If bananas reflected yellow light, but we saw them as blue instead by some purely neuropsychological phenomenon, would this cause any significant problems?
The most terrifying thing about prions is that they are infectious but not alive: they can't be "killed" in the normal sense by sterilization. The proteins must literally be dissolved to neutralize them.
I don't think anybody ever meant to imply that pure functions can be composed in any order. That's the confusion here. "Pure functions can be run in any order" only means that they don't have side effects so one call doesn't impact another, but nobody ever meant or (hopefully) understood that to mean that the inputs and outputs of pure functions could be composed in any order. I don't even know what kind of confusion could lead to such an idea.
Are you sure we are talking about the same "functional programming"? Consider a function that parses a number from a string, and a function that doubles a number. How could anybody expect the order of these applications to not matter?
When reading anything on The Guardian it's important to ask what they aren't telling you, because it's almost certain that they are omitting many very salient details out in order to fit the story into their own narrative. If you knew that Nieto had other problems, you likely wouldn't come away from the Guardian article believing that he was executed for being Hispanic.
When reading anything on The Guardian it's important to ask what they aren't telling you, because it's almost certain that they are omitting many very salient details out in order to fit the story into their own narrative. If you knew that Nieto had other problems, you likely wouldn't come away from the Guardian article believing that he was executed for being Hispanic.
People in third world nations don't have any empathy super powers for people who are ethnically, religiously, or socio-economically from themselves either.
And part of the reason why cops are armed to the teeth is because the citizens are. It would require real total mutual disarmament of citizens and police to change anything in the USA.
And until the people employed by the systems that police, prosecute, and incarcerate other people have a sufficient safety net, they will be motivated to prop up those systems.
> those of us who are non-white, older than 40, disabled, trans, not neurotypical, queer, from low-income backgrounds, and/or a host of other identities will continue to be locked out of tech.
What if those people are just less likely (note: this is about probability, for all I know the best programmer in the world could be a disabled queer 50 year old black person from a poor family) to be competitive among candidates? This basically amounts to hiring as charity.
There is no end to the list of possible "identities". You can ALWAYS slice humanity up into smaller and smaller groups to find some identity that is underrepresented. Everybody is clamoring to grab a niche identity to claim oppression points. This is why identity politics is garbage.
Unless for-profit corporations are actually jobs programs in disguise, there's only one sensible thing to do: value people for what they can do for the company. Period. Though maybe favoring a candidate because they have the right skin color IS actually good for companies? Who knows?
Trans people have contributed some crucial developments in tech. The ARM processor was invented by a trans woman. If trans people were barred from the industry we might not have all these amazing mobile devices right now.
How about a "blind" hiring process? For software engineers, it's easy to imagine tools that could help evaluate skills without revealing that person's race or gender.
If I want to see someone's work, and they provide a URL, I'm interested in the content, not the identity of the service it's hosted on. Gee, this sounds familiar...
How many more years before all of these orgs finally come to the realization that making hiring decisions based on skin color or genitals isn't a winning strategy?