Honestly I’ve never had the displeasure. Or financial benefit.

Uhh, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that, but I’m not sure where now. Any time you need to access a member of a list or array that’s determined by a polynomial - which by Horner’s rule covers all combinations of multiplications and additions - it would be a possible notation.

Transfinite algorithms are definitely a topic of research.

If we’re talking mathematicians, you just know it’s going to be ω-nested recursive functions any moment now. Just be grateful it’s not all n with polynomial subscripts or something.

The more time a coder spends in #2, the more I trust them.

The trick there is that you’ll be developing forever unless you get your hands dirty, because it like 80% works, and you need 99% to put it in any kind of prod.

I really want to build and learn to use a medieval-style pole lathe.

Exactly. COBOL still gets used in legacy stuff, but at this point you’d have to be either insane or a historical re-enactor to build something new in it.

I’ve used C more than anything else, for reference.

I mean, of course it wouldn’t be fair to expect everyone to be migrated over yet, but at some point it’s going to be an obsolete language. Memory unsafety is a pretty nasty quirk; just one that was previously unavoidable, as far as I know.

Playground zone signs where I live often read “slow children playing”. It’s supposed to be “slow (children playing)” but I always get a kick out of reading it as “(slow children) playing”.

Shoot, it did occur to me that might not technically be the right word.

Still, even if you’re an engineer in the late 80’s, it seems like it would be obvious you need a way for disks to announce themselves in O(1) time. Was it just a limitation of interoperability between vendors or something?

Why would you design a disk driver that way?

Dump a core out for my homies.

I mean, a lot of companies do stuff like that, and yet you still need money to live. Just working there doesn’t necessarily make it your fault; by that logic it would be a sin to work checkout at Walmart, because you’ll have the same blood on your hands as the Waltons.

I don’t really like talking about capitalism as if it’s a well defined concept, but, no ethical consumption under.

I’m not ignoring the other two things listed, I’m realistic.

I didn’t mean you, FYI. I mean someone who does work for a FAANG and is looking for more justification to do nothing for the common good.

Why not? Unlike Schindler you don’t have to worry about how many beatings are necessary to keep up appearances, and you might have a specific role that exposes you to very little evil at all. Meanwhile, you can donate some of that big wage to people like EFF, or volunteer using the flexible schedule.

I was kind of assuming that, since FAANG are American, but I’d guess they probably have foreign employees as well.

Canadians make pretty much the same as Europeans, I think. The Americans have a bunch of monopolies, and are characteristically weird and nationalist about who they share the spoils with. (I know, it’s not all of you guys, but it’s definitely some)

Yeah, I do worry someone will read the “work for a FAANG” part, and ignore the other two things listed. It’s absolutely not enough to go “welp, I’m just a little cog following orders”.

Maybe a one-man boycott is the wrong way to put it. Multi-person boycotts are obviously built from individual people. I guess my real point is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution; you actually have to look at the world, look at how you want it to be, and figure out how you can help make that happen from your place in it.

Agreed. Just working for somebody bad doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve given up, though. I mean, they made a movie about Schindler, and we all know who he worked for.

But financially bussin’!

And also, it’s actually a complicated question. A one-man boycott doesn’t do anything. If you work at a FAANG, work for a better world when you’re off, and go whistleblower when they do something really evil, I find no fault in that at all.