yawboakye

“pour encourager les autres.”

cont: compare the speeches and comments of other leaders at the just ended wef summit to the comments of the irish prime minister at the same summit. it’s as if ireland is insulated from the threats facing europe. we’re not, but that’s how oblivious and non-chalant our first citizen is. it’s heartbreaking to watch.

i’ve observed with trepidation how terribly ireland has been run in the last 5 years or so. that’s when i’ve been on the ground. with that experience it’s easy to understand why the country is the way it is and will remain so for the foreseeable future. in private conversations, i’ve lamented with rigorous arguments based on both the history of the island, their hatred for the english, the number one priority of their struggle for independence (ie for the expulsion of the english and not a maturity into statehood), etc.

ireland, like all independent african states, doesn’t know what statehood is, its people (aka elite) not practiced in statecraft. but its the configuration of the world that they also get a god-given right to atrociously run and mismanage some god-given resources. it’s a terrible thing to experience from within. a nightmare!

battle of my life. several times i’ve had to update my agent instructions to prefer modern and usually better syntax to the old way of doing things. largely it’s worked well for me. i find that making the agents read release notes, and some official blog posts, helps them maintain a healthy and reasonably up-to-date instructions on writing go.

> paying a few people to not work

not in this case though. as explained elsewhere, the artist is a dying career choice in ireland owing to economic reasons. no artist == drub society therefore the incompetent government intervenes the only way incompetence approves: free money. making the state function is much harder, and that’s not what these politicians signed up for. reducing electricity bill by 50% is a herculean task so how about jacking up taxes in one place and giving it back as free money in another? this is the modus operandi of the irish government.

<rant>

the irish government is adept at misplaced priorities, (very) short-term thinking, pursuers of feel-good vibes, basically everything besides running a state. incompetence here has bred the need for more and varied welfare programs just so we can have a variety of careers that cater to the needs of life. of course, necessity of the arts is undisputed. but can the artist make a career here when the money you make from a show, including tips, can’t pay your utility bills? when your income can’t afford you decent accommodation?

</rant>

worked well for a bit. but then the program became popular and that’s when it hit the curb. terrible loss, imo. it was a brilliant idea to encourage open source work with a token reward. it relied heavily on good intentions, which quickly disappeared with the popularity.

spain isn’t a great example here. it has some of the most racist fans football has ever seen and yet there’s no action. only italy probably compares. if there was a government agency going after black and brown people (ie non-white) i wouldn’t bet on the spanish population to come to their rescue. lamine yamal, a young footballer of moroccan descent hasn’t been spared the vitriol of the spanish hooligans even though he was top 3 best player at the recent euro (where he helped spain to victory).

point being, given that ice is going after non-whites and is getting by, a spanish ice will get by too, with probably more ease.

i’m not associated with temporal, nor does the link above have any referrer nonsense in there. i don’t profit from referring to it here. in fact it may well be a household name in the hn community. that out of the way, it’s not wrong to point to a proper resource that can explain and demonstrate my argument better than a couple of words could. temporal is open source[0] so maybe a github link would have been more palatable?

[0]: https://github.com/temporalio/temporal

that’s setting yourself up for trouble, imo. intermediate states solve this problem, and economically. for mature production system see temporal[0]. their magic sauce is good intermediate states.

[0]: https://temporal.io/

state machines to the rescue, ie i think the nature of asynchronous processing requires that we design for good/safe intermediate states.

got it. is it necessary, then, to couple queue db with app db? if answer is no then we can’t make a necessity argument here, unfortunately.

schema migrations will save our careers! \o/

the problem i see here is that we end up treating the background job/task processor as part of the production system (e.g. the server that responds to requests, in the case of a web application) instead of a separate standalone thing. rails doesn’t make this distinction clear enough. it’s okay to back your tasks processor with a pg database (e.g. river[0]) but, as you indirectly pointed out, it shouldn’t be the same as the production database. this is why redis was preferred anyways: it was a lightweight database for the task processor to store state, etc. there’s still great arguments in favor of this setup. from what i’ve seen so far, solidqueue doesn’t make this separation.

[0]: https://riverqueue.com/

> i’m italian

unfortunately this preamble doesn’t add the weight you assume it should. what has being italian got to do with having an opinion on this? this and all the other “italian here” takes below. fwiw unless eastdakota is being intentionally malicious, he, with the cloudflare legal team, understands the situation and its implications for cloudflare better than any random italian.

patiently waiting for grokipedia’s article on grokipedia. it seems to not be available at the moment. i’m interested from a philosophical perspective: on the completeness of self-description. for example, here’s wikipedia on wikipedia[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

the pursuit of truth doesn’t work by keeping so-called falsehoods up while a debate rages on about their veracity. especially given that there’s no indication on wikipedia of contested facts. i may not be involved in the debate but i’d love some indication and perhaps a hyperlink to where the debate is happening.

the proper discussion you want will never happen. it’s an exercise in persuasion ie trying to move people from one entrenched position to another, and there’s nothing more impossible than that. the only way out is to offer competition, and that’s what grokipedia seems to be doing. check the history of christianity, heresy, reformation. when the catholic church set itself up as the object to be won over persuasively it successfully stifled doctrinal progress. until the intolerants exited.

there are many ways to account for the fall of the roman empire, and everyone chooses their favorite (usually depending on where their interest bends). for example, it could be explained by the increased usage of mercenaries in the roman army. i like this theory because the fall was brought by losses to renegade forces. it could also be explained by bad leadership.

if the wealth isn’t inherited then it obviously requires extraordinary effort to amass. i’m not a billionaire and it’s not from a lack of trying to be. the fact that my efforts over the years—which are non-trivial btw—haven’t made me one is a clear signal.

starting and running a successful business is extraordinary effort. my life is better thanks to founders of all the companies whose good and services i depend on. i’m full of gratitude for their extraordinary efforts because they’ve made life worth living.

> putting money in the hands of the ultra wealthy

that’s a very sinister way to describe the reward for their extraordinary efforts. who’s putting money in their hands? where did this ‘who’ get the money from?

if i understood the article, these people (1) didn’t make their money in your country, and (2) are not making money in your country. they just happen to reside there. it seems nonsensical to me to tax revenue that was made in foreign land. but people who love and swear by taxes think that more tax revenue can solve world hunger.

if the uk wants tax money on revenue maybe they should incentivize these so-called super-rich to run their affairs from within the uk?

eu resident here. i’ve observed with sadness what a scared and terrified lots the europeans have become. but at least their young people can do drugs, party 72 hours straight, and graffiti all walls in berlin so hey what’s not to like?

one day some historian will be able to pinpoint the exact point in time that europe chose to be anti-progress and fervent traditionalist hell-bent on protecting pizza recipes, ruins of ancient civilization, and a so-called single market. one day!

one wonders why colors exists after all. why, we should know all about vegetation, streams, living, and non-living organisms so that their chromatic attributes are very unnecessary. monochrome for the win! i propose dark gray btw /s

on a more serious note: somehow nature choose to let us see colors, and this sense has been immensely useful to our existence and pleasure. maybe go could learn a thing or two from nature?

it remains true to this day. gascon[0] is still spoken in south of france, by both young and old. i know because i've heard it spoken. the idea that the french speak french, italians italian, is very modern. european nations weren't as properly integrated as modern history will have us believe. iirc the integration sped up post-ww2. cf seeing like a state[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gascon_dialect

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

what seems to have worked for me:

- speak to them frequently and deliberately remind them of how immense their help has been to me. i try to share important updates with them as well.

- gifts

- paying it forward. easiest, kind of natural responsibility though (even if no one helped you). hence least emphasized as a way to show gratitude.

tautological. math is language.

there's always more work to do. the workforce is always tied up in a few areas of work. once they're freed, they're able to work in new areas. the unemployment due to technological development isn't due to a reduction in work (as in quantity of work available and/or necessary). the more efficient we become, the more work areas we open up.

rousseau is a fraud of the first order.

very few philosophers dared to live by their theories. the famous failures of aristotle (in the case of alexander) and plato in syracuse (where he saw firsthand that the philosopher-king is at best a book character) are good examples. seneca didn’t live stoically: he was avaricious and didn’t bother to incite civil war over unpaid debt, if ancient sources are to be believed. he failed horribly with nero, who later instructed him to commit suicide for treasonous crimes. again, if ancient sources are to be believed, he fumbled his suicide out of raw fear.

the cynics, though, made a good life but that’s not because they had a better philosophy. it’s because cynicism is base/primitive logic available to the brute as well as the civilized man.

with all due respect, some of these journals got themselves into untenable positions that require twisting one’s self into a pretzel to defend their practices and decisions. for example, i had to cancel my acm subscription because the communications deteriorated in quality, shifting focus from publishing more on the science and practice of computing to sociopolitical issues. there was more articles on social intervention, blacks/minorities in tech, etc that reduced the useful content to about 40% of the journal, imo. not what i signed up for even though the identity police will help me know that i’m a minority in computing—a fact i wasn’t aware of until recently.

i guess at some point in these last 8 years or so, one accrued extra points for publishing articles along those lines. who knows, it probably earned acm more subscriptions, donations, pats on the back, sensitivity points, etc. and so it reinforced itself and resulted in even more sociopolitical articles. but it was a letdown for someone who wanted to passively follow developments in computing. so i left.