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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure why you think I’m rich. Mail isn’t like any of those other services. There is no mail urgent enough that it can’t take one extra business day to arrive. If there is, it certainly wouldn’t be sent through lettermail nor delivered by the normal carrier.

    If we’re going to raise taxes to pay for things (and by all means we should), I would much rather prioritize all of the other strawmen you brought up than continue to pay for lettermail delivery 5x per week.






  • I feel like there need to be multiple CS pathways. For example, people who want to go into hardware development might take a set of courses more closely aligned with electrical engineering.

    There are.

    My university (and many others) offered Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Computer Engineering. Computer Engineering is sort of a middle ground between EE and SE, where you learn hardware concepts like circuits and semiconductors (for hardware development), but there are also algorithm-based courses.

    Each of the programs has many options for elective courses, and you can focus on databases, algorithms, security, web development, or whatever you want. The core concepts are the same, and it’s more about learning broad concepts and skills, rather than focused skills. Things like Redis and Elasticsearch didn’t exist when I took my database course - the practical portion was mostly just SQL. Things like Docker came even later. But the broad concepts I learned allow me to jump in and use “new” technologies as they mature and stabilize.

    None of the programs were just “coding bootcamp”. Coding was almost inconsequential to my degree (CompEng), though I understand it’s used more heavily in Computer Science degrees. I had a single first-year course that was supposed to teach us programming - all the other courses just assumed a basic knowledge. The focus was more on the design, the logic, and the algorithms. Anyone can code - the bootcamps have that right. But not everyone can design and implement a distributed system efficiently and securely.


  • Historically, student visas have been freely issued at will to any student who was accepted to a university or college program. This wasn’t an issue until about five years ago.

    A lot of our laws, regulations, and policies were written assuming people would act in good faith. Unfortunately, that’s no longer good enough, and as a result, many corporations and provincial governments have started to take advantage of it, which has caused a lot of problems in Canadian society.











  • According to the article, 25% lead to convictions. I don’t know if there’s an appropriate quantity of strip searches greater than zero, but if it’s going to happen, this actually seems like a pretty good result.

    I guess the questions to ask here are: could these arrests be made without a strip search (e.g. would a frisk have been sufficient)? If not, could the strip searches be done by an adult of the same gender and also in the presence of their parent or guardian?

    There’s definitely a lot that is bad about this, but if 25% of strip searches result in conviction, there’s clearly another problem here that needs to be addressed.



  • I bought a house in 2013. Sold it for twice as much in 2020, it’s probably about triple now.

    But looking at house prices and interest rates now, I don’t think I could even buy that first house if I was starting from scratch. I have an extra decade of seniority and (mostly) reasonable salary increases at or above inflation, and I would still be shit out of luck if I didn’t already own property.

    That’s not painting a good picture of the future for the next generation, or even those in my generation who waited or needed longer to save.