Orrr maybe someone in the org could've practiced some basic morality and compassion and refrained from further contributing to the housing shortage. Just because you can make money being a sociopath doesn't mean you should...
939 karma · joined November 12, 2021
By contrast, PHP has actually evolved quite gracefully over the last decade, incorporating more and more desired features into the baseline language. Sadly it has no browser clientside option.
Javascript is a victim of its own rapid success :(
I am no longer sure what we're arguing about. Is it the meaning of the word "sponsor"? That's not my word choice, that was just what the OP used and I mirrored it.
I think the bigger point is that states (no matter WHICH state) are funding private companies to surveil citizens in a way that genuinely threatens what few civil rights they have left.
Secondarily, are we arguing about the degree of connection between NSO, the company, and the State of Israel? If so, I used "sponsorship" in the revolving door sense, as in intimate relationships between the staff and government officials, not entirely unlike the US and Blackwater/Xe/Academi or Halliburton or Diebold/Premier. The discomfort there is not just in the amount of dollars exchanged, but in the offloading of legal and criminal responsibility to what is essentially a front company used to do the dirty work of the state. Outsourced oppression.
> GPS devices of almost any kind are subject to ITAR/EAR in the USA. It is extremely easy to run afoul of weapons export controls and there is quite a large market for ITAR-free products. It means extraordinarily little if a product is subject to these type of controls.
OK, without looking this up, I'll take your word for it and I stand corrected. Sorry for the mistake about GPS. But that's really a technicality. Surveillance tech of this sort IS a weapon, capable of suppressing not just external enemies but internal citizens, especially if it falls into the hands of nations participating in "Five Eyes"-style surveillance exchanges of each other's citizens. And this in particular is a lot more dangerous than a GPS receiver. And unlike GPS, it has no real "benevolent" civilian purpose. Its primary (only?) customers are oppressive states.
Sorry if this wasn't clear -- I thought it was implied -- but the worry behind the state-private connection here is that this company is getting the kind of resources (and thus effectiveness) that only states can provide, thus making it a dangerous tool. Another implied fear is that the NSO group can also get special extrajudicial treatment because of their usefulness and close connections to the Israeli state, and thus risk breaking checks and balances in a way that a landscaping company would simply not.
I feel like we're running circles around semantics here. Am I fundamentally misunderstanding your argument?
Even within just the CDN category, Cloudflare does a lot with its basic CDN offering (bot blocking, transformations, dynamic caching, etc.) that other vendors may charge as separate options.
That's not to say I don't believe you, I just wanted to make sure it's apples to apples.
Cloudflare's pricing model only really makes sense, IMO, if you're either a small/med business (which makes it an incredible deal) or if you're working cloud-native using their edge functions (workers, pages, etc.). If you're primarily using them to shield and proxy a LAMP monolith or similar for a large number of users, yeah, I can see how that would get expensive really quickly. There are other vendors who specialize only in that, being a dumb CDN. Cloudflare's value is that they enable completely new architectures based on their network topology... you can't easily do something like that on Fastly, for example.
Hmm, that's actually the point of the Ultimate version, I believe: it supports multiple languages quite nicely, from what I can tell. Finally convinced my work to pay for Ultimate so I no longer have to switch between PHPStorm and PyCharm.
To add support for a new language, you just download the first-party plugin pack (like Python plugin by Jetbrains for Python). Then point it to the interpreter/compiler, which can be set as a per-machine default and then overridden on a per-project basis as needed (like if you needed to use NumPy for a specific project, or a different NPM version). Most of the time it's just auto-detected and works out of the box... it only gets tricky if you have, say, macOS Python 2.7, homebrewed 3.x, and some strays in a Docker container. It'll detect all the ones it can and ask you to choose.
But other than that, projects can use multiple languages simultaneously with no additional configuration. You can even (in the IDE) combine multiple repos into one project, each with a separate git but presented together in the editor. Or use SQL/GraphQL inline in a JS file, for example. It all works pretty seamlessly if you DO have the right license (Ultimate).
In fact I believe the language-specific products are, for the most part*, stripped-down versions of Ultimate. It's all built on a relatively modular plugin system, with each language or module (like the database browser) as a plugin -- but they can't all be activated on every product, like you can't add the DB plugin to PyCharm Community Edition. Ultimate just allows you to enable every plugin.
*That's not 100% the case, maybe only like 90-95%. I have noticed some minor GUI differences between the products, such as being able to collapse buttons... but they are very minor compared to the benefit of being able to use all the languages in one IDE.
I think VSCode works like that too, but you'll need to install a lot more plugins to reach near-feature-parity with IntelliJ.
IMO that's the direct result of Israel being strong militarily, a reluctant status quo arrived at by the immense competence of the IDF. Earlier in history much of the Arab world would've much preferred Israel to not have existed at all. They Israelis had to carve out a niche for themselves through sheer force of will (and firepower).
> And - it directly started most of the wars it fought; and one other was an attack to reclaim land occupied by a previous Israeli campaign.
I don't think that's a very fair framing of the situation. I despise Israeli militancy, and I feel sorry for the Palestinians, and I wish we wouldn't support Israel's efforts to displace them... but that land has been contested since biblical times.
For many centuries the Jews lacked a proper homeland, and that did not at all end well for them. Most of the world's population lives on stolen or conquered land. Who "originally" owned the now-contested area isn't really relevant; both sides claim it as their ancestral homeland (and both sides are partially right, as far as I can tell as an outsider). More importantly, both sides live there now, regardless of who got there "first".
If Israel gave up arms, it would cease to exist within the week. If Israel did not so strongly defend itself, as in the Six-Day War, it would almost certainly have ceased to exist by now. Some of the Arab world tolerates Israel and may make tactical decisions to cooperate with them on limited bases. But that is a very far cry from outright accepting them as a friendly neighbor, E.U. style. Israel's survival needs are unlike those of most other developed nations in the world, who are largely surrounded by stable neighbors... it's comparable maybe only to Taiwan, Ukraine, South Korea, and other situations facing immediate volatility.
This isn't to excuse (what I consider) the excessive use of force on the Israeli part, but it's the excessive that I take issue with. If they didn't use force at all (or at least threaten to and actually have the capacity for), they really wouldn't exist for very long... history has shown that time and time again, and it's the very reason Israel was founded as such. They have been challenged, life-or-death style, in a way that very few other countries have been or foreseeably will be. If the USA lost a war, maybe we'd fail to accomplish some geopolitical objective... but it's unlikely the country would simply disappear altogether. If Israel lost a war, it's the next Holocaust.
That makes sense if they already have the network but not necessarily the easy to use APIs for serverless. Kinda a way to overlay new dev modalities onto old infrastructure, I suppose.
>> I understand that's the liberal and progressive thing to say. But if you really think about it, it reeks from hypocrisy. The "progressive" countries (who are they exactly?) like Canada, Sweden, Australia etc all need the U.S to protect them. They wouldn't want the U.S to go away, not in a million years.
Yeah, even a self-identified progressive, I unfortunately still mostly agree with you. Most of the liberals/progressives I've discussed foreign affairs with seem to have a pretty limited understanding of (or even interest in) military history. Not that I'm an expert by any stretch, but I do worry that they naively see the world as an unreasonably safe place. I don't think it is.
The American progressive strong suit is in domestic affairs -- leftist populism, basically -- not military strategy or even foreign policy at large.
Broadly, I suppose I believe in big hugs for my fellow citizens, big talks with our competitors, and big guns for our enemies (but we sure as heck shouldn't shoot first).
> Canada, Sweden, Australia etc all need the U.S to protect them
Y'know, Trump wasn't right about much, but maybe NATO really ought to pay its fair share in regional defense. Our forces are so disproportionate that NATO is less like an alliance and more like a protectorate. It can't just forever be "the Western world will fall apart absent American carriers"... if for no other reason than hypersonic missiles. We cemented global hegemon status in the post-WW2 years, but it's not a responsibility we should have to single-handedly carry into the indefinite future. If our allies need to build up their defenses, maybe we could encourage them by gradually bringing ours home. And if we have fewer foreign expeditions, cool, maybe we'd make fewer enemies.
In other words, I think our military should be strong enough to defend against homeland invasions and provide limit support to our allies, but not so strong that it runs the entire world's geosecurity. Somewhere in between is the question of what to do about Eurasia and specifically China... ideally we'd find some Cold-War like balance of mutually assured destruction, with neither side really wanting a hot war. Even better would be if we just cooperated economically with them and worked together on climate change, and let them run their social experiment while we run ours. We need to stop thinking we can singlehandedly liberate the world from oppression, or bring light to darkness, or whatever. We're just another country with big guns and small hearts... there's been many through history, none of which ended particularly well.
Yes, I agree to a large extent. Most of the world's strong extant states were forged in war (or is a quasi vassal state to one which was). We didn't get here by being nice to each other. A strong defensive military is something I think every state would be wise to have, so long as human nature remains what it is... we're not wizened philosopher-kings, more just horny, hungry apes.
The distinction I draw is in foreign interference in matters that do not directly threaten us. I would rather see us resign from our role as world police/bully and focus more on domestic affairs, severely scaling back our force projection abilities (namely, carrier groups whose homeland defense uses are limited). I don't believe in this idea that "the only way to protect ourselves is to shape the world in our image, and forcibly subjugate those who will not willingly convert". Yes, there are shitty dictators out there, there is real evil in the world, but we're no angels and we've done a really shitty job of trying to make other countries better (with limited exceptions, like post-WW2 Japan and Germany).
The thing is, sustainable peace through militant nationalism is also a pipe dream. It's never stable for long and it creates vast power differentials that breeds discontent and violence; eventually it bleeds back over to us. I'd bet, measured across a few decades, our forays in Afghanistan and Iraq will create more terrorists than we've actually stopped... our administrations think in 4-8 year terms, not 20+, incurring foreign policy debts that later generations will have to try to pay off in an increasingly unstable world compounded by not just virally-amplified ideologies but also skyrocketing inequality and climate change. There is no military force that can keep an unstable, discontent world of ~8 billion apes in check for long.
Absent either a world dictatorship or peaceful multilateral democracies, I'd settle for regional hegemonies and old-school spheres of influence instead... we stay out of China's way, they stay out of ours, we trade peacefully. That means some nations will fall, whether it's Israel (possible, but unlikely?) or Taiwan (probably), Ukraine, etc. Sucks for those countries, but by % of world population, I believe that will result in greater overall peace and prosperity.
Shrug. It's all pipe dreams. Always has been. Some of us just have bigger pipes, I guess.
So what do you think is a fairer way to measure governments? Ratio of important successes to important failures? A matrix of weighted policies and implementation scores?
You'd probably end up with something similar to to the UN's human development index (http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/HDI), in which the US ranks #17, behind Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Iceland, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Singapore, the UK, Belgium, New Zealand, and Canada. All of those are perfectly livable countries. My only criterion was "developed democracies", and Hong Kong isn't even much of a democracy anymore. I don't think that's an unreasonably high bar.
Our government is just on the low end of mediocre compared to other developed democracies, at least by the metrics I can think of.
If you can think of a better metric, I'm all ears.
Export controls means, one, that the product they're selling is likely a concern of national security, unlike, say, your average lockpick kit or GPS tracker. Two, it means the state gets to selectively pick and choose who it shares this technology with, using it as a tool of statecraft/diplomacy/subterfuge/sabotage. It's a recognition of the value of the technology, along with a desire to limit its availability to Israel's enemies.
NSO's own website says "NSO Group, develops best-in-class technology to help government agencies detect and prevent a wide-range of local and global threats." It wouldn't exist if not for state sponsorship.
So you end up with something like Flight PHP or Next.js's API routes, but still needs to be deployed and then manually managed and scaled.
Cloudflare Workers is innovative not because it's isolated or follows a particular syntax, but because they allow very fast and cheap functions to be run, globally, with zero maintenance on the customers' parts. Just write code and click save and it's available at data centers all around the world, instantly, for not even pennies.
Blueboat would be incredibly difficult to scale up and maintain across clusters. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no way to deploy this at a cost even remotely similar to what Cloudflare offers, since individual customers don't have their economies of scale (and peering agreements).
This isn't some far-flung conspiracy about dark forces puppeteering seemingly innocent companies. It's just people valuing profit over concern for human rights. It's a surveillance firm, what would you expect? What would be a benevolent use of this technology even be?
They both have this old-guard mentality of "might makes right" hegemony, which a lot of other countries (and some portion of their populations) don't like because it's broadly incompatible with a human-rights centered worldview that favors the pipe dream of peaceful multilateral democracies. Count myself as someone who dislikes this approach.
Whether it's planes or surveillance tech or reactor malware doesn't really matter, all just ammunition for their goals.
Israel at least has a survival need; it learned the (very) hard way that it has many enemies constantly seeking to destroy it. It's an us-or-them mentality hardened by centuries of oppression and decades of war.
America... now that's much harder to find an excuse for. And arguably we've spent all our resources on attacking Muslim scapegoats while China leapfrogs us. But hey, I don't make global policy, I just comment on it on the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSO_Group
That's a level of sponsorship way beyond simply being a customer... that's state espionage served with a side of profit. It's evil when the USA does it, it's evil when the Russians do it, it's evil when China does it, it's evil when Israel does it... but nobody does anything about it because all those states would prefer strong surveillance rather than rights for activists and journalists.
Hackers eating pizza: https://imgur.com/pD0vIMs
Flying cat: https://imgur.com/ytd94Un
Blue car: https://imgur.com/lOmx1SC (he's colorblind too)
Or a landscape, its supposed strength: field of grass on an island: https://imgur.com/a/fpD7PDm (I no longer wish to visit this island)
If you enjoy that sort of tinkering, more power to you... you're probably a better dev & devops person than I am.
What I'm hoping for is an easily reproducible dev environments with common-sense images that can be maintained and edited in the cloud, almost like Docker images, with all that stuff preconfigured... the latest interpreters, node, yarn, xdebug, webpack, blah blah all just preconfigured and ready to go. Next.js does some of that, the dev tool Lando tries to do that (but is pretty buggy), but all of it still requires a lot of manual configuration. And coding across platforms (like Windows desktop + Mac laptop) is still a huge PITA even though it all gets deployed to bog-standard LEMP stacks in the end.
It's just such a far cry from, say, being able to seamlessly use the Adobe Suite or Slack or Zoom or Microsoft Office across platforms and projects. I guess it's a bit unfair to compare first-party vendor software to messy open-source ecosystems, but that's what I'm ultimately griping about... I don't want to spend time doing devops instead of coding visitor-facing features. Some companies have dedicated people for that; our org can't afford that, so I just have to figure it out as I go, doing a piss-poor job most of the time. Wish there was a vendor + service to take care of that, and present just a usable IDE in the end, with all the internals abstracted away and maintained in the cloud. Ideally it would be a thin local client with native GUI but offloaded processing, vs a laggy screenshare.
I haven't tried Cloud9 in particular but have tried other cloud IDEs, which just felt like remote desktops running on someone else's machine that I still have to do all the same tooling and maintenance for myself. If Cloud9 or others DOES do what I want and I just missed it, please let me know.
shrug Maybe I'm just getting too old for this stuff. I miss the simple jQuery days when there was the DOM and that was it, not a bazillion layers of tooling and the super complex packagers and containers and other enterprise tech required to support them.
I hate fighting IDEs (whether it's IntelliJ or VSCode) before I can write useful code. Javascript has gotten so bloated that half the challenge of any new project is setting up tooling. God, I'd love a 1-click "create new project" and then a GDocs-like IDE in the cloud, and would happily pay to never have to configure that again myself.
Not to say any of it is impossible to learn, but it does take more time. It's a lot more complex than jquery because of the shadow DOM and all the timing issues arising from that vs working with real HTML nodes.
All else being equal, I'd definitely choose the candidate with direct React experience who already understands the challenges around that abstraction vs direct DOM manipulation.
And not really that different from the other free hosts out there (Github Pages, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Gatsby, Google App Engine). It's just easier to use.
"Edible food-like substances" (to steal a term from Michael Pollan) have their place in a society all too obsessed with convenience and time efficiency. I don't think they should ever be a replacement for whole foods and basic staples, but they are a nice and easy way to add flavor to an otherwise bland vegan meal.
Yes, whole foods are healthier, and you can make a nutritionally balanced, delicious vegan meal out of basic grains and legumes and greens and whatnot... but it's a hell lot of work, especially because most of that stuff tastes like nothing.
For omnivores, adding meat to just about anything helps a lot with flavor, between the meat itself and the juices/fats flowing from it. But adding tofu or beans doesn't really add much flavor beyond a little bit of umami. You really have to season or sauce the hell out of every meal to make it taste good. And after a while, everything tastes kinda same-y... more nutritional yeast, more soy sauce, more curry, some generic beige protein, blah blah.
As someone who went vegan starting with whole foods yet never becoming a good enough cook, the fake stuff is in fact a really nice way to change up otherwise boring meals after a few years.
They're still made of grains and legumes and such, but the seasoning is done by Someone Else™ who's much better at it. Yeah, it's less healthy, but...
If it bothers you, let Impossible Meat know: https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Next.js is maintained by an entire company (Vercel). If Flareact ever gains official Cloudflare support, that'd be wonderful!
Next.js is technically open-source, but unfortunately a lot of more powerful features depend on Vercel (who owns it)... it's actually bad enough that I'm worried about vendor lock-in, and wish I had done more due diligence upfront. It's only getting worse too, with features like Next.js Live collaboration (think GDocs for websites) being built around Vercel infrastructure.
Gatsby is another competitor, though way too complicated (requiring a transformation step to GraphQL, I think) and pricy/slow. Github Pages for similar sites.
For the CMS part of a jamstack, I really like DatoCMS for its editor-friendly features & GraphCMS for its dev-friendly features. Both are better IMO than the industry leader, Contentful (which is insanely overpriced).
Outside of serverless hosts, I love Datadog's synthetic tests for simulating & testing user journeys across pages.