cdogl

I find this quite surprising! What benefit does your org accrue by mandating that the db instance used for testing is centralised? Where I am, the tests simply assume that there’s a database available on a certain port. docker-compose.yml makes it easy to spin this up for those so inclined. At that stage it’s immaterial whether it’s running natively, or in docker, or forwarded from somewhere else. Our tests stump up all the data they need and tear down the db afterwards. In contrast, I imagine that a dev k8s cluster requires some management and would be a single point of failure.

I don’t think you are naive - it’s counter-intuitive. The political context is important: Ukraine is incentivised to portraying itself as a country that respects international law and norms. The fact of life is that this includes respecting civil contracts made in good faith. This moral high ground has a cost.

I read it as simple humbleness, which is not too surprising given the careful management of the project and the tone of the piece.

That sounds like an awful workplace culture. I doubt the name of the git command is responsible, though.

One option for those so inclined is to cryptographically sign commits with a key that lists both work and personal email address (assuming your enterprise’s policy allows it). The employer retains control but you have a claim to credit for your work.

My personal experience is yes. Hardware provides a substrate of reality, and software developers are asked to implement aspirations.

> FTA: "While many games are playable, newer AAA titles don’t hit 60fps yet."

You’re lucky to get 60fps playing a fairly undemanding game on MacOS, even on hardware that is otherwise a dream.

For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 is barely playable on my M3 MacBook Pro at well below native resolution with all settings turned down. It’s a brilliant game but hardly cutting edge graphically.

Without universal suffrage I think the comparison between modern democracies and these examples is apples and oranges. The voters in Rome and Sparta were a small elite, so their “democracy” is more like a novel form of power sharing in an otherwise bog standard system.

When GP said “most”, I interpreted it more broadly. Most applications simply do not require the guarantees of a non-GC language. When you expand that horizon, list of contenders becomes considerably larger - even when restricted to statically typed languages.

Competitive games are unlikely to reach the market share necessary for a competitive gaming tournament if their casual scene is inundated with cheaters. Only a tiny handful of games even have a viable competitive scene.

I’ll take some police briefly on my property over that gamble any day.

For me personally, if I hated my boss, I’d be even less likely to follow their bizarre and probably unlawful instructions.

You’re not wrong, but in Australia where I work only 12.5% of all workers are in unions. We have some moderately union-hostile legislation (strikes are hard to pull off lawfully) but nothing preventing union organisation in principle for most workers. So evidently it’s not only software developers who think this way.

A developer who knows the code and will own the consequences can review and merge it - easy. Just not sure why the LLM needed to get involved in the first place.

I remember seeing you at GolandSyd meetups before you took over running them. Nice job!

The Embodied Mind is a very influential work for me. Its premise that our experience can be understood by a synthesis between cognitive science and insights rooted in Buddhist practice really stuck with me. It is science for everyone.

The simply binary of government or individual choice eliminates the middle ground where almost all change happens: the collective aggregate result of cultural change within the community. We don’t have to pick one extreme to change the world!

As someone who doesn’t live in LA: I can’t imagine what your freeways are like given your characterisation of an ordinary road. Our “freeways” max out at 4-5 lanes each way. From what I can tell, getting from A to B is a stressful full time job for the people of your good city.

Anyone with 2% denisovan DNA has an ancestor who was 50% denisovan! I remain astounded.

Many humans carry Neanderthal and Denisovans DNA. We are hybrids. I find that inspiring, not sad.

There’s enough discord and conflict within one hominid species to go around for me!

Cognitive science. “The Embodied Mind”[1] defines embodiment quite clearly and argues for its centrality to consciousness.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262220422/

Your comment was an excellent synthesis of the discussion that preceded it - thank you.

Distress also has a short passage explaining the collapse of the collapse of CBDs and inflation of the suburban property market and cost of living due to remote work, set in an area of suburban Sydney that’s now not far off Egan’s predictions. Few hard science fiction authors of recent decades can pull that off, as the 21st century has shown that our 20th century science fiction tropes are either already here (computing and networking revolution, hydrogen bombs, DNA sequencing) or will likely not materialise for centuries (space colonisation, mind uploading). Egan has a talent for speculating about little details of life that illustrate a very different world.

It’s not an easy read, but Blindsight by Peter Watts has some equally unique and compelling synthesis of scientific concepts into a big concept plot.

Egan is the only great Australian science fiction writer I’m aware of. I principally recommend Diaspora for far future post-human history with a strong focus on physics and maths, and Quarantine which is a sort of heist thriller with a unique quantum physics hook in a relatively near future Northern Australia setting where First Nations people have gained independence and positioned themselves as an Asian financial / biotech hub.

Egan’s prose, characterisation and plotting are often weak, but almost every page has a new creative concept.

> I would find one of these computers and click around until I got a Best Viewed In badge. (It was often on the Help page.) That would bypass the restrictions of the single-site browser and take you to e.g. netscape.com, where you could find a link to a search engine and browse wherever you wanted.

I’m not familiar with a “Best Viewed In” badge and I am intrigued as to how this bypass worked (based on my own 2000s high school experiences of working around restrictions). Would appreciate if any passersby could elaborate.

> The Berlin-founded company has maintained its relevance by embracing a simple ethos: come as you are. That’s made SoundCloud the for-everybody platform—one that embraces all genres, sexualities, religions, and definitions of music and art. By setting itself up as a hub for community-oriented music streaming, it’s become a kind of incubator for avant-garde sounds. SoundCloud is everybody’s underground.

I find this kind of politicised editorialising from publications like Wired quite tiring. I have many acquaintances who produce EDM and I was on Soundcloud from 2012 or so. They never saw it in these terms. Of _course_ a platform for hosting your music tracks isn’t exclusive to a particular race, religion or ethnicity. Can anyone name a counter-example in music for whom that’s not the case, outside of obscurity? Or indeed any comparable tech platform?

Some seem to have decided that being neither sexist, racist nor homophobic in your banal business offerings is a revolutionary development from the past decade or two.

I find this title highly contentious. No drug or treatment is a magic band-aid for complex trauma and a journey toward fulfilment.

Indeed - I’ve seen this refrain about “systems programming” countless times. I’m not sure how one can sustain the argument that a “system” is only an OS kernel, network stack or graphics driver.

Well put, but:

> even going as far as saying the employer does not have to deduct dues for members (who have agreed to it) pay

I'm surprised you frame this as an extreme example. Regardless of one's views on unions (they have their place), it seems way off for the employer to deduct those payments. Perhaps it's a convenience, but as a worker that is my money to pay to the union; if the union and the employer orchestrate the transfer of my membership payment behind closed doors before the money hits my account, it's makes it harder to feel the union is truly acting in my interests.

This is not just a matter of hygiene; for example, I was once in a (notoriously corrupt and socially reactionary) union here in Australia that represents retail workers. I didn't have a choice in the matter and my membership payments were deducted by my employer. About a decade later, a court ruled that a deal made between that employer and the union had left workers worse off (but was in the interests of the union bureaucracy). Incidents like this seriously damage the reputation of the union movement.

Having your dues deducted automatically in an environment of compulsory unionism doesn't seem to have much to do with empowering workers at all!