IggleSniggle

This kinda thing is so rough, and I can really relate to the questioning of your own sanity part when everyone around you is insisting something works in a particular way that is just factually incorrect.

I got hired into a pretty old small technology company that has over a decade of tech debt, and "how the whole system works" is different depending on which engineer you're talking to. You have to do a context shift to a different engineering reality just to do basic improvements to the system. Lots and lots of built up confusion over years of incremental changes, some of which under pressure no doubt, some well intentioned half-refactors, some almost dead code...imagine your well established corporate morass and then give it a shoestring budget.

It's scrappy in its own way, but the threads where people advocate "don't worry about the tech debt, if the company succeeds they will have the budget to fix it" don't account for the middle ground of not having huge success but having enough success to continue indefinitely. I guess that could mean you could fix the problem over longer time spans, but people do t stay at orgs like this long enough for that to happen, because the job of fixing it is no fun and you can't just throw huge amounts of money at the problem.

But how do you measure the timing of those instructions without a precise timer? Yes it was the instructions that produce the reproducible timing, and that timing will be consistent on the system, but the measurement of those timings from the performance timers will not display that same consistency. Is there another way to measure from a within-session context?

It's not odd as in a more unusual system, but odd in that it is widely incompatible with the calendar of most of the world, but still official calendar. Kinda like the Kodak calendar (which was instead 13 28-day months (364 days), and iirc does the off-day adjustments over the corporate winter holiday...actually pretty reasonable)

Like how Spider-Man actually belongs to Sony, not Marvel, and it gets loaned back to Marvel? Or more like how Blade isn't part of the MCU, but totally belongs to Marvel?

It's a setting in Firefox that is off by default because it can make some websites super annoying to deal with. But it's easy to get to, and allows you to be totally random per request or per tab-session, iirc

If you're the only one doing it, sure, but if none of your information is reliable at all, then every single other "totally unique" visitor is in the same category as you. From the other end, it could be 10,000 visitors or 1, all you know is that they are unique...since they look like a different totally unique fingerprint on every visit

It doesn't matter if you're fingerprintable if your fingerprint is distinct on every visit.

I don't buy that cover your tracks applies to the Firefox strategy to privacy. The Firefox strategy is to make your browser incredibly unique every time. If you visit the same website twice, you look very unique but like two totally different visitors. This is effective for real privacy and cover your tracks doesn't account for it well

Years ago you could get crazy specific fingerprints from canvas. It got far less precise when Chrome introduced jitter into timers and treated performance timers as security sensitive functions. The main difference between canvas and this other stuff is that canvas couldn't be spoofed whereas everything else could and can be spoofed, or was so general as to be useless as an identifier.

Dave the Diver just turns into a slog is all. It's fantastic at the start when everything is novel, and all the systems hold promise. But the systems themselves turn out to not have good gameplay loops, so right around the underwater village it starts to kinda suck, which ironically is right around when all the systems are mature enough that to play well you have a giant list of "todo" items across a variety of systems, many of which you may find boring, but are obliged to interact with anyway, sort of like real life.

The advantage a game like factorio has over DtD is that you can kind of abandon huge sections and "start fresh" while still collecting rent from the work you did earlier to fund your new excursions. I guess DtD does this to a degree, but there's a lot less freedom of intellectual movement.

This is why I like Against the Storm. It is a novel (if familiar) challenge every time, and every time you "beat the odds" the game forces you to move on to the next harder challenge, "you beat this puzzle, you need a harder on."

The problem with side projects is that they do not have a well defined goal. Or they do, in which case something like Factorio won't have any appeal because you can just work on something more meaningful instead. Factorio is for people who want to keep programming but are too frustrated or cynical about the real world to do it there. If the real world was better, they would do it there. If the real world could be fixed with programming, they would do it there. Many have tried, only to discover that what they thought were technical problems are really people problems.

For what it's worth, my children write letters. And by "write letters," I mean "produce artifacts filled with a combination of mediums: words, paint, markers, stamps, cut-outs, quotes, etc." They understand conveyance better than I ever have, despite being a professional information-handler. I think letters are both more and less than described here.

When exactly did you perceive cars replacing the horse? I happen to live in a very equestrian area; I think you'd be hard pressed to convince folks that the horses have even been replaced

My contention is how would you perceive the difference between a needle in a haystack and a thread-puller in a haystack

I'm pretty sure it was Socrates but I might be hallucinating

Sshhh, we've still got like a year of advantage over the folks that haven't learned about searching the Internet and still have to drive to their local university library...don't squander it!

I 100% agree with the point you are making. The only aspect that obscures it is that paying employers will happily pay to support interests that are, on inspection, a waste of time.

In that aspect, I am hopeful. Maybe if "waste of time" activities are commoditized, "professionals" can instead focus on "what is important," whatever that might be.

As a professional 2x4 nailer and gluer, I assure you that I have a ton more deliverables for my client. The downside is that now I actually have to put some thought into my work; you know, put some engineering work into it.

The upside is that I can produce a shit-ton of one-shot code in record time, so I've got time to face the downside.

I have no idea if you're correct about this or not. With 8 billion people in the world, and a significant number of those people working as "intelligent agents," how would you perceive the difference?

It is possible to over-select on skepticism about other species. Imho, the simplest explanation is that it is far more likely that there is nothing special about us, and a mere quirk of say, the combination of tool-use, foresight, and social cohesion that makes humanity special.

Or is it special? We are just a well oiled operant conditioning system, it does not mean that we are able to think the way cats can.

I think most dog owners would tell you that their adult dogs can communicate things like this, but that the language is unfortunately siloed into a very personal relationship that is difficult for even the human part of the pair to demonstrate, making it difficult to do science about

Yes, exactly!

And since "important" is relative to the person making the sacrifice, it's easy for a person to declare something a sacrifice when what they were giving up was not especially important to them, or on the other hand for someone to dismiss a "real sacrifice" that someone else has made as unimportant.

Not that this matters, really. But I think it's important not to use them synonymously. In the case of an opportunity cost, you are acknowledging that there were things given up. In the case of a sacrifice, you are saying there were things given up _and it hurt_.

It really depends whether or not by "sacrifice" someone is just saying "opportunity costs." There are trade offs in all actions/inactions.

I don't disagree that it was an ideological "essay" but I dunno why you're linking that when it's most associated with Aristotle, in particular:

"What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others."

Maybe you're suggesting that that essay popularized the phrasing? But I'm pretty sure even as a coined "term" it was around before then

Castle of Illusion was great though

I have seen over-reliance on the facade pattern devolve into endless indirection that can make the code needlessly confusing. If you are already familiar with the codebase, it doesn't seem like a big deal, but when you onboard, you'll find your new teammate combing through file after file after file just to discover, "oh, there's never any external API call or specific business logic involved, we were just reading a static json file from disk that does not change its content during a single run."

Using the known baked in stdlib functions for standard behavior removes a lot of potential uncertainty from your codebase (while also making it sometimes harder to test).

Just to work this out together a little more in discussion form, since I appreciate your attitude:

Consider these two scenarios:

- read "test1-config.json" from disk, into whatever most easy JSON-adjacent format makes sense for your lang

- just use the JSON-adjacent format directly

Isn't the difference between these that one requires coupling input configuration of the environment to the tests (possibly inclusive of env vars and OS concerns around file I/o), making running the tests more confusing/complicated in aggregate, while the other requires coupling input configuration to the tests, making the unit under test clearer but potentially less reflective of the overall system?

Effectively this is just an argument between integration tests and unit tests. Unit testers certainly have the rhetorical upper hand here, but I think the grug-brained developers among us feel that "the whole program should be a pure function."

That can ultimately be reduced to a P-NP problem.

> it was literally impossible to tell what code was going to do simply by reading it, because it is impossible to know what is being injected at runtime except by inspecting it during runtime. It's a pretty frustrating experience when reading an entire code base doesn't tell you what the code actually does.

I've worked in "legacy" nodejs code since node 0.x. Glad to hear that there might be hope of codebases that don't have this problem. I thought typescript would help, but I've learned that fancy generics can ensure that it's still quite possible to have no idea what something will actually do in a real world environment, you'll just have a lot more cognitive overhead in wondering about it.

To be clear, I love ts and fancy generics that try to impose a Haskell-like determinacy on js Object structure with exclusivity and exception guarantees and all the rest; I just also hate it/them, at the same time.

There's a lot of room for nuance. If you "just read the fucking file" but the file isn't a "real" configuration file then isn't it just a "mock?" If you replace all network calls with an interceptor that forwards all calls and responses, and just check what's happening as a "listener," aren't you mocking out the network calls to a non-real implementation?

At the end of the day, tests are necessarily a mock-up of what's real. You just happen to disagree with where some people put the abstraction layer. I also would like to make my tests more "real" but I have a lot of sympathy for folks that are trying to test something smaller without involving eg a file. After all, the whole point of "everything is a file" in Unix is that we shouldn't need to worry about this detail, it's an OS concern. If you write to a file that's not actually a file on disk but actually a device, that it should fundamentally be okay and work as expected.

This is essentially the reason I do my subscriptions as Apple mediated. It always feels a little dirty to prop up that situation, but it's a legit valuable service to me that they make it so easy manage subscriptions and see payment tiers _indirectly_ from the seller