intergalplan

The actual writing from a lot of the golden age and New Wave sci-fi authors is... OK at best, with a few exceptions (Bradbury's distinctively poetic and dreamlike prose, for example). Tons of modern sci-fi authors write stories with more literary merit, better clarity, better-conveyed action, more believable characters and dialog, and so on. The improvements there are really obvious when reading, say, an early 70s The Hugo Winners or collections of 1950s stories, and then a 90s The New Hugo Winners.

Whether their ideas and worlds stand up to Asimov and company, or happen to be appealing to a particular reader, is another matter, but the command of writing itself is overall better, I'd say. I don't think a modern author would have much luck getting novels or stories in major magazines published with Asimov-tier dialog & characterization, for example.

Plus those eras were full of tons of garbage, in addition to what we remember. New Wave (60s and 70s) in particular tended to some very special interests that I don't think have held up too well, with some exceptions. A lot of that era's stories are very in love with sex & drugs and not in a way that really translates into a good tale. Most of those aren't exactly well-beloved these days.

On the flip side, there are definitely some modern sci-fi authors that are among the most famous but have some serious problems putting together an entirely good novel. I'll refrain from naming names but among them is maybe the only author whose book has ever made me mad at them for wasting such a good idea, setting, and opening, by just having no damn follow-through and getting super lazy in the last 1/3 or so. They're probably a top-5 sci fi name, among active authors today. But I stand by the overall quality level being notably higher on at least some dimensions, and it's even true for that guy.

Huh? That's what HEAD requests and correct HTTP headers are for, surely?

There's so much stuff in HTML that's almost good enough to replace things we use Javascript for. We should also have had built-in pagination and sorting on tables, like, years ago, with some kind of (optional, if your data aren't all available on the initial page load) back-end spec for how the requests will be shaped and for delivering the data.

An awful lot of "AJAX" Javascript use could just be frames and iframes, if they were somewhat better.

Form validation should be built-in (with optional light JS for defining non-built-in validators). The browser should supply a lot more input types, including some kind of payment integration. It's absurd those things have to be built over and over and delivered by the website.

I could go on. It's a damn shame.

That loopy-style cursive they taught us in school was so damn ugly, even when done perfectly, and not especially fast. I never understood why they were making us learn it. Its existence only made any sense to me whatsoever when I learned it was designed with a fountain pen in mind.

I have writing samples from second grade.

My writing was much more legible then.

YouTube is great for things where the directions for the specific activity you want might not include "basic" things someone who knows it well wouldn't think to list in written instructions, or some little technique or movement they do automatically and don't even think about. I love it for house and car DIY stuff, for that reason and also because it makes it clear which parts will be a pain-in-the-ass, and how much, to help me gauge whether I want to do it, or hire it done.

It's also great for technique with tools in the kitchen—not learning recipes so much, but learning the right way to process a certain vegetable really fast, or exactly what a proper whipping motion for eggs ought to look like, or how a pro moves the pan on and off the flame while cooking this dish, exactly what it looks like when they deem a certain cooking technique "done", all of that.

I'd assumed anyone with visual impairment—but not outright blindness requiring a screen-reader—was using custom stylesheet stuff pretty much constantly all over the web. Controlling the appearance of sites client-site used to be a basic browser feature. I know that's receded into the background, but is something similar (either some accessibility feature, or a plugin) not the norm for those who need them? If not, that sucks, because control used to be so firmly on the client-side for those things and that was a good thing.

Now that is one of the more interesting perspectives on the situation that I've read, out of all these threads. Thanks.

Hahaha, see, I'm so terrible at both measuring and cutting that I'd never expect anything I'm building to come out remotely right if I needed to start doing much with angles that aren't 90, 45, or 30, with hard pre-sets on whatever tools I'm using because if I'm setting the angle myself it's gonna be off by enough to ruin it, no matter how precise I think I've got it. No way I'm not gonna end up working around or re-doing it with something simpler if I start bringing trigonometry to the party. I'm lucky when my straight cuts that I measured and marked 3 times "just to be sure" don't somehow end up wrong.

[EDIT] actually, I take that back, I do sometimes work with odd angles but never do it without a physical template built and fitted, because attempts to do it "cute" or figure it out purely on paper have a history of being hilariously wrong (when I do them) even when the math is 100% correct (according to the evidently-not-precise-enough measurements).

Approaching 40. Haven't ever needed calculus (or Trig) for anything. Sometimes I make an effort to pick math back up just because I feel like I ought to, but it'd be so purely a hobby with no practical use that I have a hard time keeping at it. Some of it's neat but it's not really any more valuable to my life than doing even-less-useful-but-more-fun recreational math puzzles.

Most people's lives and jobs involve even less math than mine does.

More stats probably would have been helpful. Anything less-obviously-useful needs a hell of a lot more emphasis on what it's used for and how to apply it than I ever received, IMO, unless you're a pure-math major, and certainly in k-12 since almost none of the kids are going to be math majors.

Kinda, but Square actually had an alternative way of managing UI flow, enabled by a couple libraries they wrote, and a bunch of other support libraries for basic stuff like making HTTP requests, all of which was so much saner than Google's standard way(s) of doing things. You'd end up writing Square/Android, in the sense of GNU/Linux, if that makes sense. Why Square, of all places, straight-up killed it on that particular platform, I have no idea (no shade intended to folks at Square, it's just unexpected situation). It's not like they just had a really good project template or something.

Developing for Android definitely made me a lot more understanding of quirks and brokenness in apps on my personal Android phones (developing for Android and iOS, and so being exposed to many examples of both kinds of devices, ended up converting me to being an iOS user anyway, though)

I liked the ones that had been auto-closed then manually re-opened like 5 times because it'd survived that many major versions. Entirely not kidding about more than once seeing that someone had pasted a patch file for like a 1-2 line fix in the bug thread and been begging Google to look at it for years.

[EDIT] To Google's credit, it was possible to write a patch for their OS, unlike iOS. Working against them is the fact that they don't seem to give a damn, so it hardly matters.

(Information somewhat out-of-date, especially on the Android side)

Android's official libraries are often weirdly bad and seemingly incomplete. You'll do a lot of DIY and work-around and looking incredulously at 8-year-old bug reports to which someone submitted a damn patch to fix the bug two years ago, yet they're still sitting open with the last "me too" comment three weeks ago and a bunch of folks begging Google to apply the patch. True story, seen more than once, and you'd be surprised how non-obscure the developer facing functionality has to be when you start running into those.

Once I had to resort to meta programming to change (IIRC) a color of part of a stock Material Design input field, as the implementation had been half-assed by the Android team's interns, is all I can figure. Changing your typeface app-wide used to require (again, IIRC) modifying every single view-related class, or else importing a 3rd-party library (which library existed because obviously that's an insane design). There existed a 3rd party library to shim in the Javascript maps API, because the official Java Google Maps library on Google's own damn OS could only provide an address as one string, not broken up into house number and street and such, while the Javascript one could provide the address elements separately (you can tell where their real priorities are).

Lots of Google's advice about how to handle UI flows or data in one's app is just bad and will make your app brittle while wasting your time, compared to alternatives people who aren't developing the damn thing as their full-time job have come up with.

This was all like 3-4 years ago, not back in the stone ages of 2.x/3.x, or even 4 or 5. 2.x/3.x was a special hell that I wouldn't wish on anyone.

All of the above is relevant to stuff like UI building in Android studio, or your question about whether everyone uses native libs or what have you (you shouldn't, even for basic stuff like HTTP communication, at least as of 3-4 years ago, if you value your time and sanity). If you're not doing something very simple with stock styles, you'll hit some pain, and even then you might. Not insurmountable, obviously, but it's there.

As for AS itself, it's about as heavy as Xcode on system resources. Emulator used to be so slow it was useless, but it's somewhat better now. Still wouldn't develop for Android without an Android device with me 100% of the time, unlike iOS, but they have made big improvements. It probably doesn't crash as much as Xcode. Both are full of arcane bullshit in their interface to keep builds happy, and I actually think Xcode might be a little ahead of AS now that most provisioning difficulties can be auto-fixed. They do have a WYSIWG UI builder but I vaguely recall it being net-harmful last time I tried it, though not completely terrible. Probably useful for some apps. Otherwise it's an IDE and does normal IDE stuff. One "fun" part is that you manage a bunch of Android platform deps through the IDE, separately from AS itself—or you figure out how to do it from the command line while still making the IDE happy, for better repeatability, onboarding, and sanity.

The bigger issue is the Android emulator, which AFAIK still only kind-of works on M1.

I haven't done Android dev in a few years, but last time I did the best advice a new dev could get was, "ignore any best-practice or how-to element of Google's Android docs. Ignore the old, official way of doing [thing]. Definitely ignore the new, official way of doing [thing]. Instead, use Square's Android libraries, read their blog posts, and do exactly what they do."

Yeah, I'm over here going, "oof, I hope they don't do too well by burning VC cash, or they might stifle esbuild and deno and similar efforts, and we'll remain stuck at this embarrassingly-low local maximum even longer"

> And progressive taxation.

Point of order: I'm taxed the same on my one-millionth dollar of income (assuming the same source) as Jeff Bezos is.

... I just don't have a one-millionth dollar of income to tax, but if someone wants to shift things toward equality rather than equity I'll happily accept donations toward that end. To make things more equal for Bezos and to strike a blow against equity, naturally.

I try to isolate and minimize dependencies on Google due to their habit of abruptly banning entire accounts because one of their bots thinks it spotted something slightly odd on a single service that account is using. It's absolutely part of my risk-assessment at work, when selecting which services to use. Their fickle approach to services that aren't ads or search is just part of the problem.

> Surely Google treats their B2B products and B2C products differently, no?

Not differently enough, and I'm not directing enough of our services spending to Google to find out if that gets us over the line where they won't shit all over us without at least giving us a heads-up. Maybe it would be, maybe not, but why risk it when most of what they offer is far from unique and not much better-priced than alternatives, if at all.

Writers use all kinds of tools to "cheat", up to and including not actually writing. Mining computer-generated nonsense or coherent-but-empty prose for the odd accidentally-excellent phrase or sentence might end up being just another. Hell, it may already be.

Now try a "used" diamond.

shudders

My experience is that the cops don't care a bit about thefts into the mid thousands, even if there's a high likelihood the culprit and their car, probably including the plate were caught on camera multiple times. "We'll have your report for insurance in a week. No, we're not even going to make a couple phone calls to investigate."

Hell, one time a small company I worked for had five figures of gear stolen in a break-in... and then several other businesses in the area did, too. Well over $100,000 (retail) of equipment stolen by the end. Multiple cameras at multiple businesses caught them, including their van and plate number. The cops did the same, "yeah, yeah, here's your report, we don't care" until someone called them while sitting directly behind the van in question and told them they'd found the guys and to get off their asses and do something.

AFAIK nothing was recovered anyway, but I think they were at least arrested. Yay?

I honestly don't know what they do aside from give out traffic tickets and harass people.

Right, being there at all has some value, but both the quantity and quality of actual time with them, rather than just near them but entirely distracted by other life-crap, isn't high.

I'm just saying that "I mostly see them on weekends" isn't that drastic, IMO (and I suspect it was a bit of an exaggeration anyway). Weekends represent like 80-90% of the time that I'm not just badgering my kids to get stuff done so their room's clean / we aren't late / they don't look like we don't provide them real clothes / they don't entirely wreck the house / they don't get hurt. The hours during the weekday are high-friction and low-freedom because they fall around transitions.

[EDIT] of course, again, having a large amount of money can enable one to buy one's way to much higher-quality weekday time with kids, that may be a factor. If you don't clean or tidy (much), if you don't have to cook to provide healthy food, if the kids have an actual nanny(!)—if any of that's true, then I'm sure the character of that time at least can be very different, if you don't instead use that extra liberty for your own non-kid purposes.

> I remember chatting with a woman at a work event one night and asking if she needed to go home soon because of her kids. She replied, “No, I see my kids on weekends.” I couldn’t help but cringe thinking about what it would be like to only see my son on weekends. It seemed horrible!

If you work 9-5 (really 8-5 most places) this is basically true anyway. Most of the time you get with them on weekdays may have some quality just for existing, but is really pretty poor. Rush around in the morning, send them off to wherever, get back home at 5:30 or later just in time to throw together or eat dinner (depending on whether your spouse stays home), then bed-time routine, or they run off and do their own thing for an hour or two (friends, bike riding because god knows they don't get enough time outside at school for e.g. basic eye health, homework, whatever) while you try to get the house in something resembling order for the next day, then bedtime routine.

Any way you slice it, weekday time-with-kids for someone with a normal job is pretty crap. If you're a super-parent you might be able to make some of it a little better or more valuable. Finding maybe an hour a couple nights a week is doable, especially if you shift all your clean-up into your "alone time" and basically live kids, cleaning, and work all your waking weekday hours (ugh, no).

If you're in the founder set and see loss of weekday time as a huge sacrifice, then I'd guess you're paying someone to handle a bunch of the bullshit in your life. At least regular cleaners and maybe you don't do much of your own cooking, and possibly you have one of those kid-chauffeur services. Ordinary working people don't spend a ton of quality time with their kids during the week. Again, seeing them at all may have some value, but you're not gonna hang out undistracted by other life-junk for any serious length of time.

Weekends? That's where the good times are. Morning and evening weekday hours are just too eaten up with trying to get by. About the best you get is a smooth routine that's at least not a negative experience for all concerned.

It's faster to do "screenshot area to paste buffer" then paste it than to select the text you want (text selection requires more precision than just snagging a zone of the screen) and fiddle with text formatting on the receiving program (Slack, email, whatever). I do it all the time when I just want to show someone something short, and don't expect them to need to copy it. Bonus: precisely the same workflow works for non-text.

I'd also version the DB in the URL, else you could end up changing the file out from under someone who's already got the page loaded, with who-knows-what results depending on how different the file is. You could just prefix a head to every range request to check for changes, but that adds overhead and doesn't actually completely close the gap, so it'd still be possible to read a file different from the one you intended. Cost is more disk usage, depending on how many copies you keep around, but at least keeping the most recent "old" version seems reasonable unless you're skating really close to the quota on whatever system you're using.

My problems with AMP are:

1) Google clearly leveraging it to take over more of the web,

2) The scroll hijacking that made it feel worse-performing (plus just otherwise unpleasant) than middle-weight websites normally do,

3) That some of the sites I most commonly accidentally end up viewing through AMP are useless in their AMP version, so it just adds a hunt-and-click for no reason (Reddit is a big offender)

Google is one problem, one is a technical implementation problem, and the other is an ecosystem problem.

Make friends with anyone who deals with lots and lots of people across socio-economic status boundaries—teachers, social workers, anyone in government who deals with the public on a regular basis—and they can tell you what that means. You'll think they made some of them up, but they didn't. And that's without going international.

There was a Twitter thread making the rounds a while back in which someone claimed insiders (existing employees, especially if they're able to develop a significant social circle in them) in big tech companies do the same thing: when they job hunt, they'll hit their low-priority prospects first, have others with inverted priorities do the opposite, then all parties concerned with have very recent test question lists from their, say, top 2 preferred employers, by the time they interview there.

This insiders-have-a-large-advantage factor may be at least part of why the practices survive. People without a friend & colleague network frequently interviewing at those places have a strong disadvantage... unless they hire people to scout for them, which the Twitter poster also claimed is a thing that happens.

LeetCode-type interviews are about 60% a how-bad-do-you-want-this test, and 40% a barely-concealed IQ test.

I'm not even sure that's the wrong way for FAANG to do things, given how many people want to work there. I do know it's a damn bad idea for any place not offering FAANG-like comp, since at lower comp levels you're in competition with a ton of places that don't demand hours of grinding leetcode to prove you want the job bad enough.