GrumpyGoblin

Someone doesn't know their Java history. Oracle bought Java 16 years ago in 2010. At that time Sun had been working on Java 7 for over 4 years with no release date in sight. Oracle trimmed the fat and released Java 7 in less than a year. And since then has kept a regular release cadence. Sun would probably still be working on Java 7.

I'm confused. Where does this article say anything about starting from scratch? Is there a chunk of the story missing? It jumps straight from talking about PLATO Notes to referring to Lotus Notes. There is a "spoiler alert" in there about IBM acquiring Lotus for Notes, but it doesn't spoil anything in this story. Did IBM try to rewrite it from scratch or something? What's happening?

Cool

Not saying it's not a problem, I actually don't know, but new CPU's are just old models with more improvements/tooling. Same with TV's. And cars. And clothes. Everything is. That's how improving things works. Running out of raw data doesn't mean running out of room for improvement. The data has been the same for the last 20 years, AI isn't new, things keep improving anyways.

Meh. Good article but not sure it's globally relevant.

Spotlight is about personality. Some people are visible, outspoken, and in the spotlight, and impactful. Others are quiet, subdued, behind the scenes but impactful. Some of the best developers I've known have been on either end of the spectrum.

At the end of the day it's about impact. When the quiet guy gets the job done every time, people still notice. When the loud guy doesn't, people notice even more.

Sure, there are cases where one guy screams from the mountaintops about how much he has done and gets promoted. And there are cases where the quiet guy gets passed over no matter how well he does. But these always wash in the end unless you work for a supremely shitty company. And even then they tend to work themselves out in life eventually. Even if it sucks for the people involved at the time.

Impact is the name of the game. Loud or quiet is irrelevant.

You require "statistical calculations" to support the notion that a sample size of 4000 people in two countries, two of the most modernized and affluent nations on the planet at that, is too small for a study to conclude how the human brain works across billions of people alive today across the world, Much less in human history? How about common sense?

Ok, let's do some math.

Approximately 108 to 117 billion humans are estimated to have lived in human history. Let's take 110 billion (the low end) for our purposes.

4,000 / 110,000,000,000 = 0.000003636%

Let's just go with people living today, which is approximately 8 billion (the low end).

4000 / 8 billion = 0.00005%

Not sure if that covers the "statistical" part of your requirement, but it covers the "calculations" part.

I myself would be hesitant to make claims about knowing how neurons and brains and ages work based on a sample size of pessimistically 0.000003636% or even optimistically 0.00005% of the human population and their brains.

> based on the brain scans of nearly 4,000 people aged under one to 90, mapped neural connections and how they evolve during our lives.

That is an absurdly small sample size to make such a conclusion.

It seems this age range could at least partly be culturally attributed. In modern industrialized life, many people don't have to "grow up" until a later age. At the risk of generalizing, people have more support from family, friends, and society at large.

Is the forming of those neurons based on some natural law, or is that people just haven't had to live the experiences that do so until their 30's nowadays?

As far as I know, forming neurons isn't something that "just happens". It happens due to catalysts in life. In pre-modern society, and indeed most likely in under-industrialized nations today, those catalysts, those experiences, would happen earlier. As others mentioned, there is a clear correlation with the typical age in which modern society gets married, settles down, and has kids.

I wonder what that era age would have been 200+ years ago.

There is another aspect that many people aren't discussing, the communication aspect.

For a medium to large organization with independent programs that need to talk to each other, Kafka provides an essential capability that would be much slower and higher risk with Postgres.

Standardizing the flow of information across an organization is difficult. Kafka is crucial for that. To achieve that in Postgres would require either a shared database which is inherently risky or would require a customized API for access which introduces another layer of performance bottleneck and build/maintenance cost and decreases development productivity/performance. So you have a double whammy of performance degradation with an API. And for multiple consumers operating against the same events (for example: write to storage, perform action, send to data lake), with a database you need a magnitude more access, so N*X with N being the number of consumers multiplied by the query to consume. With three consumers you're tripling your database queries, which adds up fast across topics. Now you need to start fixing indexes and creating views and other workload to keep performance optimal. And at some point you're just poorly recreating Kafka in a database.

The common denominator in every "which is better" debate is always use case. This article seems like it would primariy apply to small organizations or limited consumer need. And yea, at that point why are you using events in the first place? Use a single API or database and be done with it. This is where the buzzword thing is relevant. If you're using Kafka for your single team, single database, small organization, it's overkill.

Side note: Someone mentioned Postgres as an audit log. Oh god. Done it. It was a nightmare. Ended up migrating to pub/sub with long-term storage in Mongo. which solved significant performance issues. Audit log is inheritently write once read many. There is no advantage to storing in a relational database.

At my company there is a team like this who are solely responsible for a significant piece of internal infrastructure.

People bring them ideas. They reject them out of hand. "Can't be done" "We'd have to rewrite the whole thing" "That's not how it works". Even if you write all the code and show them exactly how to do it and that it does work.

Then they come back three moenths, six months, a year later and have a big demo showing the cool thing "they thought of". Yep, the idea they previously rejected, usually pretty close to exactly. They live by the ole adage NIH.

They're a fun bunch.

I like the realistic idea of Duolingo. I know I'm not going to get fluent with it and I'm not trying to, but I do want a good app to expand vocabulary and basic structures that I can do in 30 minutes a day. And I'm a sucker for streaks, but not all the other gamification. I don't need gems or XP or potions, just a streak to form habits, which I am bad at and need that positive affirmation.

Does anyone know any alternative apps that achieve the same goals with less of the fluff?

This is really helpful. Every comment is about immersion, I get it people, but how do you achieve that in the real world. Most of those comments seem to ignore that fact that many people can't move to another country for a couple years and leaving their significant other to get a new one that natively speaks the desired language isn't a great suggestion. I understand those are the best ways to learn, but let me run that by my wife and kids and we'll see how that goes.

This is a ridiculous reply. I'm not friends with Google. We're frenemies at best.

Google has zero reason to keep this effort going. It won't make them any significant money.

If I were a bettin' man, and I am, I'd say it's a promotion project for some developer or team who is going to abandon it as soon as they move on. Which is SOP for Google.

Aaaaaand it's shut down

Widget appearance is tied to *icon appearance. Grumble grumble. I want clear for my widgets but default for my dock and other icons. Too bad so sad me I guess.

edit: replaced dock with icon, because it affects much more than just dock

Uber didn't have to convince anyone, taxis were ripoffs. It didn't even have to always do with money. Taxis asked people where they were going and drove off if it wasn't far enough was a significant issues. Taxis not picking up black people. Many taxis in my town were dirty and and the drivers were jerks or creepy or both. With protections built into law and no competition the industry didn't have to even try to cater to the customer.

The taxi industry sealed it's own death warrant a long time ago. Ride sharing services solved a real problem at the right time. If that cost a bit more, it was well worth it. I won't take a taxi now unless I am forced to.

Man, the number of times Claude has told me this when I was absolutely wrong should also be a count on this. I've deliberately been wrong just to get that sweet praise. Still the best AI code sidekick though.

Podman networking is extremely unreliable. Our company made an effort to switch to get away from Docker Enterprise. We had to kill the effort because multiple people had random disconnects and packet drops with a range of services including K8S, Kafka, and even basic applications, both internal and in host network.

```

> kubectl port-forward svc/argocd-server -n argocd 8080:443

Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:8080 -> 8080

Forwarding from [::1]:8080 -> 8080

Handling connection for 8080

Handling connection for 8080

Handling connection for 8080

E0815 09:12:51.276801 27142 portforward.go:413] an error occurred forwarding 8080 -> 8080: error forwarding port 8080 to pod 87b32b48e6c729565b35ea0cefe9e25d8f0211cbefc0b63579e87a759d14c375, uid : failed to execute portforward in network namespace "/var/run/netns/cni-719d3bfa-0220-e841-bd35-fe159b48f11c": failed to connect to localhost:8080 inside namespace "87b32b48e6c729565b35ea0cefe9e25d8f0211cbefc0b63579e87a759d14c375", IPv4: dial tcp4 127.0.0.1:8080: connect: connection refused IPv6 dial tcp6 [::1]:8080: connect: connection refused

error: lost connection to pod

```

People had other issues also. It looks nice and I would love to use it, but it just currently isn't mature/stable enough.

Yes, but they call them senior. My company is bad at hiring.

A lot of disagreement apparently but I agree with you. Been doing this a long time and never seen it be a good idea.

I completed one successfully and it paralyzed a team of five for a year. Thankfully it was an internal product being rewritten for sale so the affect on users was minimal, but we also lost a year of potential sales.

Every other attempt I've seen has started with beautiful ideas, rainbows and pots of gold at the end, but went south after the first 20% code written and things got hard.

It's possible to do if you're willing to cripple development efforts or progress for an extended period and understand the result will have it's own issues and a rewrite isn't a silver bullet.

Like Up? This is amazing.