SanderNL

Who cares? Those who measure actual impact instead of showing off.

Focus on what matters is my only advice. Hint: it’s not your editor.

Developer productivity is not and never was bottlenecked by their tools.

One snap of the fingers in one of the many layers above us and million dollar projects succeed or fail. We are always a fancy dinner or business relation gone sour away from success or failure.

Vim or emacs come into play at layer 245 in the system and their impact on the final business reality is approximately 0,003%.

It’s sad to not last forever? That’s an interesting thought. I understand, don’t get me wrong, but it’s completely unnatural in so many ways.

Always refuse them, close to zero problems.

I can’t think of a technical reason a website without auth needs cookies to function.

This anti-learning attitude is common, but I don’t find it admirable.

To me this is like a dev saying “screw Git, I just want to do console.log(). All this complexity is sabotaging my productivity.”

Modern jobs, even health care, require learning about and managing complexity. It’s not just “taking care of people”. Throwing your hands up and saying “I’m old”, which is a lousy excuse because I know plenty able old people and completely digitally illiterate young people, is not a viable solution.

Now, whether we want that as a society is another topic. But for the foreseeable future adapting to complexity and actually taking the time to sit down and learn this shit is IMO the only way forwards.

Businesses are some kind of feudal leftovers that refuse to die. The serfs not only accept it, they actively defend it. Meanwhile the billionaires lean back and smile.

I don’t see why nation states should be democracies, but “businesses” should be private dictatorships. It’s a waste of shared resources. Your personal army of value generating serfs is taking away from our collective capacity to do useful communal work.

As always, tech people think tech is the important part of tech.

Yes and doing that requires a solid non-stop and consistent 3 working LoC per minute for six hours straight. I don’t think a human is capable of processing that kind of volume unless it is pure boilerplate.

I can see LLM’s playing a role here..

There is something off here.

- 1000+ applications, 2 interviews. Holy batman. That’s what, 4+ applications a (work)day for a year straight? How do you even find these positions.

- “Air tight”, god-tier CV.

- Only doing “PR”s.

- Handling “setInterval”s.

Charity? I sympathize somewhat, but I’m also disgusted by the utter lack of respect for government and societal service in general. That shit means something.

I wish to believe there are still people that don’t care about making Yet Another few hundred thousand and just want to actually contribute to society instead of working on ad tech or whatever bullshit.

Capitalism is a brutal, fatally flawed system that just so happens to work pretty well depending on which side of the game you are on. Sometimes, everybody sort of gets by on it, but that requires sustained heavy-handed out-of-band correction also known as government intervention.

We have set a game in motion that even sounds bad in theory leads to hideous results. That it quasi-works in practice is a goddamn miracle and a testament to our flexibility. I say quasi, because for it to work for the top of the pyramid it requires large swaths of our species to exist in bitter, soul-crushing poverty and, given that morality is not really an issue for us psychopaths, it remains to be seen if our recent penchant for planet-scale destruction has any long-lasting effects on our ability to survive as a species.

I’d be interested in a practical definition of logic truly separated from design in the context of web tech.

The two are so ridiculously intertwined. It’s already a problem within CSS, where layout systems and styling are mixed. Flexbox and grid have nothing to do with colors and gradients, which are again themselves orthogonal to positional properties. Fonts, paddings and margins (in 15 different units, look it up) add to the insanity. Now sprinkle in animations, box models and borders.

That’s cool, but I meant to imply it is kind of backwards to make a NOT gate with a component that itself is fundamentally built out of a NOT gate.

Where do you think the N in NOR and NAND come from?

> Or perhaps developers were never the bottleneck.

Now that's dangerous thinking, but I think you are onto something.

> We aren't seeing higher overall levels of productivity.

> We aren't seeing the developers who start using copilot/gpt rush ahead of their peers.

You think we are antsy worker bees, hastily rushing forwards to please the decision maker with his fancy car?

You are leadership. It's not hard. Cui bono, follow the money, etc. The incentives are clear.

If me and my peers were to receive a magic "do all my work for me" device I can assure you exactly zero percent of that knowledge will reach your position. Why would it? The company will give me a pat on the back. I cannot pay with pats on the back. Your Tesla cannot be financed with pats on the back. Surely you understand the nature of this issue.

Look, if I have to give up my shit to get where I want I’ll damn well make sure you will too. If there is anything I hate more than following arbitrary rules it’s dealing with people that think they are above them.

I think it’s less “supporting the paradigm” and more “if I am going down we are all going down here”.

You have kids that want to snuggle? I wonder what that’s like.

I don’t understand what these two completely orthogonal concepts do together.

I’m this though. I’m a raging introvert and I am married. But no, I am not loyal to my wife because my lifestyle doesn’t offer me enough alternatives. That’s F’ed up. Being loyal and committed and being an introvert is also orthogonal by the way.

Being a good husband and being quiet and easygoing are also orthogonal. Emotional needs are a thing in both of you and they are not met by tinkering with raspberry pi’s.

If you are hosting game nights and actively pursuing community, you are not a raging introvert. Trust me on this. You are a normal person with a bit of both and maybe slightly introverted and yes, you might be lacking an authentic connection. Notice this doesn’t mean a romantic connection, that’s just the “normie” variation of it.

But I am convinced every person needs something outside his or herself to truly grow. I think this can be found in art or religion, but I am not sure. Another human is easier.

I tend to call these things “distributed monoliths” assuming the camera, ML and laser driver are integral to the functionality of the system.

There is no hard rule that I know of but my heuristic is something like “can I bring instances up and down randomly without affecting operations (too much)”. If so, I’d call that a microservice(ish) architecture.

The waters have been muddied though. Microservices were IMO once associated with Netflix-like scalability, bringing up and down bunches up “instances” without trouble. But nowadays what used to be good old service-oriented architecture (SOA) tend to be also called microservices.

SOA can also be about scalability, but it tended to focus more on how to partition the system on (business) boundaries. I guess like you did.

It’s all a bit muddy in my experience.

Sure, we use a couple of Hanks for that. Sherley and Melinda will catch the bullets just fine.

So with suitable technology we should have our womens’ armies ready to march in no time. Can’t wait. Gender neutrality is a worthy and lofty goal.

I hear they are better communicators too. I see no downsides.

I agree, such blatant discrimination. I fully expect the feminist garde to be on the streets protesting this awful move.

This is the only thing they can do. They don’t produce anything. They buy. Their AI is a joke and all they earn money on is ads. MS is beating them on the AI front, hard, and they have multiple interesting avenues like having an actual OS, basically all the world’s code and all the world’s business.

2B is too little too late as well. It’s almost embarrassing. MS dumped 10B into OpenAI. 2B is a lukewarm, visionless move.

I have no ADHD but my wife, I know.., keeps me in check in ways I was unable to myself.

It's not that she hates what I'm doing or nags about it, it's just that she'll ask the hard questions. The ones I avoid like the plague.

"What are you going to use it for? .. Ok, cool, so how long will you need? .. So, have you been making progress? Why not? Why are doing something else and wasting time while there is still work to do? .. You are switching around a lot and it seems you are avoiding finishing what you started.. Have you considered therapy?" At this point I'm like, damn girl, you're right. What am I doing.

After a while I learned to ask myself those questions and get some discipline into my (hobby) life.

My brother has a pretty intense case of ADHD and is nothing like this. Some of my in-laws too and they also have no problems with weird hobbies and collecting random stuff. They certainly are no "makers".

They do have trouble holding down jobs and not hyper-focusing on their leaky faucets for two weeks straight without eating or sleeping much and talking about it non-stop while somehow not fixing it.

Yet, myself, no ADHD in sight. Other things, sure, but no ADHD and I have a knack of disappearing into black holes and emerging with "stuff"/"knowledge". I dislike synth music, but have programmed a modular software synth because I wanted to know how it works. Never touched it again. I know it now, there is no pay off in using it. That's boring and I'm no musician.

I'm not completely convinced this is an "ADHD" thing. I think this is a personality thing. INTP or something like that? You are just a "tinkerer". Getting stuff done is boring. Learning how stuff works is where the fun is at.

Why though? Quantity based pricing is not hard to express in a table.

What is so different about CapEx and a bag of peanuts that defies even providing an approximate range? Number of zeroes, no?

I don’t like it, but it is the norm sadly. It’s just a signal for “it’s expensive and if you even care about the number we don’t want to talk with you”.

I generally dislike these "turbo roundabouts" the first time I encounter them. Always a second of confusion the first time, which is definitely not something I want to feel while driving.

That said, if I enter one I am already familiar with I'm perfectly fine. I guess it depends on who you are optimizing for.

This might be a threat, but I see weakness: Google is faltering. I haven't been impressed by them - and especially what they produce (their research looks cool, but is not going places) - in years and they are holding on for dear life. Producing new and interesting products is apparently no longer a viable avenue. They literally cannot do anything else but try and survive by throwing out the toys so nobody can play.

It's a big boat and it takes a while to sink, but it will.

Someone told me their job was mainly checking Word documents for discrepancies. Basically diffing them, but manually, by reading.

I showed them how you could diff them automatically. This was not appreciated.

“Cool, IT dude, now I lost my job.” And they were probably right if anybody cared enough to look at what they actually do.