carl_sandland

It's nice having access to specialty magazines like Edge, APC, PLAY etc and the newspaper coverage is nice (The Australian, WSJ). The various 'feed' topics work reasonably well. There are some problems:

1. The (MacOS) reader app is not great when it comes to text readability, it's still awkward zooming around (some mags are just PDFs). I always feel a bit claustrophobic when using it.

2. It would be nice to be able to rotate the view 90 degrees to show more of a page at once (see above).

3. It would be nice to lose the damn adds (I'm paying after all): it's usually horrible AI image crap.

I'm always on the fence though, the 'free' version isn't THAT bad and $20/month is on the high side.

Some complexity is inherent to the problem, but most seems to be incidentally introduced by the realities of deployment (non-functional), configuration (functional) and chaos monkeys (users). There is a particular 'breed' of incidental complexity I see with space cadets and front end developers for sure. Complexity is complex lol.

Why can't we use some sort of metadata tagging system instead? Isn't this what the person is indirectly trying to do: declare some simple tags, such as "US politics", but indirectly via a bunch of garbage fed into an auto-tagger?

I keep safari "unblocked" just for this kind of scenario, as sometimes the blocking breaks stuff I want to see that doesn't work otherwise. It's becoming rarer for sure over time. Didn't mean to impinge on safari, it's a great browser that I use for work.

thanks for the interesting read, one amusing thing: I went to the site and "where is the adds?", then I remembered I'm using a add-hardened firefox to view it ;) Sure enough using safari showed me the horror. Serious question: why do we put up with this as readers?

a bit of velcro on the battery attached to the rear of the strap? that should balance it out a bit.

I don't think the problems are intentional, rather they are the unforeseen outcomes of rapid technological and societal evolution, of man leaving faith behind and discovering themselves insufficient. This only seems to be accelerating.

partly ;) I do seriously wonder if our brains are just overloaded, the rest was various conspiracies I come across (what gave it away, the communists?)

The answer you're looking for is that woke culture arrived. Your God is not dead, you've just abandoned him (again). Social media is obviously a catalyst for patterns of communicated harm that have always been around. The communists have been unraveling the nucleus of family and faith, to be replaced with isolated rage and hate, with government to provide 'proxy support', whereas once was family. We've been divided into us vs them teams on issues that used to bring harmony and coherence.

Damn, maybe there is just too many people now? and we're all connected all the time. The brain can only handle so much (much less than I think we admit).

what about AWX then? it moved from shipping as a simple docker compose to a kubernetes operator! I'd much rather it didn't.

Can great, quality software come out of a group of 'mediocre' people? I think you'll find that you do indeed need a strong(er) process and set of rules to follow, that's fine but not always applicable.

I think you need to tailor each group and their process carefully, depending on available talent pools and the complexity of the work being attempted, and sometimes you will need active management of requirements to achieve better outcomes. If your process grows faster than the core coding team does, you probably do have a negative process jerk happening you need to disrupt.

Maybe you'll get better results by not calling people 'mediocre' to start with, as if that's anything but a hateful subjective label.

I wonder if there is potential to combine generative AI with low code approaches, where the non-coder would work with the AI on a higher order description of the problem (data, states, events) and the AI could generate the MVP code. It kind of seems that is the relationship we human coders have at the moment with non-coders. Maybe all those UML diagrams can finally be used as inputs.

Great book and great memories, now get off my lawn.

I'd love a book in similar spirit, targeting say OSx/Metal, that started from first principles and built a 3d (flight|space) sim, in a fun language (simple C++). And yeah that means a blank screen, then some lines, then a triangle... etc. I'd take a series of followup books adding more to engine, perhaps targeting different styles of games and their engine tradeoffs.

I guess it would be hard to decide between software/hardware rendering, as software would just teach so much.

The market often doesn't know what it wants until it taste's something. I'm wary of any true 'formula' for creating art. It must be hard for artists to be heard (ironically given our digital age). Patreon is a good model?

Getting a bit triggered by all this "lonely adult" type language, some of us (maybe more than a few) are alone for "reasons", we might even have more cash because of that. There is no stigma/shame attached to living alone, at least I didn't really think there was. To catch this attitude, on hackernews of all places, is a bit inelegant imho.

I will grant you the cognitive dissonance though of Apple of all companies making the ultimate bachelor toy.

Do you really need to hug your kids or throw things at the dog whilst in the middle of a code flow or devops nightmare (or whatever focused work is your poison) ? Until some chick turns up and suddenly falls in love with me, maybe I can use that cash on this thing lol.

This does seem to be targeted at people being remote/isolated/alone; they probably could have saved some time and not bothered with those eyes and the virtual avatar stuff.

Maybe implementations have much less value than has been assumed and paid for by stakeholders over the decades. If code is a throw-away implementation detail of some model/abstraction then why are we getting paid so much money again? Really makes me worry about generative AI approaches; just as well there is no universal very high level modelling language everyone loves yet. I think this is why working on games is nice; it's not technical debt it's just a toy, maybe everything is.

Our cathedrals are surely [L,U]inux and the C programming language, HTML has done pretty well too.

I mean I'm kind of shocked we're still getting away with WFH at all; it was just a blip in time and will be gone within 5-10 years entirely. There are very few pure software roles that don't require high-bandwidth, interactive, in-person communications. Simply from a political view, those who are in the office more, by definition, are winning (politics is people).

would complete code coverage from tests of this line found the problem, or was it temporal somehow ?

There's no such thing as 'technical debt', just call it crap code (or a 'hack') and face the impacts of having to live with it. Its been my experience that these things get logged to Jira as 'medium' or 'low' and then of course never get looked at again, and if they ever get opened up its likely the code has moved on. This leads to the following idea;

1. code the MVP the customer accepts (customer is happy) 2. go ahead and create all the debt tickets (makes you feel professional) 3. every xmas just delete all non-high tickets older than 12 months.

If the code is shit enough, it will die a natural death (most of today's wiring type code has very short TTL anyways) Similar to "if a tree falls in the forest...", "If a customer doesn't notice...". We do so many 'invisible', 'hard' things in our line of work, it's almost an impossibly thankless road to build quality into our systems.

I think I may mean open-source, which is not really a coop. I guess a small start-up with like minded people is pretty damn identical. The coop part implies the lack of a profit motive though; just smart people solving problems with non-economic outcomes (merit).

I empathize and completely agree; I like the distinction made between programming and 'software engineering'; the latter is all pure fantasy driven by the profit motive. I think we've been too nice to capitalists and need to reclaim our hobby from the evil. I'd so like to work in a well organized coop of some sort, on interesting challenges, damn the profit motive.

And agile can go burn in hell, however 'correct' you are doing it.

To think that the decades of email suffering finally ended with... slack. Now I look back at those email driven times with relative fondness. Slack is being used to drive multiple, concurrent SYNCHRONOUS discussions. Left unchecked, none of us will survive in-tact !

I will admit to loving it sometimes (being jacked in) but it always leads to burnout.

I think that low code has some promising application areas, just not building operational systems; 1. As a requirements gathering (business prototype?) tool (the outcome is a spec used to develop the real system). 2. As a 'leverage' tool to magnify experienced coders time. 3. As a 'partial' core in an operational system written by coders (the business engine), but that's just rules based and has been around for ages.

Drag and dropping boxes with arrows for a fully operational system? yeah haven't we already being trying this for decades, quite unsuccessfully? I'm more intrigued by the idea of using AI to generate acceptable boilerplate crap (eg CRUD crap) and still think very high level languages has potential (small, focused DSL).

A lot of frustrated, abused coders here in the threads, I feel it to.

With regards to short term work; It does seem like the barrier of entry for shorter term contract work can be dramatically lower than with full-time "join our cult" scenarios. My personal pet peave is when smaller companies seem to go broke in the middle of an interview process, I guess it's for the best lol.

Apologies if this is a bit daft, I just experimented with Java/Clojure interop and I think most people here are talking about Clojure/Java interop: note the different order. I built a Java 'application' that uses Java's rich libraries to handle all the "I/O stuff and interactions", and called out via clojure.api to a clojure functional core. This seemed to work very well.. But I can see this means learning two languages (not 1.5). Just wondering if many people do this?

Get the Java code to collect a bunch of abstract data values and feed it into the functional core, which is pure clojure with very few libraries at all.

lol i thought you meant that bizzare c/c++ windows variable naming pattern.

lpwszSomeName

This is a fascinating, complex topic. Why are a group of very clever, smart people spending ANY energy on giving each other high-school level report cards? Why does one of our best ever tech companies become focused on everything but the customer ? I'd like to think they are dumb but c'mon, they are not dumb people.

It doesn't mean I can't feel sad and deeply upset at this is what it takes to 'succeed' at a company I have honest admiration for.

BUT; I've been researching this 'problem'; which boils down to "is a hierarchical management structure needed" for a group of 'activists' to achieve great things? So far I have found no alternatives, why do we have to keep track of our 'success' and relative worth so intensely so share the pie around?

as the top responses says; everyone needs to chill out and I'd add "try to be nice and do no harm".

The only point I have to add is that as someone who wants to not participate and does not care what "level" they rank; f### off?

There are times I feel that "there are no real requirements" is the most accurate description. At least, not in the form that developers can actually start to craft a quality running system from. It's all requirements theater; there is nothing specific about it and it's impossible to achieve a linear mapping from high level thought bubbles down to an if branch or error check.

Really; a lot of what I work on day to day can be summarized as 'this thing over there needs to be better, or maybe pink'.

Can't give up though; I'd encourage the author to follow their instincts towards prototyping tools. The quicker you have a running system the user can 'feel' (as the author puts it), the closer you are to a shippable outcome.

And yeah PM's are useless wastes of space, but I'm glad they are there to help the rest of us ineffectually get the next Frankenstein up and limping.

Really interesting discussion here; it's heartening to feel the underlying desire by commentators to find effective moral principles. It strikes me that what we have now has evolved into an economic/money system that is complex, dynamic and probably the "least worst" we can achieve. We do live together in a miracle. I'm happy we still have space for monastic energies to survive.

I do fear the coming resource scarcity and slowing tech adaption rate.

Putting up with crap from all the peripheral people sucking the life out of creating great software. So many self-absorbed, clueless people trying to tell me what to do. If you are great at coding and getting software to work.. BELIEVE in yourself and fight for the code. Don't let social hierarchies dictate your art and it's form. And if you don't think code can be art then maybe do something else.