VyseofArcadia

I'm skeptical of that, in part because I think the data you get out of e.g. job training programs is so messy.

Let's say instead of building houses, I invest the money in job training and crime intervention programs. Maybe employment goes up and crime goes down. Maybe it doesn't. And even if the numbers move in the correct direction, it is extremely difficult to quantify how much I helped versus external variables outside my control. I'd need a team of data scientists just to quantify how much I helped. And at the end of the day, I am still only helping the subset of people for whom those kinds of programs actually can help.

The nice thing about housing and feeding people is that it directly addresses the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You can be 100% certain that you are helping. And you can be 100% certain you are helping almost everyone. Everyone needs food and shelter. Not everyone needs job training.

Maybe I overvalue simplicity and certainty, maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe there is just something appealing about just directly addressing a need.

I'm unconvinced rich person net worth is ever actually the dollar figure that's quoted. So much of net worth is in relatively non-liquid assets. If Musk suddenly became a good person and decided to cash out in order to house the homeless, I doubt he would actually end up with $378k per homeless person.

> The problem is public housing is maintained poorly. People generally beat rentals to shit and public housing is beat up even worse. The maintenance workers are union and can’t get fired, so they work at a leisurely pace. The admin are union and can’t get fired so their office is a mess and they respond slowly.

In my dreams I would hire full time staff and significantly incentivize timely work with cold, hard cash bonuses.

> Bad tenants in privately owned rentals get kicked out. In public housing they just make things terrible for their neighbors.

I guess in this fantasy, I own all of the buildings so it isn't really "public" housing. I guess I would have the option of doing something about bad tenants. Rent-to-own is a pretty good idea.

I did some back-of-the-enveloping once, and I agree. Land acquisition and building are already pretty expensive, and then there's staff + maintenance + utilities over time.

I think the strategy is do it in a couple of prominent areas, and, assuming it actually works out, point to them as success stories and acquire philanthropic funding to keep doing it in more and more cities.

Occasionally as a thought exercise, I ask myself what I would do with the untold billions of Bezos, Musk, etc. There's only so much you can spend on yourself. I could go for a bigger house, but I like my car as is, and I don't want a yacht or a private jet[0]. So then the question is, what relatively expensive thing could I do that would solve a lot of problems? That would make a lot of lives better?

The thing I keep coming back to again and again is public housing. I would just start buying up land and building public housing. Getting the homeless off the streets would improve not just their lives, but also the lives of the people who already have homes who happen to live in areas with a lot of homeless.

I've also considered public pay-what-you-want restaurants.

If anyone wants to give me untold billions, I will get right on it.

[0] I would totally go for a private train car, though.

Are you attempting to imply that you can only build public housing in communist countries?

> MPP converts HTTPS to HTTP, strips out CSS, JavaScript, and other tags the Mac's browser doesn't recognize, then serves super-simplified HTML that actually loads pretty fast on the nearly 40 year old machine.

Honestly this sounds like a pretty great way to experience the modern web on modern computers too.

You should tell my PM and manager this.

Also, what else are standups even for? Everything I've read or seen IRL is some bullshit about using them for teams to "align" or "sync up" or "share progress" or nine other euphemisms for status updates. Let's call a spade a spade.

Except for the very online, I think meaning 5

> (slang) Crazy; crackpot.

is more common in every day use than meaning 4

>(slang) Extremely good at something (usually a video game).

Neither the Merriam-Webster dictionary nor the Cambridge dictionary[0] list meaning 4, further hinting that it is a use that is mostly occurring in niche online communities. Note that I'm not saying meaning 4 is incorrect[1]. There's no such thing. Words is words. Usage is meaning. But I think I am justified in my belief that it is still relatively uncommon.

[0] The OED wanted money to show me their list of meanings.

[1] Although it is almost assuredly a mishearing of "crack".

There is a special place in hell for PMs who can't wait for daily standup to get your status update.

There is an even more special place in hell for PMs who schedule an additional regular status update meeting.

I doubt they're using those words to mean that specifically when they are trying to sell a phone to consumers. No one sells phones on "bandwidth".

"Crack engineer" means an engineer who is smart and capable. "Cracked engineer" means an engineer who is insane.

Hasty guess: fast is responsiveness, performant is performance per watt?

These are all the views of someone who is hopelessly naive. Maybe some truth, but ignorant of where we came from and how we got here. This is a diseased view, is reprehensible, small minded, and aggressively mean, and it's absurd given how much complexity has been poured into making computers do simple things in the most complex way possible.

My man, I am not a fossil. I came of age with web apps. But I am someone who has seen both sides. I have worked professionally on both desktop applications and as a full stack web developer, and my informed takeaway is web apps are insane. Web dev is a nightmarish tower of complexity that is antithetical to good engineering practice, and you should only do it if you are working in a problem space that is well and truly web-native.

I try to live by KISS, and nontrivial web apps are not simple. A couple of things to consider:

1. If it is possible to do the same task with a local application, why should I instead do that task with a web app that does everything in a distributed fashion? Unnecessary distributed computing is insane.

2. If it is possible to do the same task with a local application, and as a single application, not client-server, why should I accept the overhead of running it in a browser? Browsers are massive, complex, and resource hungry. Sure, I'll just run my application inside another complex application inside a complex OS. What's another layer? But actually, raw JS, HTML, and CSS are too slow to work with, so I'll add another layer and do it with React. But actually, React is also too slow to work with, so I'll add another layer and do it with Next.js. That's right, we've got frameworks inside of frameworks now. So that's OS -> GUI library -> browser -> framework -> framework framework -> application.

3. The world desperately needs to reduce its energy consumption to reduce the impact of climate change. If we can make more applications local and turn off a few servers, we should.

I am not an old man yelling at the cloud. I am a software engineer who cares deeply about efficient, reliable software, and I am begging, pleading for people to step back for a second and consider whether a simpler mode of application development is sufficient for their needs.

That is unfortunate, but the man still does good work every time weather is putting lives at stake in Alabama.

I have only anecdata for this, but I have a strong suspicion that people just don't think about things on social media the same way they do physical interactions.

If someone standing outside the grocery store hands you a flyer that claims the government can control the weather and they're sending you hurricanes on purpose, you'd dismiss them as insane and continue on your way. When your high school buddy Denise posts it on Facebook, though, you're more likely to believe it. Even if you'd think Denise would be crazy if she went out and handed out flyers at the grocery store.

It's like most of us have a built-in crazy filter that works fine for in-person interactions, but it breaks down when that exact same interactions happens online.

I want to shout out a specific man quoted in the article.

> “I’ve been doing this for 46 years and it’s never been like this,” says Alabama meteorologist James Spann.

I grew up in Alabama, and I am positive James Spann has saved my life more than once with his tornado outbreak coverage. I can still hear him saying, "get to shelter now". He was a comforting voice at 2am when you and your family are huddled in the most central room of your house because mother nature is actively trying to kill you.

QT has been around for decades. So has GTK. Bindings for whatever language you could possibly want. Runs on whatever OS you want. We've had "truly portable" UI frameworks since the late 90s. This has not been an issue for my entire adult life. 20 years ago, I was using desktop applications that ran on Mac OS X, Windows, and *nix with no modifications. They were written in Python, used GTK, and just worked.

Web apps are popular because 1) people don't like installing things anymore for some reason and 2) it's easier to justify a subscription pricing model.

Is the usage of "your banker" vs "the bank" a difference between British English and American English or a difference between 1940s English and modern English?

I for one don't want to use web apps. I want the speed, convenience, and availability of native apps. I want to use applications that work if the internet isn't. I want to use applications that store my data locally. I want to use unglamorous applications that just work and use a native GUI toolkit instead of torturing a poor, overburdened document display engine into pretending it's a sane place for apps to run.

Not to mention, from the perspective of a developer, the relative simplicity of native apps. Why should I jump through all the hoops of distributed computing to, for example, edit a document in a WYSIWYG editor? This is something I could do comfortably on a Packard Bell in 1992.

But the browser is running in that gigantic special OS. It's not like the OS magically disappears.

I'm not sure I 100% agree.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the cost of off-the-shelf solutions from the perspective of sustainability, and there is a cost beyond money. The performance of software almost always degrades over time. By buying Foo off-the-shelf, you are saying, "I am ok with getting on the same bloat-dictated hardware upgrade cycle as Foo."

Of course you have the option of buying Foo and never upgrading, unless Foo has a license that forces you to. But that also walls you off from security bugfixes. But by replicating the essential features of Foo in-house, you can actually set and stick to a complexity and performance budget.

Of course if you are a business of any real size, you're already on the hardware upgrade treadmill anyway, and probably all of your customers are too, so what does it matter if your software is a little slower and a little more resource hungry year after year after year? Other than maybe a little twinge of guilt every now and then.

I believe both the PS5 and whatever nonsense string of Xs, numbers, and descriptors MS named this gen's console can do 144Hz output. I don't know how many games take advantage of that or whether that refresh rate is common on TVs.

> That was a cold-sweat moment for me: after all of my harping about latency and responsiveness, I almost shipped a title with a completely unnecessary frame of latency.

In this era of 3-5 frame latency being the norm (at least on e.g. the Nintendo Switch), I really appreciate a game developer having anxiety over a single frame.

The web sure is convenient, but for the actual work I do, I could in fact work on a 30 to 35 year old computer. I mostly code, and occasionally I process words or spread sheets. All things I could do on a DOS machine, or even something like an Apple //e. I'd certainly be fine on an Amiga. I'd be on cloud nine with a NeXTCube. I don't know that I'm willing to go older than early 80s, though. I need my computer to at least handle both uppercase and lowercase.

So arguably we've already built computers that last 40 years. Another decade doesn't seem crazy.

One project that I keep coming back to again and again is keeping my circa 2011 netbook functional. It was my main computer for most of grad school, and it seems silly that a perfectly functional bit of hardware (for documents, spreadsheets, etc.) like that doesn't work well.

What I've found is mainstream distros seem to have no respect for aging hardware. Especially if they're desktop-focused. I have had some success with Trisquel[0], netBSD, and FreeDOS. I'm confident I could get Gentoo working if I'm picky about ebuild selection and build everything on a more modern computer, but that does sort of feel like it defeats the purpose. Another option would be maybe to install a version of a mainstream distro from 2011, with the caveat that I'd only be able to install software included on the installation media. Debian Squeeze repos are long gone.

I feel like I shouldn't have to stray so far from the beaten path to do something on a computer from 2011 that I could do comfortably on a Packard Bell in 1992.

[0] On recommendation from an FSF employee. Hardware that can run free software top-to-bottom tends to skew a little older, so Trisquel needs to run well on older hardware.

We need to have a conversation, as a society, about how we cannot rely exclusively on complex things with many modes of failure. We need simple tools to stick around for when we hit one of those many modes of failure.

I own a robotic vacuum cleaner.

I also own a broom.

> who cares how people have fun?

The author's mother, who declared 40+ years ago that Atari games are a waste of time.

This is an article about hypocrisy and asymmetry of importance. The author views his mother's gaming habit as hypocritical given her attitude towards video games when he was young. His mother may not even remember telling at him to get off the video game and go outside because it was just another of innumerable occasions during which she had to scold her child.

I've had this conversation with my own now-elderly mother, and her response was, "well, it was 30 years ago, and you were a child. It doesn't matter now, just let me play sudoku on my phone". Which is frustrating to hear after the decade or so I spent listening to her describe my video game hobby as a waste of time every opportunity she had.

To some degree I think my tastes are a response to a trend that I hated during my formative years. When the sixth generation of video game consoles came out when I was in high school (Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, XBox), there was this sudden near-universal trend to make everything darker and edgier. Grand Theft Auto was making senators faint with concern, Sega gave Shadow the Hedgehog a gun and the ability to say "damn", Naughty Dog took Jak and Daxter from "Banjo-Kazooie on PS2" to "GTA-lite for edgy preteens", etc. etc. Everyone but Nintendo, who were cheerfully putting out Super Mario Sunshine, was doing it.

At the time, I was just starting to think of video games as an art form in addition to a source of entertainment, and the blatant fad-chasing I was seeing across nearly the entire industry turned my stomach. Of course the same thing had happened many times before and has happened many times since, but I wasn't in my formative years for any of those.

I will by trying it out on my laptop which has only a fraction of my library and I don't use often enough to want statistics or smart playlists.