterrent - what's the point of it? What are we trying to achieve?
Going meta - your comments are all along the lines of crime and punishment and whether they "deserve" it etc. The replies to you are all along pragmatic lines - what we should do to make society behave the way we want. These approaches are incompatible - when the pragmatic approach disagrees with the fire-and-brimstone approach, ignoring pragmatism will by definition get a worse outcome. Your own feeling of righteous anger is not a good thing to optimize society around.
The notion of justice and punishment is a subsidiary mechanism to pragmatism - one of many ways to achieve a peaceful, stable society.
(One that does not appear to scale especially well beyond groups where everyone knows each other, or into deeply complicated and partially enforced rule sets. Don't kill your tribe member or the tribe will cast you out = effective. Don't exceed the speed limit or you might possibly receive a fine of some constant amount plus a proportional factor to the amount you exceeded it by = ineffective.)
But you should try to discover the truth about them, or reserve judgement. The original dire presumed meaning of "sex offender" has been legally castrated (bad joke) in many states as shallow thinkers seize on the definition and its National implications to CHEAPLY hang any behavior THEY consider objectionable.
The most egregious misapplication (in my opinion) is "public urination", that is, being caught doing it by the wrong person, or if they consider you an unperson. Used to brand the homeless and turn them into national criminals by following them around with a camera.
Or human traditions under attack. A mixed group of adults and minors caught skinny dipping in the wild by the Wrong Deputy is another example. They'll nail the oldest and fill the younger with crushing guilt, if they are friends.
Consensual sex between teenagers is another. It's the ultimate glass-house throw stone legal abomination. And one or both gets the Scarlet Letter into their young adult years. Talk about a suicide trigger!
"Most people assume that a registered sex offender is someone who has sexually abused a child or engaged in a violent sexual assault of an adult. A review of state sex offender registration laws by Human Rights Watch reveals that states require individuals to register as sex offenders even when their conduct did not involve coercion or violence, and may have had little or no connection to sex. For example:
"At least five states require registration for adult prostitution-related offenses;[108]*
"At least 13 states require registration for public urination; of those, two limit registration to those who committed the act in view of a minor;[109]
"At least 29 states require registration for consensual sex between teenagers;[110] and
"At least 32 states require registration for exposing genitals in public;[111] of those, seven states require the victim to be a minor.[112]
People get put on sex offender lists for urinating in public. Not saying that's what happened here but it's worth considering before passing judgement.
If they can't control themselves we really don't want them wandering around the streets, we want to know where they are. Constant monitoring is an important reoffending protection measure for some sex offenders.
This comment about sex offender lists being full of people who had a single piss in public, but whenever I've asked for evidence people post maybe three or four examples.
Feel free to show me research that these public urinators aren't people flashing to children.
Yes, that sort of indefinite exclusion from public locations is certainly unfair. "Cruel and unusual", even, from a Western European perspective anyway.
And who are you to dictate what "needs to stop"? This is not tumblr. Your language and tone are not productive. Please suggest solutions and have a civil discussion!
Perhaps I'll start:
I think this is tragic but the average American feels totally powerless to help. In San Francisco the homeless are almost all mentally ill, often dangerous, people from other states. My suggestion would be to pool money from all cities they come from and fund homeless programs outside of SF, outside of metropolitan areas. Then, transfer the homeless there and give them another chance to restart and get the help they need outside of a revolving door urban environment.
For vast swaths of human mind, popular opinion tended to see the future as bleak and the past as filled with greater men, accomplishments, etc - the good days are behind us. Post industrial revolution thinking and adoption of science has mostly changed that opinion to hope - the good days are ahead of us.
As for people who can optimize code like back in the day: I am not sure where you work, but I bet if you look at the best engineers in the best tech companies today (google/ Facebook / Netflix / amazon / Uber / palantir) you’ll find a lot to be impressed with.