larzang

Peak Chinese coal consumption was 2013, it's still substantial but total usage has been falling along with percentage of total output for a while now.

Context is incredibly important. The author is writing from the standpoint of a startup trying to fine tune an MVP. Of course it doesn't matter if it lasts if you don't know what you're building and rewriting everything isn't hard.

Code-first matters a lot when you're trying to make a 15 year old cobbled-together system last another 15 when you don't have the resources to stop everything for the many engineer-years it would take to do a full rewrite. Anything you touch is going to have to last too and people have to care about adding more technical debt because it's already the 500lb sled they have to drag behind them every single day.

I was thinking more TempleOS or Time Cube

I must have missed the parts where South Korea and Taiwan were bombed into the stone age for years and then forced to repeatedly fight their neighbors for continued survival.

From the virtually complete annihilation of civilian infrastructure in the north to the widespread deforestation, poisoning, and unexploded ordinance in the south, the US barely left a country behind. Such comparisons are incredibly disingenuous without a view of how long Vietnam had to spend just rebuilding functioning infrastructure, education, etc and all without wealthy foreign investment. The Vietnamese people and government should be applauded for everything they have achieved.

Some chiropractors do have the education and experience to operate as physical therapists. When I was doing competitive weight lifting, I saw a chiro who had a masters in sports medicine and had spent years as a college football trainer. He ran his office like a rehab clinic, and a lot of his clients were high school, college, and amateur athletes like me. He wasn't just popping some bones and moving on, he was working to keep his patients healthy through identifying weaknesses and imbalances and making training recommendations to correct them. Being a chiro got people in the door who didn't understand what their problem was to begin with, just that they needed relief.

I realize the industry is full of snake oil practitioners, but some of them are actual professionals.

Working for a for-profit company is a completely different labor relationship than working for an OSS org or other non-profit. You absolutely should fight to prevent management from extracting more of the value you generated just because you cut your personal costs, but you may be able and willing to accept less income in order to contribute to an organization that you believe in that isn't profiting off your labor. One is adversarial theft, the other is the willing donation of your time to a cause.

Wasting massive amounts of mostly carbon-producing electricity as the planet dies to do absolutely nothing productive is a pretty cyberpunk evil megacorp thing to do, agreed.

Neat project, awful name. Overloading Flow, an already important part of the React ecosystem, just makes it harder to both find information about your project and find information about Flow.

I think a fair few of us have been burned by companies where this level of respect absolutely did not and could not exist and engineers were treated equivalent to you, an amateur, calling a plumber to your house and then hovering over them telling them everything they're doing wrong. Informal PTO would have just made the situation even worse.

Something I never see mentioned in these discussions is the surprisingly high hurdles to actually operating a distributed company. You'd think in 2021 it wouldn't be difficult to have employees doing knowledge work in multiple US states without running face-first into laws governing conducting actual business in multiple states, but that's not at all the case. International is even worse. The additional complexity and costs of having non-local employees can absolutely be prohibitive, leading some companies to just abuse 1099 status.

This obviously isn't a problem if you're FAANG or Salesforce, but for a company of 20 it is.

FIG standards are explicitly interoperability standards. They make it easy for anyone to jump into a new company or open source project with minimal friction and minimal bikeshedding.

If you or your team don't care about that and want to do something different, there's nothing stopping you. Even the Symfony team, who contributed to these standards and largely follow them, have gone their own way when they thought it was worth the trade-off.

8 days, but the bigger problem is that increases the expected sea states encountered by several levels. Huge container ships don't like that.

So what's your proposed alternative that doesn't involve checking? Option-style wrappers enforce consistent checking and handling, but so do explicitly nullable type signatures. At some point you're going to need to know whether you have data or not, and that requires checks.

Having worked on a number of CRM and other business applications, yep, it's maddening. Not all addresses and names are your address and name.

Individuals may not need it, but companies? The company I work for has multiple products which internally rely on geolocating arbitrary addresses. OSM keeps our costs way down, we only have to pay Google when OSM fails a match and we fall back to the Google Maps API. I doubt we're uncommon in this. OSM had less of a programmatic use when Google's free monthly tiers were large and subsequent costs low, but that hasn't been the case for a good while now.

$125 for my zoji that I've used at least 4 times a week for the last decade is significant value that you just don't see out of most appliances anymore. I'm more impressed by the reliability than the cooking tech (though it makes wonderful rice of course).

If pumping and dumping for the robin hood chumps is far more profitable than years of dividends, which is the real product?

It seems really premature to make any declarations about brand loyalty when Uber is still majorly subsidizing consumer prices with a VC cash bonfire.

Postgres stores records by primary id sequence. If you have completely random IDs, records inserted at the same time are fragmented across the entire set, which makes accessing them slower if they're meant to be sequential.

Whether this matters entirely depends on the type of data you're storing. If you're storing unrelated data which is always random access anyway, non-sequential ids don't really matter. If you're storing related data which is mostly accessed sequentially, e.g. Impressions filtered by a creation date range, it's definitely better to have sequential ids for non-fragmented storage. UUIDv6 isn't as commonplace in libraries as v1 or v4 but offers a good compromise for this.

If we were serious about preventing deaths, a lot more could and would have been done before going as far as taking risks on experimental drugs.

It's not a question of perfect, it's a question of __unnecessary__ fragility/vulnerability. We all rely on electricity because the alternative is far more difficult. We drive despite the costs and problems because most places in the US have been designed entirely around driving and it's very difficult to survive otherwise.

Does my fridge actually need to talk to the internet? Do my lightbulbs? Are the gains from having an addressable coffee maker worth the downsides when things break (or are broken due to security being an afterthought at best) over having a coffee maker that's just a coffee maker?

It's not any different than any other code all of us write on a weekly basis, when you start tacking on unnecessary features and increasing the complexity you will inevitably compromise the stability and simplicity of the features it must have to do its job. It's why the Unix philosophy exists to begin with.

Dealing with the hell of mixed ISO-8859-1/15 vs CP-1252 vs UTF-8 vs simple ASCII was enough to make me an early embracer of UTF-everywhere despite mostly only having to deal with English language sources. "Someone copy/pasted from Word and broke the database again" are words you don't want to ever have to hear.

UTF-8 was the sane refactoring after the initial incompatible parallel standards were established.

Completely agree, a change is an atomic change and should be contained in a single commit, I don't need to know the sub-steps it took to arrive at the final solution when I'm trying to blame or log the reason it changed 6 months from now. It also encourages bad commit messages which further confuse change history and motivation when you're creating separate commits just to fix formatting and such in your real change.

"Removing outdated or poorly written laws by paying off Congress is more effective than funding lawyers to litigate their misuse on a case by case basis forever"

It also still requires 32-bit drivers, which were initially missing from the last nvidia update, forcing a rollback.

I'm incredibly grateful for the work they've done on Proton, but it's definitely odd they don't seem to have anyone prioritizing updating the Steam platform itself.

My immediate reaction isn't "this is so cool and useful for me" but "this might be really useful over traditional speech translation for programmers who can't use their hands". If you know the code but have difficulty inputting it, this might have real value even if it has none for making understanding the code easier.

I would have been perfectly happy if Microsoft had just kept making the Natural 4000 forever. Logitech has some 20+ year old designs they keep producing because for some people they're perfection, and I'd hoped Microsoft would continue likewise since it's been well over a decade with the 4000 too.

But nope, it's dead, and the replacement isn't nearly as good.

Right? Forget bugs in the contract system, if you have pools writing whatever history they want in private that seems to defeat the entire point.

Completely agree. Sure, any editor can be paired with static analysis tools to make sure I probably didn't break things, but only a full IDE can just handle the refactor for me so that I don't have to spend time searching, fixing, and checking to begin with.

No, I don't need or use all the IDE features. I don't use the integrated shell, I don't use the git integration, I don't have it handle my packages. I don't see a need for these things when I always have multiple terminals open anyways, but proper code intelligence is not something an editor+plugins can provide like a real IDE can.

What programmer wants to add those things? Ads have been the bane of the internet for 20 years, how many times has a developer excitedly clamored to ruin their performance metrics, layout, security, etc with more ads? How often are programmers arguing for incredibly complex UI elements over the native (and trivial to implement) alternatives?

Programmers don't choose these things, because programmers aren't the real decision makers, it's management and business that makes the web awful.