draklor40

This expectations will mostly end up circumventing certain principles, because to keep with such expectations, firms will have to find various hacks and compromises. FB would not have achieved its growth for example, without providing advertisers with personal information of users.

There is no natural entity that can keep growing exponentially forever, unless it is cancerous cells. And we all know what happens to a body infested with such cancerous cells.

Makes it easy to understand the reasoning behind a lot of decisions.

"Concerned "Parents" are worried that video games might cause kids to become violent murderers kind. "

This is just mainstream media and their lackeys blowing up things out of proportion just to prevent Signal from getting popular.

and I also remember reading that they had to reverse-engineer the designed and build their own CAD models because they couldn't re-build the situation (and it looks like a lot of customization was done to each engine). But my overall point still stands, IMO. They couldn't just rebuild it , just because they had the plans.

Fact Check 2: Last I checked I can still download/clone repos anonymously, from public repos; My point is , this can very quickly reverse. It won't take a lot of time for Github (and others) to add restrictions under any excuses to restrict anonymity.

Just like how it took one Apple and only a couple of years to make an entire industry almost completely eschew 3.5mm jacks for seeming no good reason (One excuse was waterproofing, but my s7 had a 3.5mm jack and was still IP67 rated).

Imagine if ifixit.org was de-platformed, because they were providing repair guides that was "illegal" from Apple/Google's perspective. Sure, as users we would rally behind ifixit because to us, the user's, ifixit's cause is noble. But, can you actually force Apple to reverse their decision, when it doesnt work out for your benefit ? If they don't , do you have an immediate alternative, that works for you, before your or ifixit goes out of business ?

I do not defend Parler or the people on it either. What happened was not a civilized thing. The whole point of rule of law is that society doesn't succumb to rule of the jungle

Should Parler be banned ? I don't know. A big chunk of me leans towards the answer yes.

But this very answer scares me. Who am I, in a civilized, nation state, with a legislative, executive, govt. , to decide who has a voice and who doesn't ? And even if I do , who checks my powers ? What stops me from doing the unethical, the incorrect and the evil ?

What I wanted to focus was, not on Parler (it was my prompt for ideas washing around in my head for a while), but on the sheer amount of centralized power and authority in the hands of Big Tech, at the moment. Wikileaks was the wakeup call. It showed how much financial, media and technological clout Big Tech has and how effectively they operate in conjunction with the government.

Social media unshackled the voices of the normal people from the dependence of print and TV. It made the system of checks and balances more approachable for the common. I fear that Big Tech is now becoming the very same villain that they wanted to liberate the common man from.

And it scares me.

spec , IMHO, seemed oriented towards validating properties and values in maps, as Hickey mentions in his talk, it is all about manipulating data.

Spec is opt-in. unless you are working with code that has already been spec-ed , you will run into the same problem that TS + JS interop has.

I found spec a little too intrusive (especially the namespaced keywords) and sometimes I wasn't sure what it was meant for, TBH.

In my first company, it was a bunch of cowboy programmer that didn't really care about typing the codebases, too cool to write unit tests and simply wrote enough end-to-end tests cases to solve the problem. I was just starting out and had NO idea on what was good programming practice.

In the second firm , we had used schema to type the codebase partially and it worked. But the type checks weren't compile time , but rather during unit tests and when running with type-checking enabled (I think this is the same for spec as well)

I think the advantage of TS comes from the static types (+ checking). You get immediate feedback before you can even compile it into javascript.

Having worked with Clojure for 4 years, and a JS (ES6 and +) codebase, static typing is amazing.

There are far fewer bugs at runtime because of incorrectly setting or forgetting to set keys in a map or a property or accidentally passing the wrong value to the property. Yes, interop with JS is a little messy, because of the dynamic nature of JS, but a large class of errors can be significantly reduced by Typescript.

As for the argument , unit tests can catch most of the problems Typescript solves, my counter is that

It reduces the amount of tests you need, to check getter/setters,types etc SIGNIFICANTLY. You can focus your unit tests on the more functional aspects than having to worry about basic property access.

All high-level languages have a learning curve. I don't expect to pick up the nuances and all the little bits of Typescript in a matter of weeks or months.It might even take years, but I think Typescript and its experimentation with providing a well typed Frontend interface is amazing !

Kevin Schwantz and Wayne Rainey were 2 epic motorcyclists in the 90s. Schwantz had more individual wins, but it was Rainey that had more championships titles, because he was more consistent in his races and made fewer mistakes (Even Schwantz admits this in an interview)

The browser platforms are a total mess. An insane number of APIs, a combinatorial explosion of what feature is supported on what platform. And web applications move fast. REAL fast. Features are rolled out in days, fixes in hours and frameworks come and go out of fashion in weeks. It is no longer possible for devs to keep up with this tide of change and they seem to end up resorting to do libraries for even trivial tasks, just to get around this problem of fancy APIs and their incorrect implementation and backwards compatibility. And needless to say, every dependency comes with its own burden.

Web platforms are kinda a PITA to work with. On one hand Chrome/Google wants to redefine the web to suit their requirements and FF, the only other big enough voice really lags in terms of JS performance. Most devs nowadays end up simply testing on Chrome and leaving it at that. My simple browser benchmarks show anywhere between 5-30% penalty in performance for FF vs Chrome.

Unless we slow down the pace of browser API changes and stop releasing a new version of JS every year and forcing developers to adopt them, I guess slow web will be here to stay for a while.

If sycophancy is what it takes to get promoted, the real criteria is sycophancy and not technical merit. There are no incompetent managers being promoted, only good/bad values (again, depends on the perspective of the lower rung employee), in the company.

Had plenty of back pain while running. Havent had any back related issues since I started weightlifting.

Weightlifting FTW

If you are reading for pleasure, then so long as you are pleased, any number is fine.

If you read for knowledge, you should be able to see if you have any chances of applying the knowledge to your life. Unused knowledge is at best, useless, at worst, dangerous (too many valueless thoughts taking by brain CPU cycles). I used to read ~30 books a year. Only read 10 books last year. This year it might even be fewer. But each and every book I read adds value to the fields I am focused on (history, religion and a little bit of non, pop sci fiction).