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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • By almost every measure, the world is better than it has ever been. Violence, poverty, starvation are all at or near record lows worldwide. Average lifespans are way up. We are just way, way more aware of what is going on in the world, and bad news drives more clicks than good news.

    There are some cracks, no doubt. For example climate change is showing its ugly head, inequality is rising in the US and some other developed countries, and lifespans are taking a slight dip in parts of the US. But, compared to almost anywhere at any time during history, this is a golden age.






  • When I was a very junior EE I ended up working mostly on microcontroller code. There was one bit of extremely ugly code I inherited that parsed a terribly designed serial communication protocol by using a giant maze of nested if statements. I really wanted to rewrite it to something better, but I never quite came up a solution while I worked there. Years later after I was no longer at the company I had a stress dream about it and finally came up with a working solution. I still wish I could go fix it. I really hope it’s no longer used, or that someone else has finally fixed it.