chronofar

There are also tangible benefits. Economic models needing to adjust to non-perpetual growth is not an impossible nor existential crisis.

#1 is I think often the biggest issue, or rather a direct easy to spot symptom of the central issue which is that "agile" is just blanket applied as a development methodology to everything, including many projects that have no business being agile, while the project requirements aren't agile at all.

Agile is better thought of as a product management than a development methodology. It is meant to be agile in developing your product to iterate quickly and respond to feedback from real users. It's a great fit after a MVP is released to users to iterate on their interaction in a responsive way. It's not an ideology to be followed religiously for all projects with all constraints (particularly those where those paying for it want specific features/dates are a poor fit).

- If a given project is only agile on the development side and not also the project and product management/sponsor side, there's going to be a ton of friction.

- If all projects use the same methodologies (be it agile or waterfall or some other new hip flavor) to develop regardless of their scope and needs and sponsor, there's going to be a ton of friction.

- If your teams adjust their approach to meet the needs of the project at hand, and all aspects of the team for a given project are in sync with that approach not just developers, you just may be able to glean a relatively smooth experience.

> 95% of the criticism of GraphQL is people complaining that GraphQL doesn't solve the problem of preparing the API response for these different requests.

This problem is solved by quite a few GraphQL providers nowadays. Hasura, DGraph (not true graphql but close enough), Prisma. I like Hasura quite a lot for many projects. Just define your database and you instantly have a full GQL API for the clients to use however they please, no backend required really. Doesn’t work for everything, but it’s pretty great for a wide swath of projects.

> Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know.

This seems to me a rather anthropomorphic definition. It seems as though it could be entirely possible for a system to lack these qualities and yet have sentience, or vice versa. The qualities you pointed to are seen in humans (and other creatures) because of evolutionary pressures that make them advantageous (coordinate among groups), but none of them actually depend on sentience (looking at it neurologically it would indeed be hard to imagine how such a dependency would be possible).

Looking at behavior and attempting to infer an internal state is a perilous task that will lead us astray here as we develop more complex systems. The only way to prove sentience is to prove the mechanism by which it arises. Otherwise we will continually grasp at comparisons as poor proxies for actual understanding.

This is also why I never started a blog, and don’t maintain any social media accounts. Participating in forums like this already drives some self-obsessive behavior (watching for upvotes and proverbial nodding heads), but a pulpit I fear would drive near incessant “audience awareness,” a constant reflection of my ego’s shape as perceived by others. Our social proclivities are to easily supercharged to neuroses with modern technology.

Or maybe I’m just lazy.

Well "almost always" is a step in the right direction, though I'd say is still a tad too strong. Probably favorable working conditions are reliably improved by unions, but there are also probably reliably less jobs to go around in union situations. And of course the specifics of the job also probably matter quite a good deal. I would be content with something like "Amazon warehouse workers would likely have reduced hours and improved medical benefits with a union."

I would imagine it's dependent on the specifics of the agreement, but as I understand it yes it would not be at all uncommon for the union to have incentive to stipulate members cannot negotiate outside of the union terms.

That is clearly too broad a brush. Collective bargaining is useful if your needs are aligned with the collective, if not they may be at best unhelpful and at worst actively counter productive (for instance if you have some personal circumstance you wanted to negotiate beyond the terms of the agreement, rather than negotiating with a boss or two you now have to negotiate with your representative organization). Not to mention various forms of corruption that can take hold in such arrangements.

I wonder if the rather abhorrent means of union busting has led to an extreme reaction of causing passer bys to take a cartoonish slant, as though unions can only do good in the world and only if they can overcome evil corporate interest. Unions have some clear advantages, but are far from a panacea of aligning interests for all parties.

This seems to me to be yet another fault line on which propagandists at the dials have managed to convince people to coalesce into tribes strong enough to use absolutist language where nuance is required.

Personally I’d much rather work with Flutter than RN. The tooling and general developer experience I find to be far superior.

But of course the primary advantage of RN is the ecosystem of developers and libraries it comes with, so if those are important to you I don’t believe Flutter will catch up any time soon. Personally I think those are a bit overrated. Any competent JS developer could pick up Dart very quickly, and all the various bits of browser knowledge a front end developer would have that are more valuable wouldn’t be applicable here, so to me “used before” only offers rather modest gains, and over the long run isn’t much to base a decision on.

If the worst happens all the money in the world won’t save you. No one can predict the future, including you, and if the future is doomed your time is far more precious than your money.

Times always seem uncertain to those living in them, especially if you pay close attention to all the various problems in the world almost exclusively (of which there has always, and will always be a long list of). Instead focus on what’s in front of you and in your control in the here and now. Be grateful for the immensely wonderful and comfortable amenities around you. When was the last time you were hungry and couldn’t find food? Or even more when was the last time you couldn’t eat virtually anything you wanted to within an hour?

This is not the sign of a civilization on the verge of collapse. We’ve got some things to sort, and may not get there, but enjoy the immense privilege it is to try while you have the faculties to do so.

Same. I've also stopped letting it make decisions about lane changes on highways, so it's basically just an advanced cruise control for me.

Once the novelty wears off (both in the case of highway and more recently surface street beta), I ultimately want to use self-driving to remove cognitive load and provide a safer experience. The vehicle does a good job at keeping lanes at a relatively steady speed (note not great, phantom breaking is still a thing and it brakes/accelerates too fast still), but too often makes poor decisions which ends up increasing the amount of attention I have to pay, thus defeating the purpose. On some highways I frequent I can't even turn on auto-navigate at all, even w/ auto-lane change turned off, b/c for some bizarre reason it thinks it needs to get to the far left of a 16 lane highway to follow the route so it keeps bugging me even after I reject it (so again, just more of an annoyance). I pretty much only turn it on on surface streets when showing someone new in the car w/ me or driving on a long straight 2 lane backroad (which it does probably best of all).

Personally I'm not as up in arms about Tesla being reckless as everyone else, I think they make it pretty clear you need to supervise the car thoroughly. But for me it's just not really even close to the level it would need to be to provide the convenience L4/L5 would.

> Microservices was always a solution to the organisational problem of getting more developers working on a system at once.

I’m not sure that that’s entirely true. To be sure that’s an aspect, but it’s also conceptually quite reasonable to desire the best tool for a particular job rather than employ a kitchen sink for everything. Separation of concerns is a commonly admired quality in code, and it makes sense sometimes to have this separation be at the repo level.

I don’t jive with the “only organizational not technical” characterizations this thread is rife with. It’s now hipster to say the cool shiny thing is lame, and it blinds some utility.

> It is easier to start with a monolith, find the right design and then split on the boundaries than it is to make the correct microservices to begin with.

This I definitely agree with in many, perhaps most, cases. But of course inertia, especially in organizations, could have future you lamenting such a decision you now have no easy way out of.

I too lament some of the homogeneity of culture brought about by globalization. But I think the benefits are well worth it. Indeed in the future I would expect (or hope) for people to feel as though they are world citizens, and never feel too far from home wherever they go. The world gets smaller as we integrate it, and though we’ll lose remnants of the past I think it is the only way we can hope to have a future.

> Cosmpolitan it's not synonym for "colony".

Of course it's not, but characterizing tech workers in foreign cities as "colonizing" makes little sense, even if the various problems you're pointing to can be laid entirely at their feet (which, without knowing enough about Rome to have a high degree of confidence, I would suspect is inaccurate, you could just as easily be describing general gentrification which has good and bad components).

All in all this attitude seems to me to be more or less typical NIMBY-ism, just with a focus on tech workers likely due to your purview (we're on hackernews after all). And to be sure NIMBY-ism is not usually without good reason, it's absolutely a worthwhile and reasonable goal to preserve culture you hold as valuable, and indeed in the case of Rome there is some very special culture there worth preserving. But it should be noted that change is inevitable, and cultural isolation is not a reasonable way to accomplish this goal conducive to the kind of world we want to have (or I should say I want to have, highly mobile and integrated so your origins have little bearing on your potential trajectories, much more unified than it is today as a species rather than provincial squabbling).

Rather we want solutions wherein people can move freely and be accepted wherever they go, while also preserving cultures and spreading economic benefits in a more efficient way. For instance better taxation so nomads pay taxes where they are not where they're from.

Big cities are by nature cosmopolitan, it’s very strange to say only some people “belong” and others don’t. Would you prefer the world isolate into pockets of belonging based on generational inheritance as it has been and we crank back globalization? Certainly there are growing pains, but I would view more globalization as the direction we want to go.

> It's actually hard to organize your time and take care of yourself in the absence of formal structure.

It’s not hard, it just takes deliberate action. Learning to take said matters into your own hands rather than conforming them to what you “have to do” (aka formal structure) is something most people would benefit from as early as possible in life.

I'm not so sure they're not comparable, they certainly seem to at minimum be a gradient of the same curve. "Unnecessary deaths" is a tricky thing to attempt to claim, and you'll need a bit more than shouting into the void to back such a claim up. Indeed you'd need some pretty detailed analysis to claim an unusual number of deaths directly attributable to a lack of available care at facilities typically able to provide said care, specifically because they simply didn't have the resources to administer the care.

In other words, I doubt your latter scenario at the more extreme end of overloading was widely the case (in the first world), perhaps you have some analysis backing it up?

This is a bizarre reply if intended for a reply to what I said. I'm not sure how what I said could be construed as "semantic goalpost shifting" (as I have neither explored the definitions of words nor given an original goalpost to move).

In any case it does not appear as though you are open to reasonable discourse. You have decided on your "facts" and any opposing, or merely appearing opposing even if it isn't, viewpoint is catalogued as "delusional," even though you've offered virtually nothing in the way of an actual argument. So, I guess, you win?

Let's try and refrain from strong language such as "delusional" and "unarguably," we'll likely find more to agree on if we do.

But yes, I agree a hospital overloading is a crisis for those providing or seeking to receive care at said hospital. The cause and remediation of said crises are I think likely significantly more involved than just attributing it to COVID. In other words, the crisis of a particular overloaded hospital is not likely strictly a COVID crisis, but rather an issue with how care is prepared for and distributed in general.

I don’t know, I think it depends on how you qualify crisis, and what you deem as an appropriate response.

If we’re trading anecdotes I don’t personally know anyone who has died or even been hospitalized with COVID. I know people who know people who did, but that is a small number and the majority were not likely to live long due to other causes (I do know one of one family member of a friend who was in seemingly good health and was hospitalized).

For my personal health and the health of most people I would say there wasn’t ever a crisis, though the delta wave got closest to being so that also coincided with the vaccine availability which removed any crisis that would have come otherwise. For others who are prone to severe illness it has been a crisis and continues to be. Aside from the political banter that is what has made this so divisive, the real risk and experiences of people can vary wildly.

Yeah Residence Inn is the most common one I look for as well of this type, though they're not all like this, and the ones that are often aren't price or review competitive, thus it rarely wins out. I do definitely look down these avenues though, and if they were more common or at least consistently highly reviewed (I'll pay a premium for reduced cognitive load if the experience will be reliably positive) I would do them more often, but it's just not common enough to be a reliable solution from what I've found.

Yeah I've tried that route but the lack of reviews and difficulty finding usually ends up not working out. Sonder has expanded, but has fairly mixed reviews whenever I chase them down. It does seem promising though so I do continue to include it in my searches, it just hasn't been able to provide a great solution yet for what I've been looking for.

They also very rarely have kitchens or washer or dryers for long term stays, or monthly discounts (advertised at least). If you’re just there for a few days stay over sure hotels are a fine choice, if you’re staying for a while they often won’t be particularly well suited, and finding one that is will take just as long as searching AirBnB.

Like the person you responded to I also spend a great deal of time searching for suitable long term stays. I think there is a large gap in the market for reliable brands/services with solid customer service (which AirBnB lacks) and amenities for modern longer term tech travelers (desks (ideally standup), fast wifi, kitchens, suitable space for 2 to work separately, washer/dryer, etc). If I could just look in a city and say “oh there’s a X there around an area I want to visit, I’ll just book that” it would be oh so nice.

Are there stats showing this? This would seem to me to be a very strange thing to base every day spending on.

Also the market should cool down from its current ridiculousness, and I wouldn't call it a recession if people stop throwing up crazy bids from FOMO and houses have to start being competitive to sell.

Laptops are definitely more hit or miss given the proprietary nature of each manufacturer layout. Because PC building is so common on desktops you don't have to worry about idiosyncrasies to nearly the same degree. If this is your first build you should just expect some things escape your purview and thus you may have to troubleshoot a thing or two, but there's nothing fundamental about Linux and desktop hardware the precludes a turn-key experience.

Yeah, like I said with my own anecdote I also didn't experience any issues w/ AMD graphics cards. Actually after searching a bit maybe I had that backwards and it was actually Nvidia that was the problematic one. I haven't had problems with either, but have read about problems and I thought it was AMD, but perhaps I was mistaken.

Someone can correct me if I’m mistaken, but you should be fine with most parts for most Linux builds. The main thing I would say is if you go with a dedicated graphics card go with Nvidia as their driver support is much better (though I’ve used AMD cards with no issue on Linux also). Outside of that and maybe the rare motherboard feature that doesn’t work quite as you expect (and noting that pretty much all first party software monitoring/control tools are built for windows) you should find little issue with making a build suitable for Linux.

> Has money suddenly become more important to everyone?

Quite possibly, or dare I say probably. The amount of available products and experiences one could purchase with more money was significantly smaller in Einstein's time than today. I think it'd be quite a reasonable hypothesis to posit the explosion of consumerism coupled with the everything everywhere effects of online life have caused folks to be considerably more aware of, and interested, monetary gain.

I’ve found AWS’s SAM to be a real pleasure to use (though I’ve only used it a bit), and it would solve the pain points you’re talking about here (basically include all your functions in a single repo with a sam template and accompanying cli that makes deployment and orchestration a breeze). May be worth a gander.

> due to the various different accelerations and decelerations of cars.

Right, changes to the flow of traffic.

> There simply is not a way to avoid the consequences of being near or above a road’s capacity.

I agree, that is a valid bullet point. But that is certainly not the only cause of congestion, and driving aggressively in congestion and attempting to justify it by keeping the roads clearer doesn't hold a lot of water I don't think.

But I see you're saying you're not advocating unsafe driving so that's good, and I take your greater point, thanks for expounding on it.