there was an infuriating segment on the local news last night that single-use/disposable coffee cups (e.g. keurig) are somehow "greener" because they supposedly use water/energy more efficiently than "traditional" ways of making coffee. of course, zero mention of where these things end up after their 15 seconds of fame.
it's like CO2 is the only impact to the environment that matters. you can always find greener ways to source the energy, but you're not going to find a lot of ways to reduce plastic trash.
My first thought was "what kind of oil?". It matters. The clean burning, energy dense stuff was turned into fuel from the start. The rest of it is barely fit for a cigarette lighter.
But beyond that, not all plastics come from crude oil directly. Many plastics, especially baggies and consumer plastics of the type shown in these photos, come from liquids that are removed from natural gas.
Either way, you're certainly dealing with a liquid hydrocarbon of inferior quality. And at the huge energy cost of having refined it twice. I'd be surprised if this provided any net-positive energy. And it's certainly a dirty burning fuel with low BTU per volume.
Why not just burn the plastic directly at this point?
"...are smart enough to comprehend the wider consequences"
Smart is not wise. Just complicate what you think people would hesitate to do, and they will get fooled into dong it. Especially if it challenges their intelligence (e.g. algorithms).
I notice a hive-mind of looking-down on "ordinary work" even if it's not really challenging, and is actually isn't less purposeful than open source projects that get to the HN front-page.
'Coolness' is an unmeasured and a dangerous motivation.
It's not a hivemind, it's people expressing their frustrations. In this industry, it's easy to feel safe in terms of income, so naturally people seek fulfilling needs from higher up the Maslow's pyramid.
And a typical programming job is not really doing anything useful for the society except maybe extremely indirectly. At best, it's not actually harmful.
Personally, I've been through plenty of webdev jobs, and almost always, it was building a copy of something that already exists and is better, so that our company (or our customers) could compete in the same space. If I ever met a potential user of such service and my bosses weren't looking, I'd actually direct them to the original competitors. It would be dishonest to do otherwise. It's jobs like these that can make one feel they don't contribute anything useful to society (making your boss richer by building a copycat product in a global market is hardly useful for people other than your boss).
Essentially, companies/products like Google (AltaVista, Lycos, ect.), Facebook (Friendster, MySpace, etc) or Slack (IRC, Skype, etc)?
IMHO, it's very rare to be working on something truly unseen; and if you are, the chances are numerous people are working on the same thing at very this moment, just in a different flavor. Aren't these incremental improvements part of the natural selection?
IMHO, you should strive to find meaning not in the external, but internally; you should start somewhere, however basic it is (fixing your bed and cleaning your room, before trying to change and help the world). Jordan Peterson talks about that in great detail - highly recommend his lectures (they're available online).
Outside of tech, there are plenty of pretty mundane businesses that do lots of social good. In tech this is harder mostly because everything has almost global availability by default. But still, you don't neccesarily have to work at one of the big five to have social impact.
As for finding meaning within, I see this as a cop out. If you extend it to the limit, the most meaningful life is that of doing nothing and enjoying your inner self. It's not the kind of life I'd personally find meaningful.
the biggest problem with ordinary work is the rote schedules most such work entails. Just having to be in the same building for many years from X am to Y pm Monday through Friday, except for M weeks vacation, is itself pretty depressing to many people
He was comparing coolness, an "unmeasured and a dangerous motivation", to curiosity, which is similarly unmeasured and dangerous. ie, both are unreliable motivators and yet the industry idolizes both.
It's a form of virtue-signalling, much like making sure all of Hackernews knows you eat strictly paleo and only have as many possessions as can fit in a single rucksack.
I see no harm in one having basic experience in multiple fields. Especially when those fields are related. Actually, this concept I kind of "market" it among my circles. A mobile developer should know the basics of web development and vice versa. That way they communicate better.
I claim that already happens naturally. It's our drive to quickly build a niche (e.g. "I'm a professional X developer"), in addition to insecurities that lead to saying "X is not my responsibility", is what gets in the way of expanding our fields of expertise.
Not as general or useful as Rust's "if let", though. Rust's "if let" affords fallible pattern matching on arbitrary types, not just on "nullable pointer types" (in Safe Rust, a "nullable pointer" is simply a regular reference wrapped in Option<>).
While Java devs are fighting with the eclipse issue of the day, generating wsdls, deploying wars, making annotated glorified structs for typed json/xml/both (except in some cases when they just go with a Map<Map<....,String>,String>), and so forth, those other dynamic languages get out of the developer's way and let them solve their problem with less fuss.
Java's not a terrible option. But it's rarely the best option, especially for Right Now, though it may become the best option later when enough competing concerns have cropped up.
Here you don't even have to write code for controllers or db connections for basic CRUD HATEOAS REST service. Spring takes care of it. The model still needs getters and setters, but you can avoid this with Lombok
If all you need is a basic CRUD service, there are even easier options in the PHP/Rails/etc. world. If you have a schema for your data, it's pretty much one command away to generate such a CRUD service. Some of them even give you a nice looking out of the box web interface too. So you're not really selling me... And my day job is in Java, we're pretty modern with Java 8, Jetty 9, Spring, etc. but it still ends up being something like this: https://ptrthomas.files.wordpress.com/2006/06/jtrac-callstac...
Spring Boot may be a bit nicer than the most out of the way method I used years ago (now at https://github.com/stoicflame/enunciate/wiki) which did use Spring for some things, but it's really still far away from what dynamic languages and their ecosystems offer.
Honestly, I think just because it's so exceptionally un-cool. PHP may not be that cool either, but Facebook uses (has used?) it, and it's at least not as strict and "enterprise-y" as Java.
My favorite MySQL gotcha is that if you issue a GRANT statement with a typo in the user's name instead giving a "user does not exist" error it simply creates a new user with the misspelled name.
