deckard1

> Cupertino is ...

a lot of hour drives away from everything? London or Tokyo it is not.

> Maybe they live in a "shitbox fixer", maybe they don't.

I was being rather generous at $2M on a $300k salary. Let's just assume the spouse makes that much too. Where do you place the odds of getting a nice house at, in that area? Of a similar quality that would run around $200-400k in the rest of the country. It's the suburbs. You're going to be inside your home more than you would in a city.

> You might consider that people like and care about those other properties though.

The point is $300k in SV isn't living large. You save more for retirement or to move out. Great. But you still have to leave to realize that benefit. You're just planning for some tomorrow that usually never comes for most people.

> Initially, Lisp-style languages had linked lists as the primary data type, but vectors were early added

The Achilles' heel of every Lisp is dealing with any data structure that isn't a linked list. I'm talking aref, setf+aref, vector-ref, vector-set!, char, etc. It's all just a huge pain when compared to any other language (Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Java) that has syntax for arrays, hash maps, strings. Solving the generalized "map" or "length" is really only solving one side of the problem. The other side can't be solved because the language is s-exps and "everything is a function." It would fundamentally cease to be Scheme at that point.

you don't actually believe that "work together" crap do you? You realize you're dangling a job over their head, right? There is a power imbalance. You'll never see "work together" in an interview because you're not colleagues on equal footing.

ah, yes. The American Dream of living in a 50 year old shitbox fixer that costs $2M in the suburbs of Cupertino.

If you can make that much remote out in Nebraska then sure, fine.

There are people doing a lot worse. But when doing much better looks like that, what even is the point?

yes. If GraphQL is anything it's absolutely batteries not included.

When people speak of tooling they are almost certainly talking about Apollo. I think you could probably find a similar analog in the SOAP XML days. There were lots of vendors, lots of tooling, and mostly the same challenges and outcomes. It could be as nice as you wanted if you spent the time and effort getting there.

To make this more concrete, GraphQL is "strongly typed" in the sense that you get a run-time error when you use the types incorrectly. That's fine for development. Not so much for production. In order to get end-to-end typing you need to integrate with TypeScript or whatever language you're using. That has its own set of challenges. Your build process needs to know which GraphQL endpoint to use (not so easy when doing development on the API or need to use staging environments, etc.) and then generate typings based on that.

Errors are another GraphQL travesty. Do you use out-of-band HTTP errors? In-band error codes? Both? (ugh, but probably once more than 1 developer touches the code). Do those errors kill your entire query? What or who determines that?

I could also mention caching. But that's enough headaches for today. You need tooling just to get up to bog standard HTTP and browser caching gives you for free.

you're really going to be in for a shock once you get your law degree. Good luck with that.

> Nobody's telling you not to drive to an office every day.

reminds me of this meme that was going around Facebook during the last US election. It was an image of a line at a store like Target. The caption was something like "you stand in line at the store, you can stand in line to vote." You know, one of those absolutely stupid republican anti-mail-in-voting things. They apparently forgot that Amazon, one of the largest corporations in the world, exists. So no, I and the entire world do not stand in line at the store. And if you want to go stand in line all day to vote, you still can asshole. But I'll be dropping my ballot off at my mailbox.

My dad got a letter from our ISP saying someone was "hacking" a certain site. He asked me about it and I sheepishly denied it.

The site that reported me was the owner of hax0r.com (or .org? Cannot remember) and various other stupid vanity domains (used and leased, purposely mind you, for IRC bots and things like that). I think they were just mad because their shell account was passed around IRC like the most popular whore in town.

I was finally coming around to systemd. Then they broke my laptop.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269

I'm still livid at this Luca guy gaslighting people on the "correct" behavior of a feature people were using for years already. They re-purposed an existing sleep mode and changed it entirely to mean something else. Originally you would set a timeout that your laptop would suspend and then hibernate. They changed it to mean that your laptop suspends until your battery hits 5% and then hibernates. As if people want to open their laptop the next morning only to have no battery left.

Ironically, the stated reason for this change was to "prevent data loss". Guess what they did? They introduced a bug in this "fix" that guaranteed your laptop would not wake from hibernate. You had to reboot the damn laptop each time you woke from hibernate because it would get stuck on a black screen, thus "losing" your data. I "lost" more data from their stupid fix than anything else.

They admit the original feature was broken because it didn't take into consideration for battery percent. Fine. But there was absolutely no reason to change the behavior. You can do both! The only reason I can think of is you just like being an incredible asshole to people. Which is obvious from that thread. Do they even use a laptop? Why would I want a dead battery next time I open the lid???

it's worst of both worlds because types are not free. There is a certain amount of energy and effort and maintenance that you must put into type annotations. Before you reach the point of return on that investment you have to plow through the period of limbo where the cost of annotations is greater than the rewards. Some codebases never make it out of that morass.

One could easily make the argument that adding types to a preexisting codebase is more difficult than adding them to a greenfield project. So the effort and energy (and cost) is even higher.

Let's just say, you better be snuffing out an absolute fuckton of null reference and other bugs that a type system can actually help with for it to be worth it.

Types are ultimately a contract. If your code was not originally designed with these contracts in mind and then you introduce a system that actually promotes ad hoc interfaces (TypeScript or any structurally typed system) then what you get is a mess. You're constantly Pick or Omit-ting everywhere. But worse, you absolutely have to use "any" or "ts-ignore" during the process. You can't avoid it. But one single "any" has the effect of stripping all code of type annotations, making the entire process a giant waste of time.

To compound matters, none of the TypeScript devs I've worked with have any experience with type systems. They don't think in terms of interfaces. They are still ball-of-mud developers. They did not come from Java or C/C++ or even Haskell. They came from Python or Ruby.

I'd also caution people about using third party types (i.e. DefinitelyTyped). These are often not correct because the underlying library is not in TS and does not have type information. You will pull your hair out when the library does not match the type definitions. These third party definitions can introduce bugs into your code. They can falsely claim that some field exists on an object which, in fact, does not. Your IDE will happily autocomplete to the invalid field, TS will happily compile it, and your JS run-time will unhappily crash.

> The curse of guest languages.

Every language lives under the iron fist of libc and the C ABI.

"old code runs fine" is a poor benchmark for how well a language holds up over time. All x86 code still runs fine. Perl 5 is from, I think, 1994. It's still maintained and in development. Most C code from the '80s would still compile and run just fine (at least POSIX-based, Windows however...). You can trivially find Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, and Forth code that all "still runs fine."

I don't think it's a particularly unique or interesting quality, that some old code still runs. After all, I can go to archive.org right now and run all of that ancient DOS, Amiga, whatever code in a 100% exact (or close to) emulator in my browser.

Plex has the annoying habit of stalling indefinitely for me. I don't know what it's doing. I believe it's transcoding so that it can "burn" in the subtitles, but I have no clue.

I've mostly given up on it. I use sshfs and mpv when sitting at a desktop, which actually does work flawlessly.

they always use text that is ideally sized in mock-ups but completely falls over when real data is used in a responsive web app.

My favorite is when design adds data to a mock-up that we don't actually have. My company is, admittedly, a bit of a joke.

Also up there: design giving us mock-ups that are a composite of shit that needs done today and future shit they still haven't decided on. And then demand review approvals. No. You can't have it both ways you fucking morons. Either give me exactly what needs to be done, or you get no review rights. I'm not going to sit here for three weeks of back-and-forth while you play hunt-the-pixel and giving me hell for not matching the fog in your own head.

Digg is still around. So is Slashdot. For some definition of "still around."

> The energy is better spent getting Reddit to improve their official app imho

The market forces of a site like Reddit (or most web sites, frankly) are fundamentally against accessibility. The mobile web site nags me constantly with a banner popup to install their native app. How does one even talk about accessibility in the presence of dark patterns that make a site inaccessible to even those without the need for a11y?

If I'm being blunt, a11y is nothing more than a sledge hammer that devs use to bash other devs over the head with. A lot of "thou shall nots" with not a whole lot of actual user testing. Sprinkling aria attributes and "semantic" tags all over your DOM doesn't make your site accessible. Not when you're also putting in ads, carousels, and various other things that go completely against it.

Forth.

systemd supports "suspend-then-hibernate" which I think works now.

That said, systemd fucked the hell out of this feature and then the devs started gaslighting people about it[0][1]. That was on top of the fact that their "fix" broke the setting entirely and when you suspended your laptop it would never resume, guaranteeing a reboot and lost data (which ironically was their premise for "fixing" it in the first place). They really tried to get people to believe that a nearly dead battery 8 hours from now was preferable to hibernating after X minutes and resuming with a nearly full battery. On a motherfucking laptop.

Sigh. Just when I was starting to accept systemd they go and do that shit. Words cannot express how pissed I still am from that github thread and them breaking my laptop from a basic ass fucking system fucking mother fucking fucking upgrade. Fuck systemd.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/zczdnq/systemctl...

[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269

and without GPUs, mind you. And a lot of that trickery probably came down to: let's write everything in assembly. Fruity Loops was absurdly fast in the early 2000s and was written in Delphi and assembly, IIRC.

In 2023 DAWs should not be that difficult to make fast. It's a solved problem. Multi-channel audio processing is one thing that modern CPUs should not even break a sweat at. I believe this article has uncovered the basics that have made every DAW complex from the beginning, but seems to be focused on efficiency with your bog standard off-the-shell GUI library. That's the mistake, IMO. None of the DAWs I know of use, for example, standard GTK. Even the ones that do use a GUI toolkit use it minimally, for the file pickers and configuration. Not as the primary interface for the DAW itself. You need to go lower level and remove the layers of cruft. I mean hell, adding language bindings on top of everything is going to add yet another layer of inefficiency.

10 years ago? As in 2013? Did you mean 40 years ago? Almost every car? On a scale of 1 to 10 billion, how high are you right now?

one alt-social crumbling from throwing rocks at another alt-social

This is peak Web 5.0 right here.

If I have access to the physical device and the SD card/USB drive in order to pull off an attack that secure boot prevents, then why wouldn't I just take the whole damn device and swap it with my own? Presumably the network/gpio/etc. are the important part here and not the Pi.

People that don't know what BuzzFeed News is definitely do not know what ProPublica is. This thread is rather shocking to me.

We are in the selling shovels to the paranoid neurotic upper/middle class that is dependent on tech for their livelihood phase. A new form of the hustle culture.

Think about it this way. When the true revolution arrives, you will not get open access to it. The person that has access to such an AI has access to infinite labor. They will be the closest thing to a living god and will attempt to protect that moat at all costs.

I feel this is closely related to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

There is an unearned trust you have granted ChatGPT. Maybe it's because the broad outline appears correct and is stated in a confident manner. This may be how good bullshitters work (think psychic mediums, faith healing, televangelists). They can't bullshit all people all the time. But they don't need to. They only need to bullshit a certain percentage of people most of the time to have a market for their scam.

Smartphones only cheapened photography in an additional manner. Which is why you get Instagram filled with pictures of food. It's the internet combined with the nearly free cost of digital.

But digital cameras for the everyday person existed long before the smartphone. And before that, point and shoot film cameras and Polaroid.

Coincidentally, Amoeba records put out a really interesting episode of What's In My Bag? today with Seal[1]. At the end (I linked the timestamp) he starts talking about perceived value of owning an album vs. the digital ether. Really worth a watch.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WznlFoMd24&t=915s

Reminds me of how I nuked my first Linux drive. I was using the cthugha[1] music visualizer app. You had to pass in a CD-ROM device as well as a DSP device (long before ALSA existed). Instead of the DSP I probably passed in my hard drive. Whoops.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software)

That's amazing. The writing reminds me of Aqua Teen Hunger Force

> not know what to do with empty space

every PM everywhere. They simply cannot leave good enough alone.

Eventually every site A/B tests its way until it becomes Reddit mobile site. No one asked for carousels but sites continue to use them. We are getting inundated with popups today. I don't want to say it's as bad as 1990s flash ad popups. But it's getting damn close now. Bullshit cookie popups. "This site is better on our mobile app" crap popups. Google sign in popup bullshit.[1]

I would say anti-UX and anti-accessibility is very much the point of many sites. "Dark patterns" help conversion and the bottom line. Every site you visit is engaged in psychological warfare with you.

[1] https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/174978821/stop-th...