throwawaaarrgh

That's a lot of money and time to spend on supporting someone else's bug-riddled software. You can't test literally all software that exists before you release a security patch. Just imagine testing every single solitary Windows application that exists, or has every existed, just to see if one of them crashes due to intentionally doing the wrong thing. What are they supposed to do, fix the 3rd party software? Delay fixing the security hole?

Testing is the responsibility of the 3rd party (in addition to using supported methods). If the 3rd party was part of a preview release program, they could test changes before they are officially released.

You must do BJJ, to be able to twist yourself into such knots to blame Microsoft for a 3rd party vendor's unsupported buggy hacks. No mention of how the 3rd party vendor lies by omission to the users by not telling them that their software is very literally using unsupported, buggy means to accomplish its goals. Leaving the user to blame Microsoft for the crash, when if the user knew the truth, they may feel differently, and maybe not even use the 3rd party software. But it feels better to blame the big bad corporation, despite the fact that they have not lied, and are just trying to fix security issues.

I think "debate everything" comes from:

1. Uncertainty. People haven't done X before, and are concerned about the outcome, so they delay, by debating. They don't know whether they're right or wrong. They're really just trying to figure out their own opinion. So they will bring up objections, even if they don't actually have a concrete reason to object. They just literally don't know if something is valid, so they pose a hypothetical. Another form of uncertainty is lack of trust. If somebody has trust that an outcome will be acceptable, then they can deal with any fears they might have about whether a given approach will have the outcome they hope for. If they can't trust the process, or people, they'll bring out road blocks.

2. Ego. Let's face it, we work with people with big egos. People who are smart, and capable, and know it.If their egos don't feel adequately compensated, they will debate until it is.

I think "just tell me what to do" is easier to understand:

1. Apathy. It's a real killer, and it can hit any organization. Sometimes people care too much; if they don't feel like they can affect change, that turns into caring too little. Or perhaps they've just been burned too often at this job. Frustration builds until the stress or friction is too much, and they compensate emotionally by disconnecting. Some people carry this from job to job, like a form of PTSD.

2. Inexperience. When you have a lot of experience, you mostly know what to do already. But if you're working on something very new, or the organizational hierarchy isn't clear, or goals aren't clear, or processes, or you just don't have a lot of professional experience, you can be lost in a sea of uncertainty, not sure what to do. Maybe you have ideas of what to do, but it's not clear how to decide on it. So you relent, just waiting for someone to give you some guidance.

In each of these cases, the missing component is: leadership. There must be good leadership to help people do their best work and keep the ship sailing. Bad leadership, or the absence of leadership, will lead back to these problems.

If you can write Python, Perl, Ruby, etc. Hell even yq in the shell. Then you have a full programming language that can output YAML or JSON in any way you want. No weird DSL, no twisting yourself into knots.

Just write normal code, make any data structure, print it as any data format. Call the code, output to temp file, use file, delete file.

Is it clunky? Yes. But it works, and you can't get any simpler.

Keep it simple, silly.

I've seen a lot of teams lately that are just making up a random workflow based on random ideas and whatever they feel like doing, and the managers say nothing. This doesn't lead to good product outcomes. Don't let your teams do whatever they want if you want good product outcomes.

That ship sailed years ago. We could have had "pipes between hosts" with a distributed OS design like Plan9. But Linus doesn't care, so we've got what we got. Until somebody forks the kernel and goes their own way for fun, it will never change.

Does it provide more value for your business than it distracts from your business? That's a difficult calculation. Personally, I love open source, but I wouldn't open source a business unless I needed to.

Promotions are not meritocratic. You get promoted if you are useful to the person promoting you; you'll play ball, follow orders, know a secret, can do a favor, are reliable, don't ruffle feathers, under promise and over deliver, make friends easy, etc. That's not merit, that's corruption.

This is true for one simple reason: Promotions are not weighed by an impartial algorithm, chosen by sorting, and doled out on a set schedule. They are submitted for consideration and approved by the powerful, when they feel like it, for whatever reasons they feel like.

The further up the hierarchy you go, the less exceptional people are. It's called the Peter Principle. Even if you used to be exceptional at your job, a promotion gives you a different job. And technical skill has almost nothing to do with ability to get promoted.

The only reason women might be promoted more is they're working twice as hard as the men. I'm sure if you asked them, they would rather have been men, when it comes to getting promotions. The bar would be a lot lower.

You're not paying attention then. Office politics applies to everyone. It's the one meritocratic thing about business. The person who's better at manipulating people goes to the top, regardless of race, gender, etc.

Worked on a system like this once. Nobody wanted to fix the actual backend problem so this limitation was a requirement. But I figured that advertising these little "quirks" in the login flow would give hackers ideas, so instead I just added a function to transform the "bad input" into an alternative set of characters that wouldn't have a negative effect on upstream. Since you couldn't view the saved password, nobody realized they were being transformed behind the scenes. Stupid yet effective.

You saved $35 a month but spent 3x as much time maintaining and tweaking your self hosting. I guess we know how much your time is worth!

It's not strange. The last thing a poor Mexican in a foreign country thinks about is whether their ingredients are authentic enough. You buy what's readily available.

(2014)

Fwiw, sinks have overflows: https://www.thespruce.com/the-purpose-of-a-sink-overflow-271...

The computer equivalent is probably load shedding

That's not a great comparison though. Commercial Airlines are known for safety and reliability, startups are known for being tire fires

Cars are pretty simple to estimate value on. Take a car, estimate its useful life left, estimate TCO. Compare to new.

If the batteries are good for 200,000 miles and you get one at 75,000, for half the price of new, and you pay cash (financing on used is typically terrible interest rates), then this is an economical purchase. If they require serious repairs other than the battery then maybe it's not economical.

There's some small advantage to buying used, even if it's not the best deal. It's a fixed amount of money for a fixed amount of time (life left). If you hate the car and want to change it, or it gets totaled and insurance won't pay for it, then your financial hit is less than if you had paid full price. Your next car can still be new, or used if you find a better deal. Finally, if you have the means, there's no shame in wasting some money on something you really want.

However, being used, and being a used rental car, are two different things. Buying it from a fleet, at least it would be driven somewhat sanely. But there's no crazier driver than a rental driver.

If you make a space for community, and give it what it needs, it'll flourish. But distain it in search of cash and it'll die.

Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can find a business next to the community, to keep money coming in. But it has to be something more than advertising, or you'll be chasing your tail til it falls off.

There's still a future for a music business combined with community. There's many problems for both fans and artists that haven't been solved. Just takes somebody to solve it, without focusing on the profit. If they're very lucky it'll last.

Bullshit clickbait is bullshit clickbait.

Scrum doesn't inherently suck. Scrum can work if you do it right. It won't if you don't.

Just leaving it up to the individual team leads to the same result. If the team sucks at managing their work, the team will suck at managing their work. It doesn't matter what you follow if you suck at it.

This isn't as catchy and feel-good as the bullshit clickbait that reinforces what you want to believe (that the process is the problem, not you or your team). But it's accurate.

SO answers, SEO-driven blog posts and YouTube videos are not good learning tools. They provide shallow answers to specific questions. They don't teach you deeper lessons or give a nuanced understanding, and they don't give the experience of practice. I believe programmers have become worse over time due to depending on them.

If the only programming you do is generic commercial work, you won't get very good, especially if it's at the same job or on the same kind of project.

You can learn more about programming by giving yourself new and challenging projects at home. Doing both personal and professional work is the fastest way to progress while learning lessons from both. (commercial work teaches you the "professional" side of software engineering, which has almost nothing to do with programming)

There are a lot of different factors at play. What you're seeing looks similar but has many different causes in different cases, like having a runny nose. Lots of different things cause it, same symptom.

Software can decay, hardware can decay, both can exacerbate each other. The registry gets filled up, the filesystem gets fragmented, the software accumulates in memory, upgrades of the same software accumulate hacks and poor design leads to worse fixes to problems, and slowly buggier versions are shipped. The hard drive slowly fails, the SSD loses viable blocks, the fan and heatsink gets clogged with dust and less efficiently cools the system, the battery loses capacity which causes the system to throttle itself, the power supply components slowly degrade causing voltage inconsistency, tin whiskers develop.

The simplest explanation I can give is entropy. Everything in the universe is in a state of decay. Eventually the thing decays so much it breaks down.

McDonalds is a franchise. Franchise owners set prices and promotions. The cost of running any given McDonald's is going to be different based on many factors. Hence the prices are different.

Somebody should tell them Docker can run in rootless mode.

So it turns out that running your own servers isn't always the best idea

> Why did the people who are meant to be our leaders not do anything?

This is by design. A representative democracy is not intended to do what the people want. The representatives know the people are ignorant, obedient, comfortable, and scared. So the people just stand there mouths agape while the representatives do (or not do) whatever they want. The only consequence comes from other representatives. No representative fears the people. They're sheep.

I put on my robe and wizard hat.... for the last time. :'(

Some businesses have a higher purpose. Some actually want to help people, or the environment, and commerce is just the means to do that. Insane, right! You won't find em in silicon valley.

"Try and get a job at somewhere growing rapidly"

Personally I try and get a job at a company whose mission and ethics I believe in so I don't feel like a hapless techno-weenie cog in some generic startup wheel whose driving purpose is to give the founders a nice exit.

Sadly for my skillset, the people hiring are generally evil or their net effect on the world is negative. Looking into goat farming.

HIPAA requires that no entity involved leak any PHI or penalties will be applied, you absolutely have to do more than "do risk analysis/management".

The irony here is carpenters aren't generic. You don't hire "a carpenter", you hire a cabinetmaker, a framer, a fine woodworker, a cooper. It would be ridiculous to hire a framer for cooperage.

Most people doing tech hiring are idiots. But most people getting hired are also idiots. So I think it all shakes out about even. If the results actually mattered, we would have some kind of industry wide standards, people would need to understand the tools they use or computer science, etc. That's not really the case anymore. You can hire any monkey who's gone through a boot camp and they'll fake like they know what they're doing pretty well. The work will be shit, but you can sell shitty work as long as it looks good to the customer.

"Big Boat blocked lanes, so many shipz waiting, lolz, oh noes!" vs "Shipping transit rerouted around African cape, prices might increase in a few months"

If it's not entertaining nobody gives a crap