Since I can't edit this comment: obviously I mean a Touch-ID sensor.
2,413 karma · joined June 4, 2010
https://ary.pub
What are you adding to the conversation when you complain about it? So it's a dealbreaker for you, don't buy it.
To @aemerson_: Congratulations on taking a risk. On first look this is great work. The attention to detail on both the keyboard and the website is really impressive.
We need to remember the people, that we may never talk to, that are downstream of all of this software. Not necessarily “the users” as there are many pieces of software meant for other devs, but I think the users deserve consideration nonetheless.
Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world. This is on top of all of the problems that existed before LLMs, like human error and perverse financial incentives. Shipping poor quality and user hostile software actually hurts people. Real people. Harm is caused in both big and little ways to living, breathing actual people. This “inevitable” slide into generative AI harms every single person it comes into contact with. The devs, the users, the investors, everyone. Those harms may happen at different times and in different ways and the creeping nature of it all might make it easier to ignore, but it’s happening.
“AI” is a blight. You can leave me behind as well.
To spend time making something most people never see look just as good as the things they do see you have to care quite a lot. This care begets a wide range of (usually) desirable secondary effects brought about by diligence. In my view it's similar to the effect of spending the time to make many iterations of a thing versus one perfect thing, with the former usually resulting in an end product much closer to "perfect".
Juxtaposing yourself with Warren Buffet and then hand-waving away his wisdom is probably the reddest of flags when discussing finance (not that Buffet is always right). "Innovation" in payday loans is akin to inventing new ways to feed living, breathing things into a meat grinder. In this case it's the poorest among us. The author goes on to say:
> Is financing your lunch a sign of societal decay? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s definitely an evolution in Market Completion.
This is undiagnosed sociopathy.
There is a point when making a thing that you must ask "what affect will this have on the world?" or you risk destroying far more than you create. Finance types have learned absolutely nothing since Buffet laid down his "newspaper test":
"I want them to not only do what’s legal obviously, but I want them to judge every action by how it would appear on the front page of their local paper written by a smart but semi-unfriendly reporter who really understood it to be read by their family, their neighbors, their friends."
This person understands the “business” side of the tech business. I couldn’t agree more. Where many struggle is that they can’t communicate legibly about the indirect benefits their work has for the business. The classic “refactoring” (which he mentions) is a great example.
Refactoring code has a context dependent benefit to a business. When you’re searching for product/market fit is has essentially no benefit, and then you’re Microsoft and the code is deep within Windows and affects the performance of every Win32 app it can have extreme benefits. In the end it’s all about how you relate your work to either making or saving the organization money, and doing so indirectly can be legible if you take the time to figure out how to best communicate it to the target audience (and how it can be conveyed to customers).
As discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3609912
If LWN is worth $16 a month, and it is, then so is The Atlantic, ProPublica, etc. We collectively need to make a habit of financially supporting actual journalism and doing so loudly.
Examples of support people worth $200k+ are abundant, and the business case is the same every time. When you do the work to place a monetary value on customers and their retention your support personnel costs relative to that are easy to justify. When a support person is preventing churn of X number of customers worth $Y dollars a year the math becomes trivial.
The (American) tech industry is so accustomed to massive scale and lack of competition that the notion of giving a damn about customer retention has risen to the level of a cultural, not economic, problem.
Regarding programmers specifically I can concur, but with a caveat. Devs often care quite a lot about many things, but often one of those things is not doing the job they were hired for. The tedium of building software for businesses, even what we now call "big tech", is universally unappealing and definitely not the reason most devs started tinkering with computers. So they care very little, and it shows in the tech taking over the clerical aspects of every day life.
Were the ads run on the web not built on a separate business that attempts to violate the reasonable sense of privacy the average person expects, and didn’t attempt to warp consumer’s expectations of privacy, I think there would be less objections.
The Mozilla offering looks somewhat comparable, but I do wonder if they’re going to beat a company which has the sole focus of solving this problem.
I've experienced this first hand at multiple companies and it's fairly cringe-inducing to hear the excuses made for simple asks like having a written meeting agenda, project specification, or high level feature descriptions. Work breakdown meetings with these types over video calls amount to them trying to tell other people what to write down and ending the meeting as quickly as possible (perhaps the only upside).
Ascension to management appears to be a more extreme, self selecting version of the Peter principle for many. They can't make a living, or their desired income, in a role that has a well defined output and thus search for hiding places within organizations. Remote work puts them back into a role with expected outputs, and that's basically panic-inducing for someone who opted out of such things long ago.
My verdict: too much pride to admit that whatever communication skills they ever had have atrophied in the cauldron of management-level in-office politics. More energy than is required to learn to write coherently will be expended protecting identity and status. Companies will have to die and be replaced by those with more sensible policies and hiring discernment.
This is the way.
A similar idea has been bouncing around in my mind for a while now. An ideal, turnkey system would do the following:
- Execute via Lambda (serverless).
- Support automated startup and shutdown of various AWS resources on a schedule influenced by specially formatted tags.
- Enable resources to be brought back up out of schedule when demand dictates.
- Operate as a TCP/HTTP proxy that can delay clients so that a given service can be started when it is dormant or, even better, the service isn't serverless but you want it to be. This can't work for everything, but perhaps enough things such that the need to run always on services is reduced.
Cloud Custodian [1] can purportedly do some of this, but I've been reluctant to learn yet another YAML-based DSL to use it.
So this is my "make things designed to be always-on serverless instead" project and the work AWS has done to make Java apps function on Lambda keeps me thinking about the potential to take things that 1) have a relatively long startup time and 2) are designed to be long running service loops, and find a way to force them into the serverless execution model.
- Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols (https://www.amazon.com/Interconnections-Bridges-Switches-Int...)
It covers a broader range of topics than some of the other books mentioned here and helps with an understanding of where existing tech comes from and why. Also it covers topics that you don't necessarily need to know if you're only operating in a cloud environment, but that help to understand what is going on in those far off data centers.
Yearning for XP is something I can relate to. It feels like the last good UI version of Windows. The video is only a nostalgia trip though. Actual improvements on XP's UI would be:
- Removing the hierarchy and modes Microsoft kept piling on since 3.1. These are endemic in the shell. Both the Start menu and Windows Explorer are rife with them.
- Organizing the Control Panel such that it's thematically grouped. All settings involving the display (and thus graphics sub-system) are in a single place, all networking is controlled in one place, etc.
- Reducing the number and complexity of mouse interactions. Context menus should only be needed for the most exceptional cases. Right clicking to accomplish a task should be rare.
- Near elimination of dialogs. Users mostly dismiss them without reading anyway.
- Reduce, to the degree possible, the need to understand the file system, and its hierarchy, to find one's data and make basic use of the system. Watching people try to understand files and the file system hierarchy is pretty painful.
- Reduce the need to manage individual windows, and introduce a way to intelligently place windows across programs such that the user can juxtapose the applications they need to copy/paste between to get work done with minimal effort.
These are just what's top of mind, and I don't fault the creator of the video for making a tribute to XP. I'll add that a lot of these complaints apply to macOS, but often to a lesser degree. Perhaps I'm the old man yelling at the cloud here [2], but this stuff has been eating away at me for years and there doesn't seem to exist the will to address any of it.
[1] https://shop.mattel.com/pages/fisher-price [2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud
RIIR isn’t merely a “sprinkle Rust magic because I believe” thing. The tech has clear potential and I personally think a version of it will take hold where C was once assumed. To know for sure we have to ship more software with it, and we need good comparisons. I’m quite thrilled to have projects like this pressing on.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source
Perhaps it doesn't qualify by some arbitrary "next generation" status, but Unreal does?
There is a clear and perverse incentive to talk about "the coming AGI uprising" incessantly because it's free marketing. It gets and keeps people's attention as the majority of humanity is entirely unqualified to have a reasonable conversation regarding anything AI/ML related.
Doomsday fearmongering about AI is a form of grift, and I'll change that opinion only when shown clear evidence that there is something to actually worry about. The real danger of AI is as a weapon to be wielded by people against other people. Good luck having that conversation in any meaningful way because it basically amounts to the long overdue ethics discussion that this entire industry has been avoiding for decades.
You’ll notice that the recipients of both reports responded similarly, with apathy. Perhaps that was the point of juxtaposing them?
I'm reminded of what happened to the creators of Dwarf Fortress and it's hard not to recommend some form of commercialization for projects that need financial support.
Somehow we forget that one of the most important aspects of learning is a clear understanding about why one does it and how it benefits us. This must be repeatedly reinforced over years, and close to zero people want that reinforcement in the hellish form of a gamified and entirely soulless piece of software.
This is an odd statement given that Ultima Online can out in 1997 and WoW came out in 2004. Are you referring to hobbyists?
1000% agree. I put together my version of standing up remote state in AWS into a Github repo. https://github.com/aryounce/terraform-aws-bootstrap
Our use of Terraform splits state exactly as described primarily to keep the state refresh times reasonable.