languagehacker

Any project that doesn't need 30 or more devs with various specialties working on it all at the same time doesn't need the complexity that frontend/backend separation introduces. I learned this the hard way through years of over-architecting 1-2 person projects as a freelancer. Nowadays, it's just Django with a little bit of Tailwind on top.

There's definitely a market for something like this, because most software companies at a certain size end up needing to build something like this. The real question is, how much work will you need to do to fit your current software to their paradigm in order to get the benefit? For a newer project, there's likely little sunk cost, but for anything that's already productionalized, I don't doubt that the rework -- particularly around all the devops bits and pieces -- will likely be significant. And then of course, from a strategic standpoint, you need to balance the risks vs. rewards of hitching your wagon to Flightcontrol's set of conventions.

There will be a really solid chunk of projects that find good cost savings using this platform -- especially teams that are resource-constrained on devops and don't consider it their core competency.

When Jeff Hodges gave a presentation of his "Notes on Distributed Systems for Youngbloods"[1] at Lookout Mobile Security back in like 2014 or 2015, he did this really interesting aside at the end that changed my perception of my job, and it was basically this. You don't get to avoid "politics" in software, because building is collaborative, and all collaboration is political. You'll only hurt yourself by avoiding leveling up in soft skills.

No matter how correct or elegant your code is or how good your idea is, if you haven't built the relationships or put consideration into the broader social dynamic, you're much less likely to succeed.

[1] https://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distrib...

Thanks, I hate it. Keep an eye out for Nathan Grayson sliding into your DMs though.

Good organizations know how to get people who think broad to collaborate with people who think deep. Some organizations culturally value the broad thinkers better, while others value the deep thinkers. I think the reckoning here is really around making this distinctions more egalitarian and finding ways to celebrate the accomplishments of both groups in concert.

I really admired Gregg early on in my career. He gave a fantastic talk in Austin, Texas back in about 2007 or 2008 for a Semantic Web Meetup (at a venue called "The Boom Boom Room" funnily enough) back when I was working as the resident search expert and linguist for an SEO consultancy (remember those?). He talked about RDF, OWL, and SPARQL, and some of the iterative ways we could get there on the sites we're building in a way that had me enthusiastic for the web's future. I spoke with him after the conference, and if I remember correctly, he encouraged me to start looking into Lucene after hearing about my job.

Several years later, I'm living in the Bay Area and working for Wikia (now Fandom), acting as their resident Solr expert after taking his advice to heart. Wikia was investing in their structured data initiatives, and ended up bringing Gregg onto exactly the team I was attached to in order to investigate how to apply his area of expertise to our vast store of user-generated, semi-structured data. The opportunity to work with such a talented researcher in a consultative capacity was a tremendous learning experience.

I felt privileged to get to work with someone I had admired early on and made an impact into the trajectory of my career. The takeaway from this is probably that you don't necessarily know whose future your might touch with a presentation or with friendly advice casually offered at a conference or meetup.

Something tells me I'm one of countless cases where Gregg didn't just push the science of structured data and the semantic web forward, but helped to mold expert practitioners through his kindness and enthusiasm for the work. In this way, his legacy will be long-lasting and inestimable.

Finally I can be Karl Havoc

Wow, didn't even see much about how miserable using the sync_to_async and async_to_sync transformers are.

In general, the architectures developed because of the GIL, like Celery and gunicorn and stuff like that, handles most of the problems we run into that async/await solves with slightly better horizontal scaling IMO. The problem with a lot of async code is that it tends not to think beyond the single machine that's running it, and by the time you do, you need to rearchitect things to scale better horizontally anyway.

For most Python applications, especially with web development, just start with something like Celery and you're probably fine.

I ain't reading all that, but I'm not asking an AI to summarize it for me either

This is a nice one! Reminds me of the [beer garden analogy](https://www.stevetecharc.com/blog-posts/understanding-oauth-...) which I also thought was a good entree into OAuth.

If you've already done the work figuring out how to knock out a basic web app deployment of kubernetes for a project that you think will grow, then I say go for it. It's not much cheaper than buying a reasonable minimum amount of compute with a company like Digital Ocean.

For hobby projects that I don't really plan to scale, I've recently gotten back into non-containerized workloads running off of systemctl in an Ubuntu VM. It feels pretty freeing not to worry about all the cruft, but that will bite me if something ever does need to live on multiple servers.

I would like for these guys to figure out how to keep bad drawings and cartoon porn from people I don't even follow out of my discover feed

This does seem like "Sky blue and water wet" sort of reporting, but that's just because of the daft headline. When most people are challenged with affording the basics, that points to a severe economic risk. We've lived through a period of incredibly cheap credit due to where we are in the monetary cycle of the USD as a reserve currency. We sort of brought it on ourselves though, given the vicious cycle of buying cheap junk we don't need on credit, and then the parties selling us that cheap junk buying our debt. We're overdue for some considered and precise deleveraging. Without it, this problem will only get a lot worse.

Can someone double-check my understanding of this?

Double is a portfolio management service that purchases shares that match the blend of a specific index for its customers. So instead of owning an index, you own the shares.

Double is winding down because they are not profitable. They are instructing their customers to either fully liquidate their holdings, or perform an ACATS transfer, which generally requires that any fractional holdings be liquidated first. However, the business model will necessarily require holding fractional shares because of the way indexes work.

So my question is, this is going to cause many of their customers to get dinged by short-term capital gains tax, right? That stinks.

I've been waiting for bitcoin to collapse since it started, and books like Number Go Up make an excellent case for why the whole thing is built on a house of cards. And yet, empires are bought and sold off of questionable financial vehicles all the time. Most of it is a ponzi scheme or some other mean grift.

The question mostly becomes, how much do you trust the creator of Inspector Gadget and a bit child actor with the guaranteeability of every Tether? The first full-scale run on it that shows an exchange can't be fulfilled in a timely fashion brings the whole enterprise to its knees, right?

The problem has now become that enough people think these instruments are legitimate that, like most questionable financial vehicles, when they collapse, some government entity will be required to bail the bad guys out and shift the cost onto anyone who was unlucky enough to be within the blast radius of the whole thing. Which is pretty much all of us at this point, either directly or indirectly.

Huge yes to this one -- especially on the part about how important this is for managers to get right. I spent two years white-knuckling the wrong job for the wrong reasons. Pretty much every day I am reminded in some way of how thankful I am for having left and found a job with a culture I'm a better fit for.

How did it perform against a boglehead portfolio? Were fees and commissions included? Seems weird to evaluate performance over a single year for trades. Much more interested in long-term growth over one or more market cycles.

Thank you for the vaporwave vibes!

Some good content for people who want to go down the Crypto Scammer rabbit hole:

Exit Scam (https://www.exitscam.show/) -- Crypto exchange founders rip off their customers so much that it has an actual name, as infamous a grift as the The Money Box or The Big Store. This podcast explores a QuadrigaCX and its founder's likely faked death, digging into a few other crypto scams for parallel examples.

Number Go Up by Zeke Faux (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/711959/number-go-up...) -- this book, which reads as a cross between investigative reporting and New Journalism, tracks Sam Bankman-Fried's rise and fall, discusses the NFT grift, and explores the weird, wild world of stablecoins. Turtles all the way down on this stuff.

amen brother

Insightful words from the Coldplay guy.

In all seriousness, there is definitely the comfortable lie of nostalgia playing into a lot of the dudes approaching (or squarely in) middle age as far as tech goes.

It's truly a bummer that they're expressing the internalization of the wrong lessons. Instead of standing up against decades of enshittification, they're complaining about having to say "allowlist" instead of "blacklist", and still erroneously believing that the right hackathon will solve their company's existential problems.

I got the best monkeys and the best typewriters, so if I let them do what they want in this "meritocracy" I created, it will definitely make the next Hamlet, right?

Great seeing Ray Mooney (who I took a graduate class with) and Emily Bender (a colleague of many at the UT Linguistics Dept., and a regular visitor) sharing their honest reservations with AI and LLMs.

I try to stay as far away from this stuff as possible because when the bottom falls out, it's going to have devastating effects for everyone involved. As a former computational linguist and someone who built similar tools at reasonable scale for largeish social media organizations in the teens, I learned the hard way not to trust the efficacy of these models or their ability to get the sort of reliability that a naive user would expect from them in practical application.

A nice measured perspective / retrospective on the long-term impact of two of Urban Planning's big cornerstone books. Sort of suggests that the passage of time is a moderating force for both sides of the aisle.

mIRC was my favorite app back in the '90s. Without it, I wouldn't have been able to spend like two days downloading The Decline from NOFX over a 56k dial-up connection.

Honestly I'd probably still be using it if DALnet hadn't been DDoS'ed for months on end.

I always like to recommend the book When McKinsey Comes to Town in any post about Management Consulting

I forgot about Priceonomics. Seems like the pivot from being just a blog to something more substantial left whatever this version it was in the wake.

MacStadium is hiring for some super important roles.

Specifically, we're looking to make our first SRE hire at the intersection of Kubernetes and MacOS virtualization.

We're also looking to hire a team of developers (including a lead) for migrating our back-office admin and GraphQL API from a mix of TypeScript and PHP to Django. You can apply to either the IC or lead role through the "Automation Engineer" posting.

https://www.macstadium.com/company/careers

Yeah, it can't be understated how much was lifted. Chakobsa, the Kindjal, etc. Shamyl even acts like Atreides with regards to how he uses "visions" to drive important political decisions.

It sounds like the data set they use is designed to teach what logical fallacies are, which makes sense that it would do fine with it. I doubt this would do well against real-world language with things like structural ambiguity, anaphoric resolution, and dubious intent.

A comment mentions it, but Sabres of Paradise is another key component to understanding Dune as a referential text as it pertains to imperialism and religious fervor as an insurrectionist response.