No need to disagree. We’re 100% on the same side. However, the argument of “don’t develop carbon capture because it will divert society from changing” is just stupid. We will need it as much as possible.
953 karma · joined March 10, 2016
On one hand, this is good since those technologies are in desperate need of funding and scaling on the other hand, make no mistake: They're much too small and will need to improve from stone-age to modern age in just a few decades.
edit: typo
This is the best thing since idk. Thank you so much, folks!
And of course, I'm horrified by bad decisions politicians and managers seem to make.
This might sound like a trivial conclusion at first, but as a community we should find some kind of common understanding without playing down its potential usefulness nor riding the hype train some people want us to jump on.
I mean, the only thing we (as "the informed people") can do about it, is to keep open and working alternatives for "the masses" to step in on an instant when things are going south with commercial or governmental controlled products.
An example that comes up is Mastodon. It's weird, not necessarily bug-free and has a steep learning curve, compared with commercial alternatives. Still, it manages to attract those people that you want to talk with and every time I'm skimming through the timeline, I'm seeing something remarkable.
We do already (Fairphone, Firefox, etc.) but should work more on keeping up the good tradition of providing free alternatives. When we're too powerful, we'll be getting criminalized but that would just add some more fun to it.
That said, I'm really underwhelmed by the output of both those tools in the context of the ongoing hype. They're far away from taking anyone's job. They're producing misleading and even manipulative output in such fine-granular deceiving manners, it's like reading a whole contract in fine-print. Given that our job is already mostly reading and understanding vast amounts of code, I don't really see a productivity boost in reading generated erroneous code. And if it boosts productivity because of boilerplate, we already have plenty of old tools to deal with that. Heck, every CRUD Framework from mid-2000s is better at generating boilerplate code, with 100% correctness.
So there's no "big disruptive innovation" going on but new nice-to-have tools. Just know, when not to use it.
1) Overly excessive bureaucracy combined with not enough civil servants.
2) A housing market that's essentially not a market anymore.
3) Several problems with governmental services that have been under-invested and not well managed in the past, e.g. schooling.
Sure, there's crime. There's also slightly higher crime-rates in cohorts of refugees/immigrants compared to the average but not compared to cohorts of of "German young men".
We see a lot of far right propaganda tho along with the delusion of "the mainstream opinion shifted to the left". That's an old fascist trick.
Saying this as a German: If you take Germany's tech and civil services sector, you're absolutely correct.
It turned out, although it was air-gapped, it was susceptible to an attack against its update mechanism. Some white-hats showed it was possible to inject malicious code and change the results.
You never know. That's the essence of the problem.
Well the opposite of this is the antiquated world of "old Java". My subjective assessment is that Spring is somewhere in the middle: reasonable conservatism of principles but eager adoption of beneficial new things. Jumping on virtual threads is a reasonable action.
> their call stacks between injected components are sometimes a couple dozen layers deep and it makes no sense.
We're talking big enterprise-y software, right? Things get huge over time, no way out of complexity. The major red-flag would be accidental complexity which Spring, compared to the rest of the Java world, generally manages well, I'd say.
> they don't provide easy upgrade paths between majors versions and they stop updating vulnerabilities on older major versions. I inherited some code that was using version x but had to be upgraded due to critical vulnerabilities. The vulns weren't fixed in x or y but only z. I tried moving over and their cryptic unit test fixtures stopped working. No docs on migration. Spring is sort of like cancer.
Well non-trivial upgrade paths is the essence of a "major version upgrade". The alternative is to let old ideas never die and either stop introducing new concepts at all (old Java) or introduce them and make the framework bloated (something you criticized in the beginning of your comment). It's a trade-off which I think generally is well managed in Spring. It's boring, but in a good way.
Not accusing the author, but maybe better think twice before making those kinds of assumptions if the easier explanation is: Stupidity. And as we all know, there's plenty of that in management rows.
- I have talked to many workers who are die-hard fans of their jobs. They highly appreciated the easy non-bureaucratic way of earning as much money as they wanted to.
- Uber et all are also about disrupting antiquated oligopolies of old businesses. Esp in Germany you see a lot of gatekeeper business models who are managing their comfort zone lobbying for bureaucracy in their favor. Those are often not in favor of workers or customers.
Edit: In addition with AI act and its very broad definition of what an AI is and a classification like "Education" you might end up in level "highest risk" just for calculating statistics on your quiz app (no one knows until a court rules). With Cyber Resilience Act and its application of the (physical) supply chain direction, your open source repo from 5 years ago might end up being a footgun with you being personally accountable for other companies using it in their product. And so on...
Let alone Mozilla (non-EU) and browser extensions (like ublock) did more for personal privacy than any of the aforementioned laws. And in contrast to creating a "level playing field with Big Tech" they made tech business in the EU a morass of legal insecurities for small businesses while big corps are still happily intruding individual's privacy in ways that our current legal system cannot even cover.
As a European software engineer I'm calling BS on your statement, Mr Manager. EU legislation might not aim to stifle innovation (in contrast, they're always talking about a "level playing field") but their imprecise and vague regulation texts are like a loose cannon for whatever innovative business might come up if you have your first hire to be "the lawyer who gives legal advice in context of EU regulation".
Now, those people will just quietly move away to find a new home-market for scaling up and then eventually selling to EU countries. This is not "lagging behind" but an economical fiasco since the same laws only help local oligopolies of gatekeeper enterprises and (the ones they initially aimed for) Big Tech who can afford licenses and lawyers.
Two little examples (but there's more):
- What about the safe harbor thing? It's all a grey area now after court rulings decided that pretty much all US-EU IT biz is at least partially violating the EU regulations.
- We're now all happily clicking cookie banners and startups are getting sued by third-rate law firms. Some things were good with GDPR but did it help with Big Tech's (and meanwhile Tiktok's) way of collecting data? Nope.
Looking at my home-country Germany that is a funny thing to say, since the public sector is living in a 90s/00s alternative OOP timeline and doesn't get anything done. The car oligopoly is frantically trying to gain competence in "user software" by stealing game designers and buying foreign startups. Meanwhile, the local startups are held down by German bureaucracy(tm) which additionally usually doubles down on any EU guideline.
Over the last 20 years, they all reached a level of incompetence which makes it very hard to not believe in a conspiracy.
IIRC it took me about 6h, the Inkscape UI was frustrating at first but eventually I got better at it and won the contest. Such a fun seeing other people running around the city of Karlsruhe (Germany) wearing my shirt.
Thank you Inkscape team! I'm seeing as much potential as with Blender in kicking some commercial vendor's butts!
Let me just say one thing: It doesn't necessarily take the US for German leadership to shoot their feet.
> USA had blown up the pipelines delivering cheap energy from Russia
Well, did they? I know this theory but AFAIK they could trace it back to some people in Ukrainian military. Western secret services (afair from Netherlands) even warned them twice that this was being planned but they didn’t react.
> USA is deliberately suffocating German economy.
Sorry, but those are ALL mistakes made by Germans themselves. They have been cheating, they have been lobbying the German governments to ease transformation cost for short-sighted profit, the (conservative) German governments acted to slow down renewables while quitting nuclear power earlier than planned. I think it’s not a coincidence that Putin started the war on Ukraine just at the time, Germany phased out its last nuclear power plants. It’s all stupidity on the German side, esp. when Merkel is still claiming that “she always knew who Putin really was”.