You are the only person who will recognize and value your own overachievements. Prevailingly, others will view your efforts and either think nothing of them or wonder why anyone would go to such lengths.
If you're going to go above and beyond, you should seriously question why you are doing so. When in doubt, do it for yourself.
As an example, food safety in the developing world. Food firms claim food is fresh and came from places where it did not come from. If you introduce an agricultural and food tagging system that logs food item IDs into a blockchain-based system, you can know when and where food was made and grown.
Note that this ignores the huge expense of measuring and storing all of this data, but I've seen some interest in these use cases in Asia, especially for staple crops like rice.
You don't take the data at face value. The goal of these systems is to reduce human intervention, not to remove the intervention. If a firm fakes data, you still have proof in the bad products and customer complaints. This lets you investigate and file complaints on the public blockchain. Think of it like a review of a company's supply chain reliability.
More advanced systems consider using third party, tamper proof scanning systems and packaging. Again, the costs of these systems are quite high, especially for food, but there are physical ways to reduce fraud if the data holds enough value.
They can always print fake labels, but they can't deliver fake products too many times. Customers will realize that fraud is happening. Again, there are also ways to make labels that cannot be faked, then attach those labels to tamper-proof packaging. It helps to realize that these labels and packaging exist so that the food items can be scanned and tracked as they enter and leave different facilities along the supply chain.
A blockchain is useful as a review database because you have guarantees that the reviews came from the claimed reviewer. This reduces fake claim fraud, which you might, for example, see in restaurant reviews. The reputation of the purchasing company is also at stake when they make claims that another company committed fraud. You want good guarantees that information came from the party it's ascribed to. It's reputation building in a scenario without mutual trust.
Replace "reeducation camps in Xinjiang" with "projects in Philadelphia" and "social credit system" with "private credit ratings" and you see that we're not as unlike as we thought. Yes, the scope and severity of the situation is more blatant in the Chinese example, but pointing fingers overlooks that we have similar problems brought about by similar causes in the West. Moreover, we already have these systems in place, and we treat them like oracles. How many poor in the West will never get a chance to be anything else because they get stuck in a system that only sees them as an unnecessary risk? I'm not claiming either system is good or bad. I'm saying both systems are similar and will have similar benefits and pitfalls.
I would ask Westerners to look long and hard at our financial credit systems and ask whether they allow dissent or whether we have simply accepted that dissent is a largely fruitless endeavor.
Whoa whoa whoa, just because both systems have problems and have some similarities doesn't mean no one can complain. I'm not gonna defend the US's problems because it doesn't matter! It's easy to see the Chinese system as morally bad. Why? Because free speech and dissent are the mechanisms by which we improve our ideas and systems. This social credit system backed by the already authoritarian government will further cement the will of the party powers over the will of the people. And everyone should care about a billion people.
We're agreeing. My point is that we should care about a billion people in China and a billion people in the West and billions everywhere. You're right that free speech and dissent are how we make change. I'm questioning the Western perspective because it seems like free speech and dissent are reaching limits as well. Dissent as you like, it probably won't work, and you'll probably suffer consequences in the commercial sphere, albeit not formally in the political or national spheres. We should keep complaining until it gets better. I just wonder if the complaints ever get heard in good faith.
In the limit of infinite passing tests, do we recover the byte we sought? Or does it asymptote to some other quantity? I'm asking relative to a maximum entropy prior.
This is where we revive the debate about whether programming can be creative because it follows such rigid syntax rules. The unenlightened say it's not, and the obsessed say it is. How do we communicate across this gap?
Programming languages having rigid syntax is like English being limited to the Latin alphabet - the opportunities for creativity lie in the combinations of higher level structures.
That's a good way to put it. The ones who think it's an uncreative field are usually the ones who struggled through learning the syntax, and therefore assumed that's what the hard part of the job is.
Thinking that an unambiguous syntax implies it's not creative means something that is creative must have an ambiguous syntax. That's on its face absurd, yet a weirdly common belief.
Python? I find the documentation to be confusing and difficult to search. Many of the arguments to standard functions are not explicitly documented nor do they have obvious enough names for me to guess what they mean. As I was learning Python over the past few years, I inevitably turned to blog posts and Stack Overflow for clearer examples and more explicit descriptions of optional parameters.
I'd be curious to know what you like about the Python documentation because my experience has probably been different than yours.
I feel similarly about Python. I never really had to interact with it beyond using it as a calculator on the command line until a project I was a part of earlier in the year had a utility Python script introduced and I needed to hack on it to make desired changes. Then, more recently, I started using BeautifulSoup[0] for personal scraping. Of course it feels more trivial now (and now I wish I documented my frustrations so I could be more specific and perhaps help out other Python learners in the future), but it does take a while to adjust to Pythonic code where everyone is using cultural conventions like _foo and __foo and you wonder what the hell __foo__ is[1].
More on-topic, searching is a major weakness of Python's docs. What's that? Python just got multi-line strings allowing embedded expressions? They're called f-strings? Let me go read about them[2]. I can't link it, but even using Startpage the immediate results are a post from RealPython and PEP498 and while both are great, they aren't terse enough to be frequently referenced. If you search for "formatted string literal"[3] in the docs it takes 10 results before you reach something explicitly talking about them. And then you need to follow the links a couple times to reach https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#f-... (notice it is anchored as "f-strings" which was the first term we searched for).
While the Python docs, when I've found them, have been adequate for me so far -- although I still check up on how others do the things I want to do -- I'm partial to docs such as MDN that cover parameters and return value in one take for reference with more in-depth information as you scroll down, if needed[4].
If you're going to go above and beyond, you should seriously question why you are doing so. When in doubt, do it for yourself.