The flawed premise of modernity - of work and vacation

You come upon a fork in the road. One road is a well-maintained cobblestone path, while the other is a dirth path with overgrown trees. Which road do you take? What you should really be asking is: There came a time where we found ourselves enslaved to powers that be, whether they were lords or CEOs of a fortune…

Introduction to the Philosophy of Software Engineering 

Introduction There are plenty of guides, books, courses to teach people how to program, but there aren’t any resources to teach one how to think like a programmer (or The Philosophy of Software Engineering). I feel like this is the missing piece to a person’s journey to becoming an expert software engineer. Software engineering isn’t a simple mathematical problem where…

Why Progressivism Continues to Lose to Moderates

Although there seems to be very vocal support of progressive ideas, when it comes down to voting, it would seem like the progressives always loses to the moderates. While the political pundits want to overanalyze the reason why a certain candidate failed, from the lack of voter turnout to the different demographics that supported them versus their candidate, I believe…

Automation is Slavery

The Freedom Dividend. Andrew Yang’s idea of a Freedom Dividend and the motivation behind why such a dividend is needed comes close to highlighting an endemic issue that exists for as long as humans have been alive. Andrew believes that a dividend is needed due to automation eventually replacing people. However, I do not believe that this is a proper…

The Real Roko's Basilisk.

Roko’s basilisk is a thought experiment proposed in 2010 by the user Roko on the Less Wrong community blog. Roko used ideas in decision theory to argue that a sufficiently powerful AI agent would have an incentive to torture anyone who imagined the agent but didn’t work to bring the agent into existence. The argument was called a “basilisk”…

Where are all the good engineers?

Or: The 20 Percent Paradox. The Pareto principle states that: [F]or many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes (the “vital few”). Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity. - Wiki This principle is observed in various different fields and aspects of…