BariumBlue

The world we work with is entirely artificial and ephemeral. Anything is redoable, ctrl-z-able. You can "create" and explore a luscious forest, but there's no smell, no permanence. It's a simulation we create for ourselves, created for self-satisfaction.

Software engineers get lost and subsumed into the virtual world, so I don't think it's surprising we look for and pine for ways to exit.

There does seem to be a limit - we have found 0 life in the Dallol Geothermal vents in Ethiopia, which are simultaneous highly salty, highly acidic, and highly hot pools of water.

Problem is that the Federal Highway Association only spends for new projects, not routine maintenance (please check me on that though).

Therefore cities who need maintenance done will bundle routine maintenance they can't afford with expansion (lane expansion, streamlining). This lets them access federal dollars they wouldn't otherwise get.

Over decades, this has created a lot of infrastructure that isn't financially responsible as stuff has just gotten built and built and built. The ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) always grades the overall US as a "C" or worse for maintenance.

Part of the problem is that building things is sexy, maintaining them is harder and not sexy. Lotta money and focus on new stuff, maintenance is a secondary concern.

I would imagine most reading would be "let me read that sign" and not much else. To most folks, writing was probably logographs - "Ah, I've seen that collection of letters before, that meant 'pub' "

For pet project folks, I used to think "person who's excited to refactor the entire codebase because they're excited by some new technology they read a post about, but doesn't actually understand the codebase nor the technology" was an exaggeration until I got one as a team lead.

You're implying it was intentional, when it clearly was not. I'd be OK with calling it criminal negligence.

My annoyance was the focus on something that aligns with a narrative some people love to push (US bad), and ignoring the bigger issues that actually plague the Iranian people that just get ignored because no one actually cares.

Wasn't it right next to a military base, and previously used as part of that military base? And therefore a reasonable part of the targeting list that should've gotten more scrutiny but just didn't?

This feels like someone wanted to slander the US military actions, could only find one unambiguously negative thing, so then they pontificated on that.

It literally may be a syntax thing, but I too can never remember the exact arguments to put where so I never use it.

I think if `reduce` looked more functional or more like Erlang code, it'd be easier to read and digest.

Those feel very ink-blobby - like they were drawn by someone who can barely hold a pen stick-stopping across each line and then redoing parts of each line to correct mistakes. Looks elementary schooler.

I prefer Excalidraw look and feel - a couple of smooth and mostly straight lines per line, which looks more like intentional competence with a quick and imperfect tool.

The US governmental system does have it's issues (first past the post and it's effects being the most glaring), but isn't it the longest continuous democracy alive right now?

> They are also less likely to start random wars EU lack of aggression, to defend themselves physically, economically, or otherwise, has been criticized constantly - slow and late to react to the Russian invasion, slow and late to react to new technologies like AI, electric cars.

Thy're not immune to deadlock either - sometimes going months or even a year or two to form a valid governing coalition.

The grass definitely looks greener though, especially if you've been in one pasture a long time.

I suspect my oldest memory, of me getting into a booster car seat as a child, is no longer the actual memory, but the accumulated imaginings of me trying to remember that specific memory, masquerading as a memory.

As per the article they're slowly shuttering the project, but I assume AlphaFold itself is still available and usable?

I assume that AlphaFold isn't perfect, but surely after so many years on it most of the useful juice had been squeezed in terms of making it a useful tool?

It really depends on the kind of war being fought.

If the cheap solution involves having troops only a dozen miles away from the enemy, then you're going to take casualties, and funeral costs are FAR more expensive then the cost to buy a large bird and fly it from a 100+ miles away.

An MQ-9 has roughly the same wingspan as an A-10 - they're not small birds.

An MQ-9 needs to have a good sensor ball, ideally with both color and IR, gps jamming resistance, weapons integration with multiple types of missiles (ideally large enough to take out something larger than a motorcycle), good on-target time INCLUDING transit time (if it can only stare for one hour on target it'd be pointless), good uplink and downlink to reliably move that data (you don't want to lose track when a missile flies off), and the architecture to support, including ground control stations.

You CAN stuff someone in Cessna, give em a camera, a radio, and some mortar rounds to toss out the back, but that's not going to work for most use cases.

Honestly software that gets a bunch of updates often gets more brittle and problematic over time, like how a person accumulates illnesses over time.

Though I guess a software project or software team usually does get stronger over time, as they figure out pipelines, devops, systems and rituals that work well for them.

True - the biggest thing I want to catch in an MR is "will this change lead us onto a path that is uglier, buggier, less maintenanable".

People will generally copy and follow existing patterns, so for example if you let somebody add a new internal date time format, then soon your codebase will bifurcate and there'll be multiple inconsistent versions roaming around.

The other stuff (minor bugs, overly verbose code) can easily be fixed. Paradigm rot cannot.

Seems like housing again:

> Rents have surged in recent years, driven by tourism, foreign investment and a shortage of affordable housing. The cost of housing now consumes one of the largest shares of disposable income in the European Union

My impression is that where housing is expensive, there will be complaints of unaffordability (obviously), but also vice versa, that where there is unaffordability, housing always seems to be a large component (at least in "the west").

in most places basic food (rice and beans or an equivalent) is cheap. Services can usually be skimped on. Transportation can usually be flexible (new car / cheap used car / transit / bike). Housing costs seem to be relatively non-flexible though.

I wouldn't be surprised if Greece has strong NIMBY factors.

Yeah, it's a bit of an awkward article. Just compare the paragraph headers to the paragraph contents - "Why a hex grid" and then the paragraph doesn't talk about hex grids.

AI stylisms are not necessarily bad - short, punchy fragments CAN make it easier to digest some text. But it can't be all punch. In a meandering writing (like this post), it comes off as unfocused and as a blasé imitation of actually focused, to-the-point, punchy writing.

It gives off of similar vibes as corporateese - like someone who kinda knows what "right/smart/good" sounds like, but doesn't or can't present something actually right/smart/good.

EDIT: Not that there isn't interesting stuff worth reading, but it does feel a little "someone put a big mac in a blender and I guess it's still decent".

Yeah my take is they wanted a language more resilient to slop-cannon code. Last I looked they had 900kLOC of Rust just after the Rust PR - I have no doubt there's a lot of garbage in those LOC, and Rust gives more safety guardrails for that.

>There is no meaningful way of distinguishing features from bugs.

From a user perspective, a bug is when behavior deviates from reasonable expected behavior.

From a dev perspective, a bug is when the code actions mismatches the mental model (aka spec if it exists, else a reasonable mental model of the system).

A bug becomes a feature when it becomes expected behavior.

A common combo for this is (was?) C and Lua. Lua is intended to be a embedded language, so good for Interop, but also also high level and easy to use.

There's a reason why Factorio uses Lua as it's scripting level language

Yeah, I think one issue is that AI fundamentally dgaf about you and your code base. They don't have a salary on the line, and from their perspective it's not some project they super care about. I think they're happy to help, and dutiful to orders, but if the business dies in two years because of crap code that's no skin off their back.

Hah, I was just thinking that Python likely has a vast ocean of training data, but it's likely of lower quality, being much of it is written by beginners and those who aren't primarily programmers.

Ok, they're saying "let the job choose the correct tools and have that be the stack, don't have a stack and fit it into working for the job".

Which to me sounds more reasonable than what I thought they were saying.

Apparently there have been IRGC and basij curfew patrols shooting at buildings / windows of people who sing or shout anti regime songs and slogans. Apparently they are also (at least in some cases) dressing as women to avoid airstrikes. There has been very little photage and info coming out of Iran though.

I still believe the Iranian government is more afraid of it's people than of the US and Israel - the US and Israel can bomb leadership and materiel, but without ground troops, regime capitulation is unlikely, unless the populace can themselves overthrow the govt (though that is hard to do when there is a major imbalance in who has guns).

Yes I had the same thought.

Imo brutalism is monolithic and unyielding. This is opposite, with the sturdy concrete yielding into plant overgrowth and exposed rebar.

I hear this a lot from a lot of my coworkers who like Java Spring - they trust Spring to do things right, more than themselves.

On the other hand, I hate Java Spring because I feel like I don't trust it - it doesn't let me look into and understand the internals easily, making me feel like I'm afloat on a pile of abstracts I'm not allowed to look down into.

Looking at some other projects enterprise js/ts codebases though, I see a lot of "I don't understand how this works so I'll try random things until it works". In that kind of environment, I can understand the attraction of Spring - it's not great, but it also won't be a flaming pile of unbaked abstractions.

> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.

Are you saying that Iran is capably fighting and killing US personnel, aircraft, and invading infantry?

I am a little confused about the universe you live in. The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command and are effectively moving and acting by momentum, essentially no different than a dead man walking.

Do you know the names of any alive people in the IRGC chain of command? Have you seen videos or evidence of IRGC doing anything to harm US forces other than lob some stuff and hope it hits? Where are the Islamic Iranian armies and navies you imply to exist?

If a scientist is doing more work to secure grants than doing science (my understanding is that this is very common), trying to justify their own existence, then I wouldn't be surprised that results get skewed towards that end.

If every software engineer and developer had to do more work justifying their own existence than actually coding and developing, I suspect overall software quality would be worse than it is today.

To add to what the central city budget problem is - each new piece of street and road in LA has, on average, not paid for itself in terms of increased revenue from taxes or otherwise.

So for each new street widening, new road, and piece of highway capacity, LA was increasing it's financial liability to revenue ratio.

Add over decades all of the street and road construction that LA has done, and it now has a unsustainable amount of road maintenance it's responsible for compared to the amount of revenue it pulls in. I'm having a hard time finding numbers though so please correct me or add numbers if you can find them.