I think this comment[1] from the post's author does a good job of answering this:
> I would word the intended message as "whether or not someone shares our values is not directly relevant to whether one should cooperate with them". Moral alignment is not directly relevant to the decision; it enters only indirectly, in reasoning about things like the need for enforcement or reputational costs. Monstrous morals should not be an immediate deal-breaker in their own right; they should weigh on the scales via trust and reputation costs, but that weight is not infinite.*
> I don't really think of it as "pro-cooperation" or "anti-cooperation"; there is no "pro-cooperation" "side" which I'm trying to advocate here.
Hm. I'm interested in hearing more about the specific scenarios where this sort of tool is useful.
I skimmed through the HN comments and see that it can be used for adding diagrams to code comments. But what else? Slack, Jira, READMEs, SMS, Signal etc all allow you to include pngs.
What do you mean by READMEs here? Markdown readmes support embedding images from external files, which isn't really useful if you're looking at the readme directly (or do you use data: uris there? Last I looked they had too-severe length limits.)
(I'm also curious what you mean by SMS, or are you conflating it with RCS?)
Messaging apps don't have fixed width apps, I think. You would need to pick one app's specific font (idk if Monodraw lets you do that), and draw using that.
I strongly disagree. Relative to other books, maybe it is on the expensive side. But relative to the value you get from it, I think it is incredibly low.
One way to think about it is in terms of how much you value your time. If you value your time at $25/hr and this book saves you more than 4 hours of time learning UI design, it is worth it.
Another way to think about it is in terms of ROI. As someone in the tech industry I think that having these skills is likely to pay off way more than $99. Not in a legible way -- it's not like anyone will ever say to you "I see you have these UI design skills, here's a $5,000 raise." But I believe that the skills will ultimately shine through and improve your ability to get jobs and make more money.
Also, in practice, if you're in the tech industry, there's probably a good chance that you can get your employer to pay for it.
In other countries, "tech industry" does not pay that well. Also keep in mind that there exist a lot of people who do programming (even often quite complicated programming) as part of their job, but work in a very different branch of industry than tech industry - also with a much smaller salary than what is common in the tech sector in the USA.
The example given was $25 per hour though, which is not some outrageous Silicon Valley salary.
I think the idea may well be that there are two groups of people in the world. Those who pay for books and those who never pay for books, especially if they can find a free download somewhere.
Students, young tech workers from low wage countries, people who just want to have a look or are horders rather than readers won't pay regardless of price.
So the only question remaining is what effect price has on those who do buy tech books. Will they buy a cheaper book instead?
I don't know the answer to that, but I can say that for me there is a psychological £49.99 threshold that makes me start thinking and looking at other options rather than making an impulse purchase.
This threshold is completely irrational. If you double my salary today, the threshold won't change. It only changes gradually over time.
>
I think the idea may well be that there are two groups of people in the world. Those who pay for books and those who never pay for books, especially if they can find a free download somewhere.
I claim that I belong to a third group: I do spend a lot of money on books, but have to be somewhat careful with my spending. I can also claim that the knowledge that I get from the mentioned book will in all likelihood not increase my salary, so I am interested in this book solely because I am very interested in this topic. But since I am interested in a lot of topics (and tend to avoid illegal downloading of e-books if possible), I have to concentrate the huge book spendings on those books that are insanely good.
> As someone in the tech industry I think that having these skills is likely to pay off way more than $99.
That is certainly true, however many young programmers could benefit from books like this one when they are in the early learning phase, to avoid developing bad habits that can only become harder to forget with age and (bad) experience, especially if they land the first job after creating or contributing to a dozen projects.
Unfortunately, I'm having trouble understanding though. The furthest I got with math is calculus. I'd love to hear a more ELI5 description of what you said. Something that doesn't require prior knowledge of abstract algebra. (I recognize that's a big/difficult ask. No obligation or anything ofc.)
That makes sense to me that in these two particular situations they have leverage. But what if they don't have enough board seats and you also aren't looking to raise a subsequent round? It sounds like then they don't really have leverage, right? If so, it seems easy enough to guard against the risk that VCs end up with too much leverage over you.
I've never understood why React components are considered to be pure. The output is not just a function of the props, it's also a function of the state (as in `useState`) and context (as in `useContext`).
As someone with most of their experience in JavaScript and Ruby, I really like how Clojure is just so _different_. It's like someone who speaks English learning Chinese instead of a similar language like Spanish. I think doing that opens your mind and teaches you more than if you learned something that is "more of the same". Similar to how it is useful to learn about other fields instead of continuing to grind away at "more of the same" within your field.
I've been programming in JS for years now and only picked up clojure last september. I love it. I started with "Clojure for the Brave and True" and then went on to solve codewars challenges and make web apps in clojurescript.
I completely agree with your point about learning something different. Clojure is really good at handling immutable data, lazy evaluation, macros. So you can write elegant code that would be inefficient/unweildy in something like js or python
This strikes me as overly cynical. A pendulum swung too far. Yes, someone who takes "we don't want to change a thing" at face value is probably overconfident. OTOH, someone who says that the old culture "ceases to exist" is underconfident, I would wager. Reality is somewhere in the middle.
> I would word the intended message as "whether or not someone shares our values is not directly relevant to whether one should cooperate with them". Moral alignment is not directly relevant to the decision; it enters only indirectly, in reasoning about things like the need for enforcement or reputational costs. Monstrous morals should not be an immediate deal-breaker in their own right; they should weigh on the scales via trust and reputation costs, but that weight is not infinite.*
> I don't really think of it as "pro-cooperation" or "anti-cooperation"; there is no "pro-cooperation" "side" which I'm trying to advocate here.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/o4cgvYmNZnfS4xhxL/working-wi...