_hao

I'm very close to returning to the high seas for content... A personal recent anecdote. I wanted to watch Interstellar again a few days ago. Beginning of the previous month I saw it on Prime/Netflix or both (can't remember). A month later when I wanted to actually watch it it was gone from both services... I got really pissed off, but I rented it from Prime, because I wanted to watch it with my family "now".

Your app that does random thing "X" does not need a subscription. Stop. Doing. This. This rent seeking behaviour doesn't pose well for any of us.

Yuck. Definitely not for me. I'll stick with Inconsolata.

Of course. However, that wasn't my point which was that the world won't stop turning if TSMC suddenly vanishes.

> TSMC is dominant in technology AND volume. It chip shortage would be massive. Redesigning everything that has a TSMC chip in it to use something else would be a massive undertaking.

That's true and yet I'd say that's not my problem? The market will be fine. If anything that means more software work for me. New opportunities will arise. People won't buy a new phone every year for a while (which is objectively a good thing!). The M series MacBooks are so good now there's virtually no reason to upgrade to M2 or M3 if you have the M1 (like in my case). I fully expect to use this computer for the next decade. My desktop PC is basically unchanged since I built it in 2016 (+1 extra SSD I've added after, but that was it). The i7-6700K in there is still chugging happily along.

Apple have more than $100 billion of cash at hand. They will be fine no matter what happens. It's not like they didn't change chips before :)

> The first is that people don't recognize how important TSMC is, and how much its hardware powers.

TSMC might be the the best and ahead of everyone in technological sense, but there are enough semiconductor companies worldwide to handle a potential TSMC demise. So what if our hardware stops improving at breakneck speeds (which might happen anyway in the near future..)?

I can argue that would be a good kick in the ass for every software dev that writes shitty bloated code. People like that won't be able to "just add more CPUs" to their problem and they'll have to do some actual engineering again. The state of software dev and performance today is abysmal given the amazing hardware we have.

As an aside every time I come across a Raymond Chen article I remember this post from Joel Spolsky - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...

I remember very distinctly this quote about him:

> The only person in the world who leapt to my defense was, of course, Raymond Chen, who is, by the way, the best programmer in the world, so that has to say something, right?

So in my mind I've made the connection that Raymond Chen = best programmer in the world since then haha.

It irks me that some of the banknote images used in the article are the old ones without the Cyrillic "ЕВРО" on them.

Funnily enough I think recently I had to do something in Rider (the IDE) and everywhere in the file where I had a "g" it got cut off somewhere on the last 1/3 of the letter. It was a visual bug that disappeared after restart, but it also made me notice the "g" in a bit more detail. I attribute this to the fact that of all the Latin letters lowercase "g" is by far.. should I say "fanciest"? I can see how the loop tail variation might seem out of place.

I don't like fonts where the zero has a dot (or nothing). I need to have that slash in my zeroes.

For me nothing can dethrone Inconsolata[0], there's just something elegant about it that I haven't found in other fonts I've tried. Been using it for almost ten years now. Also I don't like ligatures...

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconsolata

Here's a nice article from the VSTS team at Microsoft on trunk-based development - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/release-flow-how-we-do...

This is basically what I do on all of my projects and have put this into place in a couple of companies that I have worked at. Haven't encountered any serious issues and it has offloaded some big problems related to the gitflow madness that preceded it.

Calling Bacon just a mathematician (first sentence of the text) seems quite reductive. Other than that it was an interesting read. I think the Wikipedia page is better - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon

You can use O&O ShutUp10++ to disable all the shit that every update re-enables.

> What’s the job market like? You mean fewer jobs?

Based on my anecdotal data it’s not good. And yes - fewer actual jobs. Last year I did some interviewing throughout the year and it seemed things were picking up to before-COVID level. After I left my previous place last September I got a nice (although short) outside IR35 contract. That finished just before New Year’s. Since then it’s been absolutely dead. Most recruiters are just CV harvesting. A lot of the job ads on LinkedIn, JobServe and others have been put on repeat for months. It seems a lot of companies are waiting for recession and have paused hiring. OR I just have had a bad luck, which is possible of course. It should be noted the financial year has just ended, so that period being Q4 for a lot of companies with uncertain budgets played a part for sure, but time will tell.

> Where would you go next?

There are a couple of options. Have a good friend in Switzerland that can help me out if I go there. Can go back to Bulgaria which has a very healthy IT market or might make the jump across the pond. I haven’t really decided, but I’m thinking on the matter.

I've been based in London since 2018. One thing that I have noticed in the past year (apart from the overall abysmal state of the job market) is that IT salaries have actually went way down. When I moved, I started at a higher salary than what's shown as ranges for a lot of jobs now 5 years later. All London based roles and I'm talking about positions across the board from junior to senior and beyond. That in combination with COVID, inflation, IR35 etc. has wrecked everything. Now, I'm between roles and I'm actually thinking that it might be time to leave.

I do most of my back-end development inside WSL (C#/C++, some JS). There's a way to run GUI Linux apps from WSL as well (for example GitKraken which I use on both Windows and from WSL) which is awesome - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-....

Docker Desktop on Windows has full support inside WSL and integrates seamlessly i.e. can access running containers on your Win install from WSL without issues etc.

One thing I have to highlight is that you shouldn't do dev from WSL inside windows folders (my main work folders are under WSL's /home). File access is very slow, If you want to do that I think you can go for WSL 1, not 2, but I won't bother honestly. Just use WSL2 and do your work on Linux folders.

For Windows I use PowerToys extensively to bring window layouts and stacking the way I want via FancyZones. It's not exactly like the window tiling managers you'll find on Linux, but it does the job well enough.

I've used a Mac in my previous job and it was OK experience. The M1's hardware is truly great (I bought one for myself as well, since I didn't have a laptop at the time) and I like the portability. There are a lot of smaller features that I really like, but the overall experience for development is just not there. I use mostly my desktop setup for dev work. I can attach different machines to my monitor or use picture in picture or side by side (49" ultrawide). Last year I was back on Linux for a few months to see if that was going to be "the year of the Linux desktop" for me. I've done this every year for a few months for the past decade. However, unfortunately yet again I've went back to Windows 10. The same nagging issues with things just randomly stopping working on Linux keep showing up after time. Ten years of the same thing. Windows (with WSL) despite all of its flaws and bullshit seems to be the best OS for development. I find that very sad to be honest.

> 2. Overwhelm myself with positive true thoughts in the same area as negative thoughts so I gorget about the negative ones

I'll use computer analogy for why this is a bad idea (at least it was for me when I did it). That's pushing the problem down the stack and it builds up internal negative pressure. I've done this and it made me even more miserable at the time. You _shouldn't_ mix negative or positive feelings at the same time just like you can't have two distinct things at the same time in the same memory space. In my experience trying to push myself to be positive just made me even more apathetic, depressed and cynical. It just made my internal balance to go to super (-). Having mixed feelings (±) could as well be the definition of deadlock, race condition, halt and catch fire etc. type of thing that happens to us all. It's what leads us to procrastination, dopamine chasing and the effects of those things.

The fix for me was to stop pushing myself and try to find the root for some of my fears, insecurities, previous beliefs. It takes internal work and observation, _NOT RATIONAL ANALYSIS_ to try to reach the roots of your issues. We were emotional beings before we were intelligent. The emotional system is a lower-level system than the intelligent/rational system we employ as modern humans. You should observe your emotional state and when you get there, you'll see that your negative thoughts are really not that of a big deal and they're not you and that they don't define you. If your first point is true and you have understood that, then this step should be relatively easy for you. Once that "clicks" you really do feel a certain feeling of lightness and calmness. It means you've let go of those things that were pressuring you inside. It's not happiness (+), but I'd say it's a pleasant neutral (0) where you take things as they are and have the potential to go on about the things you want.

I won't try to predict the future as far as such ML models will take our jobs or not. However, I'd like to point out to most people that working on and studying fundamentals won't be a time wasted. Even if programming disappears as an employable job, people will still need to understand and learn things. You'll still need to know the math/physics/philosophy/history/literature/art/music etc. It might turn out that it's going to be more important than ever for us to be more confident and strict in our own skills and knowledge. And I'd also suggest to broaden our horizons. We should become good at a couple of different things like the polymaths of old.

IF you have to spend hours debugging ML generated code for something critical you better know exactly what you're doing. If you have to generate a Harry Potter Balenciaga meme video (the whole Balenciaga meme and all the different versions are hilarious btw) you better have some visual/art and musical sense in order to make it funny and engaging.

I think the end of the world is greatly exagarated. We actually have much bigger problems than "AI".

> In areas like this, incidental complexity is the key limit holding us back.

> Once you've reached 100% of the brain's capacity, the only way to "get more out of it" is to waste less of its capacity on non-useful things.

Queue modern day social media... It has its uses, but I feel like the brainrot and lessening of attention span it induces (and not to mention everything else like polarization, cult-like behaviours etc) is basically not worth the small amount of benefit it actually provides.

I feel bad for us devs everywhere if this is the standard that we have to adhere to.

Not to be combative, but I didn't say anything about being smarter or master at web FE and React. My comment was supposed to be seen as more like how @hathawsh read it. It's easy to do work with React if you have a good programming background and it doesn't need that big of an investment of time to go into it.

I'm sure React has it's own intricacies just like every other tool and it takes time to appreciate those. I can see how managing your reconciliation state can become a big hurdle in larger projects for example. I've done WPF, MFC and a lot of other things on native desktop programming and the ideas in React are not that different. Those ideas in the browser context are actually easier to deal with than on a native platform hence my "easy mode" thought.

For context I'm a specialized back-end (but with a lot of experience in desktop GUI/game engine stuff) dev and I also wanted to learn React recently to round off my skills and be more marketable in the job market.

Like yourself I also prefer written docs, but trying to find such structured info was an exercise in futility. At the end I used my existing Pluralsight subscription and went through the React 18 path they have which is around 18 hours or so in total. The courses covered different topics around React like components, hooks, testing etc. Good thing is the courses also have full transcripts! I followed them along and created some small apps myself in the process. Now I'm pretty much sure I can handle working with React in a normal job setting. You might want to consider that option. To be honest FE seems like programming on easy mode compared to some of the things I'm used to working on in my day to day. If you are an experienced programmer you should have no problem getting caught up to speed on that relatively quickly.

Recently I nuked my Reddit account. I didn't delete the actual account, but I purged everything I've posted as a comment or submission in the past 10 years. I don't think it's a loss even for the cases in a thread where I was being helpful to someone. Most interactions, even this comment I'm typing right now should be considered a conversation in a coffee shop or a small convention where the topic at hand that gathered us is the OP link/post. As soon as the convention is done we all go home. Whether we want to remember the conversation and what was said is up to us. Most threads devolve to single-to-single interactions anyways or at most 3 people exchanging ideas in a sub-thread.

In my view these conversations should be ephemeral, but in reality the internet can keep them (barring digital or natural apocalypse) forever. I truly don't think there's value for keeping the vast majority of online interactions stored forever. There are actual physical limits here as well. At some point in the future there might be a case for which types of information has to be stored for future generations and which shouldn't etc.

All of us as humans have some inherent capacity of comprehending and analyzing information. The internet turns out is not like a second brain for us, but more like a crazy neighbor screaming at us at all times.

Maybe I'll nuke my HN account at some point too. Don't get me wrong I've searched old HN/forum/reddit threads to great success, but like I said above, I think we're not capable of handling all that information maturely. Who decides what's useful or not I can't say, but I'm at least responsible for my own comments so I can make that decision for myself.

This makes for a quite compelling case relating to the Casey Muratori video around clean code that made the tech community rounds recently. The developer of SumatraPDF has rolled his own implementations for a lot of things in order to reduce bloat and it shows! The app is lightning fast and does its job perfectly. Wish we had more native projects like that!

Seems to compare quite poorly to GitKraken (which I realize is paid, but it's really good).

I agree with you around VS and I use it all the time. The problem is that Rider for example is the same. I've had the chance to do a project with Rider recently and I have to say performance-wise both VS and Rider are just slow and prone to crashes and random errors. It's true they offer immense power. Debugging and profiling is unmatched in both IDEs. However, what I'd like is a more modular approach in both of them where I can disable certain things to take a load off the dev experience. I'm not sure if their architecture would allow for such a change, but I'd love to see it.

I'm back to my usual VSCode setup now for .NET/C# work, but there even though I have more than 50 extensions, they are all enabled on per-project basis so the experience is pretty light. I still have to boot up VS/Rider from time to time, but it won't be my first choice.

Beautiful machines! Perfect blend of art/design and engineering!

How about we actually create more performant native tools? I'm sick of the trend where we have this beastly hardware and things are actually getting slower and slower with each generation.

One of the very few articles shared on HN that I actually read in full! Great piece!