duggan

Renting is fine but it comes with a bunch of caveats.

You can bounce around the place, maybe live in a much nicer place than you could afford to buy, more easily move cities, etc. In my twenties this was a no brainer tradeoff to me, plus a lot of people were in negative equity due to the financial crash.

But you can also be forced to move prematurely. That nice place isn't your nice place, it's some other person's nice place, and maybe someday they want their brother or aunt to use it instead of you.

Depending on your relative financial capability, maybe there won't be anywhere within your means to move to in the same area. Maybe you'll treat this as a grand adventure every time it happens, but as you get older maybe you'll want to actually live near your friends, family, favourite restaurants, cafes, parks, Padel courts, etc.

At some point in your life you may not be earning money for a while (illness, career break, whatever) and certainly when you get older your finances may become more precarious – this is where owning tends to have more power than renting.

I'm not sorry I didn't buy a house or apartment in my twenties, but when I eventually bought in my thirties it was a relief not to have to care any more whether some landlord would decide to "alter the deal" at any point.

I'm curious because 2% over the last few months while the S&P 500 is tanking might be interesting, but doing worse than the S&P 500 over the same period is less so.

Hell, that's lower than inflation.

It may be no better than flipping coins.

Did you benchmark it against holding the same value in S&P 500 or similar ETF over the same period?

And perhaps "state capture", which is a term I first heard from South Africans.

Edit: incidentally, only mentioning SA as academics there developed the theory around it, to the best of my knowledge.

Not necessarily "better" but cursor-based pagination, for example, has a different set of trade-offs. It can be more performant, but tends to be trickier to implement.

This article looks like a decent overview: https://medium.com/better-programming/understanding-the-offs...

Some onus is on the reader to educate themselves, particular on Hacker News.

No need to look to fiction, various human societies were feudal for centuries.

Screensavers do seem like a relic from the CRT era, but there is probably a fraction of a second difference between waking a display and simply dismissing a screensaver, which I imagine matters to some people.

Take the last step! Just try not to account for it as the culmination of a decade’s work in your head.

I recently rebuilt my own blog over the course of a month or so after a decade hiatus (and wrote about it, of course[1]).

I enjoyed the process of working through all my little ideas and deploying it — and continuing to tinker on it.

1: https://duggan.ie/posts/ignoring-good-advice-and-building-my...

Truly bad candidates can’t provide references at all, or are entirely oblivious to how poorly they are perceived.

The only universal feedback for business is money – don't give them any and you're giving all the feedback you need to.

Anything else is wasting your time.

antirez is clearly going to be “Staff-plus” for almost any definition.

Can you clarify what you mean?

Yeah I was a fan, had every domain with them that I could! But once they were acquired their .org renewal prices just did not make sense any more, and they were missing some functionality that I thought was crucial and didn't seem inclined to add it (can't remember what it was now, maybe MFA).

Domains are like car insurance – there's no reward for loyalty, so makes sense to shop around come renewal time.

iwantmyname was bought out by a conglomerate, “Team Internet[1]”, a few years ago.

Prices went up, service went down. I’d recommend moving your domains when you can (Porkbun have been good, though I haven’t had any incidents like this).

Best of luck!

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Internet

> the demand to ship something right this second and is existential for the company tends to prioritize shipping over well engineered code.

This is a challenge, though very early in my career I learned that one solution to this is to just get better and faster.

Failing to deliver to your own standards becomes a motivator (with lots of caveats in regard to working environment, domain applicability, etc).

> Have I just had the misfortune of working at particularly crappy companies, or are things really this bad across the whole industry?

It's not universal, but you might have to do a lot of searching. Personally, I think it's easier to find the right people in smaller companies, mostly because it's harder to hide in the crowd that way, but there are clever, dedicated people in companies of all sizes.

You'll do ok. Keep the fire burning, and keep looking for people who either share your principles, or respect them.

Pretty sure people I remember similar conversations happening when people decided to produce content for YouTube full time, lean into Node.js as a dev stack, or build iOS apps.

Make hay while the sun shines, friends. It might not last forever, but neither will you!

There's a path to tread on taxation, certainly, but it's far from either treating the wealthy as leeches or solitary engines of the economy.

There will be folks who want to avoid (or evade) taxation at all costs, but those may end up being a minority of ideologues. I think most will end up being more practical about it[1].

1: https://proudtopaymore.org

Why not both?

I like the buttons in my (now practically antique) 2007 Mazda 3, but voice sounds miles better than updating my car and ending up with a janky touch screen that takes my focus off the road, the layout and responsiveness changing randomly with OTA updates.

However this:

> For instance, he said if a driver says “I’m hungry” the in-car assistant should be able to quickly direct them to a nearby restaurant that they might prefer.

sounds like more adtech hellscape.

I'm going to "yes, and" this with just one more thing that may seem obvious: almost any amount of alcohol is enough to throw that pattern out of whack.

The older I get the more reluctant I am to make the trade. Few glasses of wine with friends is hard to pass up though :)

I’ve heard similar stories, but I think they tend to have some runaway hit cash cow in their rearview enabling it.

Companies that can kind of do anything and it’s fine. Like Google with AdWords. Whatever they do, AdWords goes to work every day and pays the bills.

Other companies get high on their own supply and invent things like “Holocracy” and claim it is responsible for their success.

I think Elixir/Phoenix may be seducing more of them these days.

Are there persistent ways in which you think Typescript codebases end up a mess?

Developers have to invent too much themselves vs Rails? Something deeper?

I think lesson here may just be that wealth tax, like corporation tax, will be most effective as an OECD-wide tax[1].

1: https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/07/ne...

Routinely surprised that there are adult human beings that do this, but so it goes.

The +, however is just a comment delimiter.

All a service provider or malicious actor has to do is simply not include it when storing or publishing it to evade tracking.

Stripping it is not uncommon for services to prevent duplicate accounts.

This is amazing.

I was just reading it as if someone from Glasgow was drunkposting.[1]

1: https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/view/id/6154

As far as I understand it isn't Stripe setting policy on this, it's Mastercard/Visa. Though presumably, ultimately, it's really government.

This is also what I've heard and experienced.

Actually I don't think "technology producers" are entirely excluded from this bias either. I've assumed more complexity than there was in reality (possibly due to my background in infrastructure and backend), but other developers I've worked with certainly fall more into the trap of "there's a UI? now it's just a simple matter of CRUD."

The tooling has become complex, sure, but so have capabilities and expectations.

I used to “make websites” in the 2000s, then stopped for about 15 years to focus on backend and infrastructure.

Have been getting back into front end the last few months — there was a good bit of learning and unlearning, but the modern web stack is amazingly productive. Next.js, Tailwind, and Supabase in particular.

Last time I checked in to frontend dev, CSS directives fit on an A4 sheet, valid XHTML was a nerd flex and rounded corners were painstakingly crafted from tables and gifs.

Frontend is a dream now :)