danabrams

Julia Evans's writing is just so much fun.

That was my first thought, reading this. Although it’s almost like a combination of lisp, self/smalltalk and prolog, with OTP being the innovation.

The automaker cycle - Focus on adding value for the customer, gain dominance, milk it for all it's worth financially, drop precipitously, complain about how Toyota is beating you in the market.

I’m a chatGPT skeptic, but willing to admit this is true… but only because most physicians aren’t very good.

Not for me but for my dad. He has a giant vinyl collection from his teenage years at his country cabin in Vermont.

I hooked a raspberry pi zero up to it about 7-8 years ago, and streamed the audio to a custom app on an iPhone, so he could play a record and listen to it anywhere in the house or even outside while cutting wood.

The hard part was making a nice vector animation of a record player that animated based on the state of the playback.

"So I think what happened is computing has turned into pop culture" -Alan Kay

I love conferences, but I also loved other types of clearly pop-cultural conferences, and that's what they are.

I used to make a living producing livestreams for these kinds of conferences and they're all about passionate geeks coming together to build connections over the current latest trends.

They are about bonding over either rejecting the values of "the establishment" in your area of interest, or of simply examining how "new pop idea X" fits into the set of values your community is currently built around.

So they are about community building around a set of values, often trying to set themselves apart from the mainstream. Nothing wrong with that.

This is why I don't think AI will be as world changing as many believe. If it just replaces human thought more inexpensively, we already have a technology that does that called outsourcing, and it has mixed results.

The breakthrough of Edison in the case of the light bulb is less the filament (which he did try thousands of materials for) but the innovations: 1. He figured out that the filament wouldn’t immediately burn out in a vacuum 2. Built machinery to blow glass to the right shape and form the vacuum inside (so he figured out how to make the glass on an industrial scale) 3. Most importantly, figured out how to build a commercially viable system of power generation and distribution in Manhattan so his bulbs would be of use.

Yes he worked incrementally. He also invented ways to manufacture and create markets for his novel inventions.

I took a refactoring class where we used scratch and it was a lot of fun.

I now have a 5-month old and I can't wait to introduce him to scratch jr in a few years.

Even if the problems get reported, this helps the CEO get insight into how to prioritize fixing them, how much to invest in doing so, etc.

All companies have politics. What you’re describing is the difference between the messy politics of having to convince others vs the easy politics of telling everyone what to do.

But dictatorships don’t have nearly as good a performance record as democracies, despite their “efficient” politics.

The kind of communication we’re talking about is heavily two-way and dependent on the previous signal. Each individual signal is low in content, so the biggest determinant of throughout is latency.

Remind of this Steve Jobs quote:

“This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features.”

Talking about 3rd parties, but the same problems seem to be limiting the cross-platform Catalyst system as well.

SwiftUI seems like a better approach if only because Apple is trying to make it a unified platform, instead of abstracting on top of two different platforms.

I’ve written quite a bit of elm professionally and it was an issue for me and was a contributing factor (but not sole factor) to leaving Elm behind.

A viable solution to my problem in professional contexts would have been private packages, which I believe Gren supports, so perhaps Gren would be a solution today, but I’ve moved on. That said, what’s happening with Gren is interesting and I applaud it.

Based on this thread and many others, one thing’s for sure, Elm was polarizing!

The type system is not sound… that is there are things which the type checker cannot prove.

Not that the languages themselves are unsound.

Haven't the big tech firms mostly had their share prices drop precipitously in the past 12 months. Shouldn't the CEOs be fired if they not only failed to make shareholders money, but in fact lost lots and lots of money for them?

And over the last 12 months, most of the CEOs have lost lots and lots of investor money as share prices collapsed, yet they still have their jobs

And over the last 12 months, most of the CEOs have lost lots and lots of investor money as share prices collapses, yet they still have their jobs

Is remote work a tool? It saved me waaaay more than 30 minutes a day. And those were unpaid hours too.

Wile E. Coyote’s problem was that he was too smart for his own good. His plans were intricate and too clever-by-half, they needed weeks of planning and sophisticated, usually untested equipment.

Those spies are going to know I burned the roast!

He gets to learn from his mistake while 28% of his company is held accountable for the company’s lack of productivity. What’s so complicated about that?

My experience is that you can find developers who are 10x as productive as their peers, but rarely at the same company. That is, the average engineer at company A is 10x as productive as the average at company B.

I don’t have data on it—it could be hiring or compensation—but I suspect it’s simply systems of work that spend more time focusing on the right problems, in the right way, without slowing down the work.

But my larger point to the original comment was that wwii may have had an order of magnitude more causalities, but it also came with at least one order of magnitude more disruption. My own grandfather lost over a year of his life to POw camp and walked with a limp for the remain 77 years of his life. His family that were still in Europe on the other hand were systematically rounded up and murdered, their property confiscated, first by the Germans then by the soviets. But he was proud to have made the sacrifices he did to stop fascism in its tracks.

Let me clear that I’m not saying all of the govt actions that took liberties away in wwii were justified or helpful or good. Japanese internment is one of the clearest examples of paranoia that was destructive and did not help the war effort.

But many other actions, from curfews, to govt planning of the economy, a draft, collective bomb shelters in London, etc, clearly did help preserve life and Liberty in the long term.

There are any number of cases in our society where we decide that you can’t just decide what you want to do because your behavior has consequences on others.

You can’t speed 65mph through red lights, for instance. In public spaces, or with actions that can’t be contained, many of your choices have consequences for me, so I get to have a say.

During WWII, in the place least impacted (USA) there were substantial, government imposed interruptions to daily life and business: government mandates on production, rationing, a military draft, curfews, the literal internment of Japanese Americans.

Of course, these interruption were tiny compared to those of life in England or France or other battlefields of the the war. There’s an entire genre of literature and film devoted to lives ripped apart by the interruption of World War II.

The lesson of WWII isn’t that we never need to impose individual sacrifice, but rather that the preservation of our liberty requires deep collective sacrifice on occasion, and to work to protect it not just for ourselves but for our friends who by virtue of luck are in a worse situation than we are.

In some states (perhaps even most or all) this is true. It is your legal responsibility to drive a safe enough distance to the car in front so you can avoid collision always if they stop short for any reason.

This article nails it, but I still like microservices because I’ve yet to see a team doing a modular architecture in memory keep from creating a spaghetti mess of interdependence.

Yes, the same often happens in microservices, but the extra complexity of a distributed system provides a slightly stronger nudge to decouple that means some teams at the margin do achieve something modular.

I’m something of a skeptic on modular monoliths until we as an industry adopt practices that encourage decoupling more than we currently do.

Yes, in theory they’re the same as microservices, without the distributed complexity, but in practice, microservices provide slightly better friction/incentives to decouple.