rickspencer3

I suspect that the author would argue that more competent programmers would use their IDE's statement completion functionality to quickly determine the function name, or which of the functions to use, what arguments to pass, and what return value type to expect and how to use it. That their knowledge of the language would allow them to write the code faster and better which such tools, rather than copying something from the internet.

The distinction between these 2 types of programmers predates Google by quite a bit. I worked in user research at Microsoft in their developer division in the lat 1990s and early 2000s, and we were well aware of the difference between "systematic", "pragmatic", and "opportunistic" programmers, and ensured that we had tools and offerings for each. The opportunistic programmers were most numerous, and preferred to copy and paste their way to success.

In, cough, 1991, my wife and I did a bike tour in Europe for our honeymoon. We spent a total of 4 weeks in Holland, England, and Germany. We took trains and of course ferries to cover larger differences. We did less than 50 miles in a typical day, iirc.

The thing is, back then, no GPS, no Internet, just maps and asking people for help. The trip was not particularly challenging and was very rewarding. It seems like such a trip would be even more easy and fun today with all of the extra context and information that you have with a smart phone.

For my part, I don't much care about the data sharing. My issue is that our smart tv has ads and the default software is terrible. I can't believe I spent so much money only to have a measurably worse experience. I ended up buying a Roku just because the software is easier to use than the junk that LG shipped. I use 2 other HDMI ports for different games consoles, so the "smart" tv is just a source of aggravation, and I feel insulted whenever it ends up in the default software and they show me a goddamn ad.

Maybe I should have gone with Kodi.

I am getting the sense that over time, we will collectively building in AI a realm populated by the Platonic Ideal of objects in the human world. But since it is in learning models, we will be able to see the zeros and ones, but still won't really have mental access to that realm, only the ability to recognize the particulars that it produces.

Really cool and fun stuff.

I have a cynical view about this, but also expect it all to come out in the wash over time.

My cynical view is that some older executives are, indeed, not as effective in remote companies and younger ones, because they have no practice running remote companies and haven't adapted. Additionally, many senior and middle managers never figured out how to assess and reward actual productivity on their teams, so relied on their ability to schmooze to create a veneer of contributing, and schmoozing is easier to do in person. Finally, managing facilities is a big job, especially at bigger companies, and few executives are going to point out that their main job functions are now outdated and the company should de-invest. Imagine being an executive who is overseeing the capital costs of real estate development for a very large tech campus as an extreme example.

However, it is also my view that remote work-forces are inherently more efficient in multiple ways for many industries. I have been working from home and managing remote teams since 2008. Every time I go to an office I am absolutely shocked by how much time is wasted in an office. Time that could be spent exercising, doing laundry, gardening, so many things that are beneficial to someone's health and work productivity. I believe that market forces will solve these problems of ineffective execs and managers. I could imagine some specific companies making a co-located office their competitive advantage by appealing to the minority of knowledge workers who prefer working that way, though.

> If they're capable of launching the platform in every language, they're capable of moderating it in every language.

Said differently, if they aren't capable of moderating in every language, they they aren't capable of launching in every language. At least not ethically.

I dunno, I think "We are doing this" because it solves a ton of problems related to running an application at scale. He doesn't mention any of the difficulties that using monoliths have caused "us" over the years.

Packing multiple concerns into a single instance/VM seems particularly cavalier. What if one of the services crashes the OS based on novel user input that is being sent over and over? I think it's naive to say that perfect testing and strongly/statically typed languages make this problem go away.

A large team iterating on a set of monoliths runs into other problems as well. Ready to deploy, but wait, you need to rebase for someone else's changes, oh wait, now your tests don't pass, etc...

A set of monoliths certainly simplifies things for some projects, but many of "us" have battle scars from managing large cloud-based projects in that way, and find the deployment complexity of having a proliferation of independent entities that can have their own life cycle to be crucial for velocity and availability. At least that is why some "us" do it this way.

I appreciated the article, but it read more like iterating on a few pain point in Kubernetes than envisioning a very different future.

Where I work, we use Kubernetes very very heavily and some of the article reflects some of my experience, in the sense that any challenge we have, the community response is that we should add MORE complexity. Using secrets is complex? Rearchitect your whole app to use OIDC tokens is the answer (for an example from the article).

I think that Kubernetes was designed, released, and funded, to attack the AWS hegemony. As such, it was designed to provide a cloud abstraction layer for developers to target instead of the AWS API(s). As a result, it is designed for an organization to run a single cluster with many relatively trivial workloads (enter Helm for packaging "off the shelf" apps).

However, it turned out for some of us, the need is to run the same non-trivial application in multiple regions of multiple Cloud Providers. Here, Kubernetes really falls short, because Cloud Service Providers don't seem particularly motivated to make Kubernetes-based applications more portable, and Kubernetes remains a very leaky abstraction in terms of versions, storage, and networking.

To me, the future of Kubernetes looks like the community rallying around a single "distro" of Kubernetes that is reasonably consistent across all major cloud providers, but also makes basic assumptions such as how the CI/CD pipeline, observability and SLOs, self-managed packaging, etc... Here, I think the Linux analogy holds, in the sense that different Linux distros emerged for different sets of users, and communities were able to rallying around solution sets and provide support to each other.

> Windows Live Local Powered By Microsoft Virtual Earth

An actual name of a product I worked on at Microsoft

My dream scenario is a community support Kubernetes "distro" that is:

1. Controlled by the community of users, not a big provider. 2. Is optimized to be run multi-cloud and multi-region. 3. Assumes that you will use SaaS services for common tasks (Replicated, Nobl9, Tackle, EdgeDelta, etc...). 4. Has a fully hosted solution for CI/CD (with integrated security offerings) that is, again, not controlled by a big provider. 5. Makes enough assumptions about "sane defaults" that services are well tested and service and operator boiler plate is can guide developers to best practices.

My view is that K8s was designed to attack AWS hegemony by providing a cloud abstraction layer that assumes that a company will have a single cluster in which they will run multiple relatively trivial applications (see Helm), but for some of us, the reality is that we have many clusters which each run the same mission critical application.

I worked somewhere that was mostly remote. We hired an SRE, who was decent at their job, but there was always something off about them. Things like not being available when you would expect, but then would have reasonable explanations, but just a lot of coincidences to be happening to one person.

Early in their tenure, they said they had to go to Australia (from the US) due to a death in the family. However, someone saw that he tweeted from a bar in airport somewhere in the US, when he purported to be in Australia.

HR asked him to provide a death certificate "just for our records" and he provided a badly forged certificate, the inauthenticity of which was confirmed by a quick call to the agency that supposedly provided it.

It was all very strange and funny. Of course he was let go, and he just kind of said, "ok."

If you want to run a phone effectively forever, I am afraid that you need to turn to the free software community, and give up a lot in terms of app compatibility and the many other benefits of living within a mainstream ecosystem. Going the Free Software route is not easy in my experience.

The good news is, one of the great benefits of Pixel phones has always been that the boot loader is unlocked. So, realistically, you can run your phone as long as you want. There are many Free options to keep that going, if that is truly what you value.

That's why you always add a deadman check to your sensor monitoring.

We have very different definitions of shitty code. The shitty code I have dealt with in the past is unreliable, slow, hard to fix, and when someone does try to fix it, it doesn't stay fixed.

The code you are talking about here sounds very low drama, which is code that I love.

Maybe we should distinguish between "pretty" code and "shitty" code?

I wish that I wasn't plagued by these pesky ethics. It seems like if you are fine taking money by creating solutions to non-problems for suckers and rubes there are so many businesses and business models at your disposal.

I spend so much energy every week trying to create real value for customers; meanwhile someone is making money off of this. I conceive of scams like this all the time, but some part of me always keeps me from actually executing.

In my experience, such arguments don't move the needle on adoption. "Hegemony" of a specific useful product is a concern to such a small number of people that even getting 100% of those people who are concerned or could be made to be concerned to use an alternative will not make a dent in the "hegemony."

The only thing that I have seen work is shipping a better, cheaper, and more useful product and focusing marketing on why a user would prefer to use it on its own merits. Everything else is preaching to the converted.

I do all of my server side Python development in a container. Whenever I start a new project, I create a dockerfile as a first step. This is the easiest way I have found to make my code portable. The main downside I have found is with IDE support. I use the latest tag, so I get updated containers periodically, which has not been a source of breakages. I have not figured out how to tell VSCode to use the Python in my container for statement completion and validation.

For personal projects on my desktop, I have given up and just use pip install, and then don't try to share those scripts.

I read this as an example of my belief that unfettered engagement without a strong Code of Conduct enforced by human moderates always leads to a toxic community. Removing degrees of freedom in expression is necessary without such efforts to have and enforce standards.

For example, if you use Nintendo products, you can see that they rarely allow unfettered communication. For example, you can choose from a list of things to say, or you can choose an emotion to express, but you can't type whatever you want to other players on their network (usually).

This is a good point that I had not, in fact, considered.

So, now they will be Specific Electric?

I'm waiting for the world to catch up with the fact that looking up information while you are working is a core part of any real job. Do I care if my Linux Security Professional spends a few minutes looking up information on the internet before taking some action? It's not the case that anyone can solve any problem so long as they have a search engine. Without domain knowledge, an open ended web search is not going to lead to a convincing answer except for the most trivial questions.

This extends to coding interviews as well. Using the resources at one's disposal to get a sense of the landscape before diving into algorithms must surely be part of the job, right? What do I care if a developer needs a quick reminder before diving into a solution, or even reads up a bit and scans someone else's code before answering?

What is the value in ensuring that people have perfect recall if this is something that will almost never be necessary in a real world job?

I would have eagerly accepted a windowless room for myself rather than having a roommate my first year in college, and I know my roommate would have been much better off without having to share a room with a jackass like I was when I was 18.

My children each suffered in different ways from being forced to share a bedroom with someone when they entered college as well.

In my completely layman opinion, I think that the shared living space with private bedroom (even windowless) is a sensible compromise that will result in a better quality of life for the students there.

Thank you!

That's the problem with the downsides of social media. Even if you don't use Facebook, Twitter, and the like, their negative impacts still reach you through the people around and the rest of society. I suppose it's a bit like second hand smoke now that I think about it.

That said, the article makes what I think is an important point, that social media is not universally negative, it has some positive effects for some people. I usually use the word "cancer" to describe my attitude to Facebook and Twitter, and why I won't use it, but that is intentional hyperbole to stop further discussion.

I've been wondering how these huge companies with town-sized campuses, and all of that capital investment would respond. I guess it would take a really special kind of company to recognize that these campuses are a sunk cost and pivot to true remote.

While I agree with this in terms of users, I think that their reputation does influence how they are treated by regulators, law makers, and law enforcement. Being considered a bad actor and habitual liar by the government is problematic. I was working at Microsoft during the whole "DOJ says Microsoft is a monopoly" madness, and I can tell you that it had an impact.

So "free" but still a lot of hoops to jump through. For android I just plop down an apk (like a normal OS).

Oh? I though I had to buy a $99 developer account,and connect the device with my account to be able to build it and install it. I guess I missed something important in the docs.

What really galls me is hoops i have to jump through and the money I have to spend to install my own apps written for my own use on an iOS device. How can that be for my own security? The ability to write a program for a computing device is such a fundamental capability, how can a device that lacks this ability even be sold?