RangerScience

Yep yep, that's the whole "sharp knives" thing.

What I advise (and aim for) is only pulling out the sharp knives for "library" code, but application code should stay "simple" (and this much more easily navigable). Otherwise you can absolutely make a bloody mess!

Every language prioritizes something (or somethings) because every language was made by a person (or people) with a reason; python and correctness; Java and splitting up work; Go and something like "simplicity" (not that these are the only priorities for each language). As another comment points out, Matz prioritized developer happiness.

My favorite example of this is the amazing useful and amazing whack Ruby array arithmetic; subtraction (`arr1 - arr2`) is element-wise removal, but addition (`arr1 + arr2`) is a simple append. These are almost always exactly what you want to do when you reach for them, but they're completely "incorrect" mathematically.

Location: Los Angeles

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: N/A (Remote)

Technologies: Rails, React, Javascript, Ruby, Terraform, AWS

Email: nicktbarone@gmail.com

Senior/staff level full stack developer. Open to most things, but looking particularly for consulting/contracting and coaching opportunities; have a bunch of juniors? A couple hours a week of expert advice is a serious force-multiplier, everything from simple unblocking / getting heads on straight to 'oh, there's an existing feature for that'.

AFAIK, the issue isn't finding that $10/mo; although I'd still definitely agree that financial education is underestimated; I'd certainly love to have had a lot more! But, AFAIK -

The issue is when something goes wrong, and you have to choose between the gas bill and mom's meds. And then you need to choose between saving that $10/mo for retirement, or for emergencies; or taking what's been saved out of the retirement fund (if that's even possible) because, well, an emergency.

Had a colleague have to sell some (most?) of their BTC at $100 to make some student loan payments. As an example.

Horray!

Also:

- Wow but the moon is 3D. Like, when we see shots of Earth, the ground always looks so flat, but the depth of the craters and the heights of the ridges is really, really amazing to see

- ...KSP did a really good job mimicking the real thing

Would that then mean that the historical practice of red-lining is a “woke” practice, since it injected race and identity preferences into a program?

a) doesn’t track with how many Tesla chargers there are (and how quickly and frequently they’ve been being built over the last decade)

b) considering how many fires have been started by power lines… yeah, please regulate

This hits so many feels, and so... effectively. The corporate speak. The callousness. The vapid emptiness. The confusion.

The confusion - that this thing that seems like it should be excellent, isn't, and is in fact damaging - that's a sign of gaslighting, of being convinced to ignore or dismiss your own sense of reality.

When we're in these situations, we do know something's wrong, but we doubt; that it's wrong enough, that the wrongness matters, that the wrongness is worthwhile.

When you know it's wrong enough, you quit. When you know the wrongness is worthwhile, you don't have the dazed malaise. When you doubt your sense of reality, the reality you sense... crumbles.

Hmm! I wonder if there’s then a way to bundle something like ViewComponents as WASM, and use them as a React replacement?

"If you met an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. If you meet assholes all day, you're the asshole." (or, something close to that)

> What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

Welp.

I think of this as “humanist” sci-fi; which has heavy overlap with “golden era” SF.

Other authors I’d put in this category are Gene Roddenberry (TOS and TNG, particularly), Asimov, PKD, Vonnegut and Theodore Sturgeon.

Personally - fantasy stories are “and-then” stories, SF are “what-if”. Humanist sci-fi is then asking “what-if” about very human things, as opposed to technological things, although the two are always related.

However, practically speaking, literature vs sci-fi vs fantasy (vs young adult!) are more marketing cohorts than anything else; what kind of people buy what kind of books?

It’s back?

I intend to! And to wrap it in a gem; I’ve got it partly there, but it’s a currently a mess as I ran into a bunch of “oh that didn’t actually work” problems at various points. I’ll post a link later…

Edit: Ach, sorry - it's going to be awhile, when I went to roll my own I did it inside my project, so it's not even close to being available as a gem :/

FYI - There's some neat ways you can embed React components inside Rails templates. Basically - embed the props in a template-managed `script` tag, and use Stimulus to mount the react code, passing in the props read from the DOM. Now your React is pure state-to-view, no need to synchronize anything, - it's really just a handful of React components instead of a full React app.

That said, AFAICT, there's just two advantages:

1. Those annoying little UX doohickeys that actually DO want that level of interactivity

2. You can use any of the vast library of existing React components (for me, that's been react_big_calendar)

As a bonus (and, why I rolled my own, since `react_on_rails` doesn't support these), and with a bit of tweaking:

1. It plays nicely with Turbo. I can use Turbo to update my React props and it just... works.

2. You can embed a template as a child of the React component.

2a. This also plays nice with Turbo.

It sounds a little screwy, but so far it's working well, and it feels like it lets me use the right tool for the right job - aka, Rails for everything except the stuff with extremely high interactivity.

Survival of the fittest is the flawed quote, usually used by those with supremacist conceptual frameworks (that there can be an objective “better”, etc). This shows up a lot in fiction, where the quote is used as justification for cruelty, atrocities, and the like.

IMHO, the much better quote is:

> It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.

See https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/people/about-darwin/six-thin...

All of "wokeness", "social justice", etc, when you look at the "forest not the trees" ends up pretty simple:

One group of people is saying: "This hurts, please stop", to which the other group says: "No".

So the first goes back to the drawing board to come up with reasons, theories, explanations, convincing arguments... and you get things like critical race theory, systemic *isms, etc.

That's pretty much it. Sure, there's other bits in there - about accomplishing the "stop", or about handling emotions around blame, or about handling your own hurt, etc - but, at the end of the day?

It's really just people saying "this hurts, please stop", and what forms around the response when the response is "No".

Ah! You’re correct, thank you for the correction. I’ve been LADWP for so long I forgot the rest of the area was SCE.

I have a friend who does power pole inspection, and boy, the stories. Infra is crumbling.

I think city? Which for me is LA itself. Pacific Palisades and Altadena would be different cities, and yes, from the maps the burn areas are public land.

The last batch of fires were, AFAIK, caused by under-maintained PG&E infrastructure. I would not be surprised if it turns out these were, too.

Yeah because those are where the money’s going.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pg%26e+profits

AFAIK most of the fires in recent years have been started by PG&E power lines.

AFAIK, just the shrubs. Particularly, California native trees are fine for and in fires. And if you look at the pictures, the houses have burned but the trees haven’t.

LA homeowner here. My backyard is also an undeveloped (re: “natural” hillside).

I’m responsible for clearing brush in that hillside, so that it’s n-hundred feet from structures. It’s checked in May, or thereabouts.

> similar cases

Can you provide specific citations?

And.. normally, I might ask that for argumentative reasons, but… sitting here, south of Pasadena, I really want things to look at to understand what this might do to the place I live.

Right now it’s my understanding that this is yet another once-in-a-lifetime disaster. I think our generation is at… five of these, at least?

> Oh Noooos, the world will end :)

reads this from Southern Californa

Legit.

I went to college with him, but we didn’t know each other well. Talked Ruby and “does it scale” once, he had what’s still one of my favorite comments - something along the lines of: “Ruby is easy to write, and so it’s also easy to rewrite. You don’t need to worry so much about getting it right the first time.”

I think you raise an excellent point, and can use your point to figure out how it could apply in this case.

All the tools that are stirrups were used "by the horse" (you get what I mean); that implies to me that so long as the AI tools are used by the programmers (what we've currently got), they're stirrups.

The steam engines were used by the people "employing the horse" - ala, "people don't buy drills they buy holes" (people don't employ horses, they move stuff) - so that's what to look for to see what's a steam engine.

IMHO, as long as all this is "telling the computer what to do", it's stirrups, because that's what we've been doing. If it becomes something else, then maybe it's a steam engine.

And, to repeat - thank you for this point, it's an excellent one, and provides some good language for talking about it.

Fav anecdote from ages ago:

When hand-held power tools became a thing, the Hollywood set builder’s union was afraid of this exact same thing - people would be replaced by the tools.

Instead, productions built bigger sets (the ceiling was raised) and smaller productions could get in on things (the floor was lowered).

I always took that to mean “people aren’t going to spend less to do the job - they’ll just do a bigger job.”

> clean enough

Los Angeles after it rains (scrubs the air clean) and during the pandemic (drastically less traffic) was stunning. So, no, at least here, we’re not “clean enough”.