bargainbin

I’ve made a very lucrative career moving from .NET to BEAM. I don’t even work with it currently but the fact I’ve shipped it for some pretty niche systems shows versatility and consistently goes in my favour when getting hired.

Stopped reading at “CTO with no direct reports”. Chief of who?

Been there, got the scars.

First thing, explain to them in writing how their behaviour impacts the team as a collective, not just you specifically.

If the behaviour persists, put them on a performance improvement plan. Specifically outline the behaviour that needs to change and importantly: hold the whole team to the same standard and scrutiny.

Three outcomes in order of likelihood:

- they take the hint and leave

- they improve enough to get the PIP off them

- you have justification for disciplinary actions including termination.

It’s a drain on your time and energy, but it’s a sure fire way to create an actionable record of this employees bad behaviour.

Make sure your boss and your skip-level are aware you’re taking this action - there’s nothing they can do to stop you doing it, and if they’re genuine they’ll appreciate that you’re putting in the effort to set this guy straight.

D2 has a lot of merits but there’s little that sells it over PlantUML or Mermaid - I do feel like diagrams-as-code is still waiting for a killer program that makes everything else obsolete.

I’m forever chasing that dragon. In the meantime I still recommend D2 if PUML is feeling a bit stale.

Anything you put money into is a legitimate investment.

This doesn’t mean they’re viable investments.

This is a good thing for Wikipedia right? Their financial model is donations, people who will simply get their info from an LLM output are likely not the type of people to donate to a free information repository.

So their bandwidth costs lessen, whilst their information content will continue to grow.

Had they been supported solely by adverts then yeah it’s a death sentence, but luckily they steered clear.

One of the first programs I install in any new setup. Just having the line numbers in your snippets, when all your communication is over asynchronous platforms with UX features designed by the Greatest Minds at Microsoft, streamlines discussions do much.

Care to elaborate a bit on the UK comment, because it’s not clear what you mean or if you even live here?

The UK doesn’t tax the wealthy or their corporations either. Meanwhile high earners like myself are kept from even middle class aspirations by aggressive income tax.

All signs point to that income tax, specifically at my bracket, increasing in the next budget, leaving me ostensibly poorer than people earning less than me.

The whole system is broken because they refuse to tax the wealthy at an equivalent rate to the working class.

The headers are lost in the design amongst all the extra negative space and increased font sizes

In your defence, the choice of wording is confusing and that particular announcement did have a sense of “game over”ness to it.

But the intent was to say that Elixir as it stands from a paradigm perspective is done, but the existing features and runtime will still be improved.

Which as someone with many years in .NET, I can appreciate. I showed a friend who used C# since the first beta, who’s been hands off for over half a decade now, some modern C# code, and he could not believe what he was seeing.

Much like I can’t believe what I’m seeing when I review a C# code base and have no idea what flavour du jour the developers decided to write it with and how I have to frame the program in my mind to understand it.

Compared to Elixir, which just looks like Elixir has always looked, and does what you expect.

It’s so prevalent there’s a dedicated term for people who oppose it: NIMBY.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY

I’ve not tried Datastar in anger but I have tried HTMX after all the hype and it quickly became unmaintainable.

My dream was having a Go server churning out all this hypermedia and I could swerve using a frontend framework, but I quickly found the Go code I was writing was rigid and convoluted. It just wasn’t nice. In fact it’s the only time I’ve had an evening coding session and forgotten what the code was doing on the same evening I started.

I’m having a completely opposite experience with Elixir and Phoenix. That feels like an end to end fluid experience without excessive cognitive load.

I’m using Bazzite now for about 8 months, and I have a dual boot Windows drive. I haven’t used the Windows drive once. Windows was my daily driver for 3 decades.

Performance wise, there’s no degradation. I can run games at 4k or bonkers FPS just like I did on Windows, no input lag, etc.

Bazzite also has a very active discord for support with issues. I highly recommend.

Good for them. This and Copilot are the reasons I use linux full time now, after.. 30 years of being a Windows user?

Seriously you could install a modern distro with KDE on any computer and the average user would get by fine.

And more enterprises are starting to enable macOS and Linux as browser based tooling becomes the norm.

Why would anyone start with Windows at this point? And if I were Microsoft, why would I spend money to make life worse for the incumbent users?

If you’ve been following the rumour mill and also understand Tim “zero waste” Cook’s MO of reusing parts in multiple models, this whole thing makes a lot more sense when you realise they’re going to release a folding iPhone next year, and it’ll be the thickness of two Airs.

It shouldn’t be considered a source of profit at all, attractive or not. Water is a fundamental resource for human life. We pay bills to ensure the infrastructure is there to provide it.

If the infrastructure isn’t there, we haven’t received what we paid for. Worse, without EU regulation these companies are now blasting sewage into lakes and rivers. Ofwat can’t do anything.

At this point I feel there’s no solution other than nationalising the infrastructure again and ploughing billions of tax payers money into yet another failed Thatcher initiative.

Of course that will never happen, because we’ve not had a government willing to make sweeping changes like that since Thatcher. Except maybe Liz Truss with her exceptional grasp of economics.

Anecdotally the company I work for is scuppered by bureaucracy when it comes to getting tools to work with, yet they want us to work at unhindered startup.

We’ve found it’s actually quicker to just recreate the app (Postman, Obsidian, Claude desktop) than it is to go through the rigmarole of getting the download/license approved.

He died about a year after this in his sleep. They never publicly disclosed the reason.

Struggling to understand the positive business impact this change has, highly doubt anyone is going to pay for it.

There is no scenario where these AI companies collapse and the working class come out better off. We saw it with the 2008 crisis, we saw it with the dotcom bubble, and we’ll see it with this: The people responsible will ride off into the sunset on a golden horse whilst everyone else is left picking up the pieces.

As someone who has Word/OneDrive foisted upon them on their work Mac… why would you force this on people?

iOS does it with its apps and iCloud but it’s seamless so you don’t mind.

Using OneDrive is like putting your face next to an anus and breathing deeply.

Counterpoint, sometimes your engineer is taking ages to do small tasks because they’re incompetent, and if you do the task together you find it’s actually just you doing the work for them.

Had to deal with this recently after trying everything to stick to my world view of “anyone can learn this”.

It’s not quite as simple as “putting something in public domain”. The problem is the server costs to keep that thing in the public domain.

This is like creating a t-shirt that says “don’t shoot me”.

The problem isn’t consent, the problem is that the gun is being needlessly pointed at you in the first place.

Just got stung with this on GPT5 - It’s new prompt personalisation had “Robotic” and “no sugar coating” presets.

Worked great until about 4 chats in I asked it for some data and it felt the need to say “Straight Answer. No Sugar coating needed.”

Why can’t these things just shut up recently? If I need to talk to unreliable idiots my Teams chat is just a click away.

Ah, you clearly haven’t worked with the self hosting teams that I have.

I hope I never again have to explain to someone that you can’t just “restore the code from the weekly database backup” because the code is in the file system they just osmosed.

The takeaway here is that if you do “alternate day fasting”, that is you eat normally on one day then do not eat all the next, you will lose weight.

I can’t believe that losing 3.5 days of caloric intake would result in weight loss. In other news, water is wet.

It was ridiculous but I think it’s important to note it was a jury trial:

1) They had a musician come in and deconstruct the songs, and she showed that many of Blurred Lines elements copied the “rhythm” and “feel” of the sheet music, not the master recording.

2) Robin Thicke said in an interview he told Pharrell they should make something with the groove of Got To Give It Up.

As a non-musical person in a jury, those points are convincing enough that there was intent to copy the song even if the final song is clearly different. Though, it should never have been down to a jury and judge to decide.

Even more hilarious, a couple of years ago the Gayes tried to sue Pharrell because of an interview where he mentioned again Got To Give It Up was inspiration for Blurred Lines. Luckily that failed, but they definitely have it in for Pharrell it seems.

It’s not AI itself that’s the bad part, it’s how the world reacts to white collar work being obliterated.

The wealth hasn’t even trickled down whilst we’ve been working, what’s going to happen when you can run a business with 24/7 autonomous computers?

I’ve attempted to use HTMX a few times (as a React-hater, its hype lures me in) and every time I’ve come away feeling like I’ve wasted my time implementing a subpar solution.

From reading this, I’ve decided I will never attempt to use it again. All I could think was, just use Go’s HTML templating. What is HTMX adding, really?