duncan_bayne

It became apparent early in the call that although we were talking in some detail about integrating two complex and complicated systems, no-one on the call was a developer (except myself, lapsed).

It had never occurred to me that the powers that be might do that. Next time (and from then on) there were developers involved, at least from our side.

But it's trivially true in the case where the provider does so wish (as it would be true of any protocol with a fully-functional HTTP gateway infront of it), and it's untrue in the case where the provider doesn't.

And the provider has to do extra work:

"[offering an HTTP gateway] required adding custom options to gRPC definitions in protobufs, and add an additional container running this reverse-proxy server." ( https://wecode.wepay.com/posts/migrating-apis-from-rest-to-g... )

This still seems like a massive regression in openness to me.

No, you can just grab a generated client in a language of your choice if that language happens to be supported by protobuf.

This is a massive regression from the openness of HTTP REST APIs.

It was like a revelation.

No longer were we tied to inflexible, command-and-conquer style platforms. We could fix bugs ourselves, instead of waiting for years for vendors to maybe fix the bugs we diligently reported.

We could distribute our own libraries and packages in minutes, with licenses of our own choice. There was no corporate gatekeeper standing in the way. (But what of security, you ask? Look at Lenovo and Superfish ... that was a MITM attack produced by the supposed gatekeepers).

Now it seems things have come full circle, and a younger generation of developers is discovering, once again, that writing software for closed, proprietary systems is a mug's game.

Only now, those platforms seem even more strongly entrenched, courtesy the mobile duopoly and web monopoly.

I am, to put it mildly, not the greatest fan of Microsoft, or of most of their products. But that just sounds like a flag to avoid breaking backwards compatibility by fixing bugs that people have come to rely on.

And a strong focus on backwards compatibility most certainly is a principle by which Microsoft operated for years.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

Austrians have been saying for years that State calculation to achieve desired economic outcomes is doomed to failure ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem). This just seems like a special case of that.

Of course, I'd personally like to see this taken further, and see a) welfare programs in kind in general replaced with cash, and then b) taxpayer funding of same replaced by charitable giving (quite the opposite to the UBI folks, and motivated by quite a different morality). This feels like quite a viable transition to me.

That's a common problem. I spent a while contracting with an insurance company a decade or so ago, and one of my fellow developers was tasked with coding an "un-decease person" feature. It was non-trivial.

(Though for what it's worth, the same way it's solved problems of poverty throughout the world: https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=1528)

"If you use our tools, we can kill your livelihood at any time for any reason and tough shit if you want a why"

It has always been thus with proprietary tools and platforms.

Back in 2011 I switched careers from developing software on proprietary stacks - at the time C# 4.0, Silverlight, and MS Windows - to developing on open source stacks, starting with Ruby on Rails and JavaScript.

A short time after I switched away from Silverlight, I found a bug in the open source XML library my team was using. I then submitted a PR to fix it, which was merged (with some revision :)) after a few days. The experience was a revelation after the combination of magic 8 ball and years-long wait times for non-critical bug fixes on Visual Studio.

It looks like the younger generation is busy rediscovering the vulnerability and helplessness of proprietary systems themselves.

I think the main reason is that they're on the whole pretty racist towards dwarves.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_controver...

Although I would much rather them than Fox if forced to choose. (As it is, I follow neither).

Having a private office was great, but a team space I shared a few years ago - rented just for that team, for around three months - was astonishingly productive for all of us, with almost none of the downsides of open plan.

As far as open plan goes: it is worse for mental health, productivity, and creativity. There is ample evidence to support those assertions ( https://theconversation.com/a-new-study-should-be-the-final-...).

The only advantage open plan has is that it is cheaper, per person, than any alternative - if you only factor in the cost of office space.

Even people who should know better, like Tim Bray, keep trotting out lines like this:

> So they're gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism.

If you think about it from the perspective of an ideological war against capitalism, certain facts (like people ignoring Amazon driving wages up) start to make more sense.

That's, ummm, not my point at all, and I honestly don't see how you took it from what I wrote.

What I meant was just that Snowden's revelations revealed a bunch of 'alternative' methods, beyond a court-ordered wiretap. Collusion, cable tapping, shipping intercepts ... all seem to have been on the table for the NSA and GCHQ.

My point was just that I'd be very surprised if this court result prevented the type of interception that was being requested.

In addition to being off-topic, it's heavily biased, highlighting the (reprehensible) civilian casualties caused by the Nationalists, while remaining silent on the similar number of (also reprehensible) civilian deaths caused by the Republicans.

It also describes the Nationalists as Fascists (which is true), while describing the anarchist and communist backed Republicans as "left-leaning" (which is biased understatement).

"Here's a barge full of coal. Maybe you can fix it with that."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

Those two spring to mind immediately, and I'm not American, I'm Australian.

Personally, I don't understand why anyone trusts their Government more than the bare minimum required to support the rule of law.

For years, this has been her approach to the 2nd amendment, and to be honest, most geeks have either remained silent, or applauded her actions.

Now she's coming for the 4th amendment, and geeks are up in arms (humour intentional).

https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=770

Since its economic liberalization reforms in 1991, India’s average income has increased by 7.5 percent per year. That means that average income has more than tripled over the last quarter century. As wealth increased, the poverty rate in India declined by almost 24 percent. But most significantly, for the Dalits – the poorest and lowest caste in Indian society – the poverty rate during this period declined even faster, by 31 percent. That means that in the nation that has by far the largest number of people in extreme poverty, it is the people at the very bottom of the social strata who are getting richer faster.

You can't, and won't, 'fix' broken States with technology, or charity, or education. First, they must fix their political systems to enable the creation, saving and investment of wealth.

It's a source of some surprise to me that the above is ever controversial among folks who admire Paul Graham, and have read his essays on wealth creation.

We already do that in the case of religion.

Case in point, the bug I raised about TZ handling (which is also an example of silent failure):

https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16412

USSR.

North Korea.

Cuba.

Vietnam.

China.

Those that have recovered have done so to the extent that they have abandoned Marxism. Economically speaking, even fascism (e.g. China) is better than Marxism.

It's probably better from a human rights perspective, too. This was first published in 1988, but is still highly relevant:

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/marxist-dreams-...

How many died altogether? No one will ever know. What is certain is that the Soviet Union has been the worst reeking charnel house of this whole awful twentieth century, worse even than the one the Nazis created (but then they had less time). The sum total of deaths due to Soviet policy — in the Stalin period alone — deaths from the collectivization and the terror-famine, the executions and the Gulag, is probably on the order of 30,000,000.

http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/hicks...

To put it bluntly, Marxism has failed dismally in every place and at every time it's been tried.