The hardest bugs in my experience are those where your only source of vital information is a third party who is straight-up lying to you.

I have encountered dozens of places where streaming API calls have been reworked into imperative by whoever ends up maintaining it just so they can figure out why the hell it is breaking in some unforseen edge case.

This was not about a totalitarian government burning books.

This was about a population numbing themselves with bright colours, bland affirmation and meaningless feeds of facts. With vacuous, superficial interaction with friends and family through screens. They burned the books themselves, so they didn't have to encounter anything challenging.

Every single photo was of a cat.

I have to say I was humbled by the amount of human and computing power that had gone into developing this system over the years, that could achieve such a complicated, impressive technical feat, without requiring any effort or money on my part, and yet also be 100% wrong.

Invariably there would be someone who would, and if you were the person who had initially refused you probably wouldn't even be aware that it had happened until the bug reports came in...

So when you see people, who are well aware of this meaning, using it in a photo like that, what they're saying is "ha ha look how funny the idea of us being racist is". Which of course is actually just normalising white supremacy, and enabling it to go unchallenged by shifting the line between overt racism and coded racism, and preventing any good faith discourse.

So this is either intentionally racist joking-but-not-really on his part or incredibly crass idiocy that provides cover for other racists.

Facebook is legendary for introducing breaking changes to their API without warning, for having terrible documentation, baroque and inconsistent APIs, flaky behaviour and broken examples.

Whatever you think of Facebook the company, Facebook the API is something everyone I know has horror stories about.

Which is where UBI comes in as the missing part of a liberal capitalist economy. Until you remove the stick of starvation and homelessness, labour markets cannot respond rationally.

Then read the rest of the series, which are all good, it is just the first two are particularly wonderful.

At which point you really want a variable length list of Sides, each with a length property.

Or you want a series of points with relative coordinates, making the sides implicit.

Or or or...

What I take from it is that there is no one true object model, there is no universally "correct" way of solving the problem. An evolving understanding of the problem leads to an evolving solution that places different priorities on different attributes.

Is there any value provided to the system by making Square a specialisation of Rectangle? Is there value in being able to express a Square without a redundant attribute value? What is the tradeoff? And so on.

That it was even possible is to me quite damning of project oversight, for allowing the system to get to that stage with such inadequate procedural and UI safeguards.

Could they be collected from all those devices with front - facing cameras people spend their lives staring at?