If you truly believe that math is created by humans, you have no business in math.

The ways that we *describe* math are, no doubt, a social construct, but math itself is the discovery of underlying reality. https://t.co/z5ce8hLCTZ

— Heather E Heying (@HeatherEHeying) October 3, 2020

Amusing that Heying believes she has somehow proved that Platonism is true. This is not at all clear, and nearly everyone in her thread (including Heying) sounds like an uneducated simpleton — but it’s hard to blame them. Our education system simply is not very good and here you can see the results of that dereliction of teaching and learning.

This sums it up, though:

Watching STEM trying to do philosophy is hilarious as it is embarrassing. It’s like watching a giraffe try to Ice dance.

— Dogspeed You! Snack Emperor (@patrick_weir) October 3, 2020

It is indeed amusing and, as the kids these days say, cringe. They’re like toddlers fighting over a dropped ice cream cone on a Slip ‘n Slide. They (again, including Heying) don’t even understand the question much less what a possible answer could be like.

Why do these people even bother to go to college? It does them absolutely no good.

Why is it that latency in inputs on computerized stuff seems worse in 2020 than 10 years ago? Eg I type my pin into a brand new shiny gas station pump, and it can’t keep up with my keystrokes and misses some? Wtfff

— the normie whisperer (@simplic10) October 2, 2020

This is true, and there are a few reasons for it:

1) Frameworks. Most everything uses a framework these days (Ruby on Rails, Angular, etc.) and those, while accelerating development, often include unnecessary, inefficient or just plain bad code that slows things down.

2) Far less is done locally. Web applications alas now rule. These are just slower by their very nature, and even worse, like old terminals from the 1970s the worst ones are coded to echo back input rather than handling it locally.

3) Lots of new/newish coders who don’t know what they are doing. There has been an explosion of people entering the programming field in the last decade. Many of them are not very good.

4) Ship early and ship often mentality. Called in the industry CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery), it’s designed to avoid monolithic releases by shipping code early and often. This frequently, though, causes poor code to be released and never altered because it’s “good enough.”

5) Belief that because “computers are really fast now,” no optimization is required.

6) All the surveillance and tracking that’s inserted everywhere also plays a role.

This is why many applications and computing experiences, though not being substantially different functionally, are much slower than they were in 1995.

The expectations baseline for the number and mix of crazy events that can happen in a given timeframe has been shattered. I‘ll never be able to watch a movie or a dramatic TV show the same way again. Reality has invaded areas formerly, absolutely reserved for fiction.

— Olaf Alex (@olaf_alex) October 2, 2020

Good. I hope more people adopt this attitude. All too often I hear about some relatively-mundane event in fiction, “That could never happen.”

Buddy, have you SEEN real life? Absurdly unlikely and bizarre shit goes down all the time. People want their fiction, I guess, to be more plausible than their reality.

Hunter S. Thompson’s Eulogy for Nixon.

Worth reading again. I read it in ’94. Whatever you say about Hunter S. Thompson, that motherfucker could write.

Nothing like that could or would be published today — both the conservatives and liberals would screech like banshees until it was censored. That alone makes it worth re-visiting, to see how much the world has changed.