SupremumLimit

Indeed, specialist knowledge is a real constraint, but I think it’s possible to at least _orient_ towards building systems that require no baseline level of skill (the fast food model I guess) or towards training your staff so they acquire the necessary level of skills to work with a less accessible system. I suspect that the second pathway results in higher productivity and achievement in the long term.

However, management tends to align with reducing the baseline level of skill, presumably because it’s convenient for various business reasons to have everyone be a replaceable “resource”, and to have new people quickly become productive without requiring expensive training.

Ironically, this is one of the factors that drives ever faster job hopping, which reinforces the need for replaceable “resources”, and on it goes.

This is a wonderfully insightful comment!

I’ve encountered a similar phenomenon with regard to skill as well: people want to ensure that every part of the software system can be understood and operated by the least skilled members of the team (meaning completely inexperienced people).

But similarly to personal responsibility, it’s worth asking what the costs of that approach are, and why it is that we shouldn’t have either baseline expectations of skill or shouldn’t expect that some parts of the software system require higher levels of expertise.

Aha! advertises as far as New Zealand and I also never heard back when I applied. The excuse they supply (at least they do that much…) is that they receive too many applications to respond to everyone. But then why advertise all over the world? A scummy tactic when I think about it.

Which cloud provider is it, if you don’t mind sharing?

Thanks! I used to play it as a kid and have been trying to remember the name of the game for years.

Thanks for the post about the dot, interesting stuff and the TL;DR is excellent.

[I am the author of the post.] I know that keyword lists are different from maps, but I think their superficial similarity to maps isn’t ideal, and I don’t think that they’re the best possible solution (eg consider pattern matching on keyword lists which is order dependent, it’s not intuitive in the case of named args). They’re confusing to newcomers because of these things.

[I am the author of the post.] I have! Didn’t quite see enough value and for me something like Petal makes more sense.

FWIW, no significant changes to the language are expected in the next couple of years.

Another side of this argument is that the rate of Elm ecosystem change is far more manageable than for JS.

A "stable JS framework" is an oxymoron, I'm afraid. My JS tools and NPM packages continuously change from under me, but somehow that's considered normal and not a problem.

I've just looked up a project I have with a mere 9 dependencies, and 7 of them have gone through multiple major version changes since the end of 2019. The other two have had minor releases. None are unchanged, even though all were already "stable" when I added them! Will the code still work if I update them? I don't know. Do I want to spend the time continuously tracking the changes to these dependencies, testing, making new releases of my project? Not really.

Perhaps I could continue deferring dependency updates, but that might make my job that much more painful when I have a legitimate reason to update (eg. for some new features I need) as half the package APIs will have changed beyond recognition by then.

I have so much less trouble with going back to Elm projects and picking up where I left off. That should be taken into consideration too.

One way to get static HTML/CSS from Elm is to execute the JS it produces and serialise the results from the DOM. That's what I do in my static site generator Elmstatic: https://korban.net/elm/elmstatic

I've been doing some work on an Elm-based static site generator: https://korban.net/elm/elmstatic/

(It uses elm-static-html under the hood.)

I wrote up a list of Elm resources (including books) recently: https://korban.net/posts/elm/2018-07-31-learning-elm-2018-co...

There are quite a few books/courses/articles which examine various aspects of building an SPA.

I get your point, but Euclid's books are still being sold (in translation): https://www.amazon.com/Euclids-Elements-Euclid/dp/1888009195

Nomadic life is simply not possible for 7.3 billion people on this planet. It requires much lower population density.

Yes, it used to be free until maybe 3 years ago. I've got a free setup as well.

There's a similar project under way in New Zealand, but from what I see, the uptake has been less than enthusiastic due to lack of online services like Netflix and persisting traffic caps.

Some of the replies you got with knee-jerk reactions about spam are truly ridiculous. People are just spouting nonsense without any idea about what you do. I hope you aren't letting them get to you. I enjoy your newsletters.

You probably mean 0.9m^2. 9m^2 is a decent size bedroom.

It's also a serious issue in New Zealand. It's exacerbated by children running around with sippy cups which allow constant contact between teeth and juice (or worse, sugary drinks).

I've been thinking about the same thing! It's a pity the video is in German.

I came to the conclusion that at a societal level, competition is almost always harmful as soon as it's outside the confines of a game (i.e. when people stand to win or lose something tangible from it).

I believe it makes all large organisations extremely inefficient and dysfunctional. As another example, it results in a lot of redundancy in the context of R&D.

Here is a counterpoint about everybody being "better off":

http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/free-trade-explained-...

It hasn't happened historically, and it isn't likely to happen now, but we will get a bunch of draconian legislation nobody wants through TPP.

I had the misfortune of using Visual FoxPro once upon a time. It was horrifyingly bad, but perhaps by that time (2002-2004) it was suffering serious impedance mismatch with the rest of technology which had moved on. Anyway, I wouldn't call it a good example :)

Regardless, that was kind of my point - all these systems are only good as long as you stay within their constraints. The unfortunate thing is that the constraints always end up being way too tight in practice.

New Zealand is 3rd in the OECD in terms of obesity, not far behind the US and Mexico: http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/Obesity-Update-2014.p...

What you're saying is reasonable, and there are lots of people attempting to make RAD systems. Unfortunately, they always place severe limitations on the kind of software that can be created with them, and hence none of them have become particularly popular.

It seems that there's something missing from all the existing implementations of your suggestion. Perhaps it is that the UI and data flow primitives that we have aren't flexible enough to express a lot of business models, thus requiring custom implementations.

Generally yes, but neuroplasticity does in fact exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

Thanks for the pointer. Tried it out - it's similar to Gingko but seems much less polished, and I couldn't find the keyboard shortcuts! I guess the advantage is that it's free. I really hope this kind of text manipulation will get developed further.

Leaflet only allows discrete zoom levels as far as I know, whereas Pixels zooms continuously. I'm not sure a tile layer with an infinite number of zoom levels is possible either. At the very least, it would require extensive hacking.

Thanks for pointing out Gingko - it looks like it could have the right mix of features that I miss in Workflowy, i.e. going beyond lists/outlines and having richer content in leaf nodes. Excited to try it out!

Well, there are brick laying robots already (although not combined with 3D printers): https://plus.google.com/photos/+Construction-robotics/albums...

It also makes things difficult for those of us who are trying to make a living out of education/training.

I get that people do it for passion, I enjoy sharing knowledge too, and in an ideal world where I didn't have to earn money, I'd be doing it along with everyone else as part of a great virtuous cycle.

However, the current situation is mostly at odds with making a career out of education. I really can't invest as much time as I'd like into educational work because I have a family to support, and I barely break even on the hours invested.

It means that trying any new interesting approaches is out of the question, and advanced topics with a smaller audience are unlikely to see the light of day, which is a pity.

But I guess as long as there is a supply of people willing to do this kind of work on top of a regular job, the situation will only become more entrenched.