dynamite-ready

Money is exactly what got us to this point! Besides, I always thought taste, or at least 'popular' taste, was a market function, or something?

That's what people like Rick Rubin (Iovine, the Medici's, etc), deep down, need us to believe. Probably.

For me, photography is the metaphor - https://raskie.com/post/we-have-ai-at-home - We've had the technology to produce a perfect 2D likeness of a subject for close to two centuries now, and people are still painting.

Video didn't kill the radio star either. In fact the radio star has become more popular than ever in this, the era of the podcast.

This is interesting. At what level and team size? There's going to have to be a point where you just give in to the 'vibes' (whether it's from a human, or a machine), otherwise you become the bottleneck, no?

That's not always the intention behind that style of writing.

Often, when I'm communicating with someone who is either dyslexic, or uses English as a second (or even third or fourth) language, then I make an effort to shorten sentences, and almost make bullet points of them.

It's actually a good exercise for the person writing too. Less can indeed be more.

Some of the sites I maintain, are fine. But I'm guessing it's just a matter of time?

> Containers have nothing to do with storage. They are completely orthogonal to storage

Exactly.

And sure, you can use S3/Dynamo/Aurora from an EC2 box, but what would be the point of that? Just get the app running in a container, and we can look into infrastructure later.

It's a very common refrain. That's why I believe Docker is strongly to linked the development of these proprietary, cloud based models of computing, that place containerisation at the heart of an ecosystem that bastardises the classic idea of a 'server'.

The existence of S3 is one good result of this. IAM, on the other hand, can die in dumpster fire. Though it won't...

It's subjective I guess, but I feel as though containerisation has greatly supported the large Cloud vendor's desire to subvert the more common model of computing... Like, before, your server was a computer, much like your desktop machine, and you programmed it much like your desktop machine.

But now, people are quite happy to put their app in a Docker container and outsource all design and architecture decisions pertaining to data storage and performance.

And with that, the likes of ECS, Dynamo, RedShift, etc, are a somewhat reasonable answer to that. It's much easier to offer a distinct proposition around that state of affairs, than say a market that was solely based on EC2-esque VMs.

What I did not like, but absolutely expected, was this lurch towards near enough standardising one specific vendor's model. We're in quite a strange place atm, where AWS specific knowledge might actually have a slightly higher value than traditional DevOps skills for many organisations.

Felt like this all happened both at the speed of light, and in slow motion, at the same time.

The whole industry walked straight into the cloud service lock-in trap. How would we begin to wind back? I also think Docker is as much to blame as the bigger cloud vendors.

What are you suggesting though? That there were clues to herald these changes? Tbh, I did look at my (new) MP's record on social justice and welfare... They were surprisingly out of Party character on a few issues. But certainly better than the other candidates in aggregate.

That's about the best we can all do.

Like many others, I would like to see a Swiss style vote on anything that gathers enough public support.

Apparently, there are a few sources that suggest a 'silent' majority supports the OSA. I think far reaching laws like these (the assisted death law changes being another) should always be put before the public. That way at least, I can better understand my position, and consider whether I'm in the wrong.

(I feel the OSA should have forced the ISPs to add parental controls, and let each household manage their own patterns of consumption)

I really don't remember voting on this web censorship issue, or ID cards, because both of those policies would have changed my vote, for sure.

I suppose the missing part of the story is why they held back on pursuing this market.

At the time, the console market was wide open, with little innovation in terms of hardware, until Nintendo released the Switch.

Even now, I'd be quite happy to own a Valve branded, small form PC that plugs into a TV.

The Steam Link was a kop out to me.

I'd wager the chances of that happening are much lower under this current administration. Surprised Biden didn't consider it though.

> Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we'd previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they're wrong. Only our initial assumption of course. If they can prove we should stop say

For example, is a discussion about the defacement of the Black Hills a 'priggish' waste of time, or a valuable lesson about the real history of the United States?

This is it.

Well organised and destructive conservatives across much of the western world, have conspired successfully to nullify the positive effect of a word once used to elide wide ranging ideas and discussions on the subject of social justice.

This is social media at it's most galling.

Though alongside that, we now have a wider appreciation of a long list historical crimes, and the longstanding effect of those transgressions.

In that sense, we have all become 'woke'.

Nick Clegg left just in time.

As written, possibly. Taken literally, it's full of holes.

But if you're not a pedant, I essentially mean that most parents will vaccinate their children, many passengers will book flights, and a majority of the citizens in a population do respect their officials (etcetera).

And I think if you were to dig deeper than this, and test that hypothesis with... well... a scientific experiment of some kind, the result would probably support it.

But a good number of people will naturally question the outcome!

I think this comment comes across as slightly ignorant.

Many examples exist where a misguided belief in scientific 'facts' (usually a ropey hypothesis, with seemingly 'damning' evidence), or a straight up abuse of the scientific method, causes direct harm.

Suspicion is often based on facts or experience.

People have been infected with diseases without their knowledge.

People have been forced to undergo surgical procedures on the basis of spurious claims.

People have been burnt alive in buildings judged to be safe.

And look at Boeing.

No one has a problem with science itself per se. Everyone accepts the scientific method to be one of our greatest cultural achievements.

But whether one is "less bright", or super smart, we all know we as humans, are prone to mistakes, and are just as prone to bend the truth, to cover up those mistakes.

There's nothing plebeian about this form of suspicion. In fact, the scientific method relies on it (peer review).

At their core, I still think of these things as search engines, albeit super advanced ones. But the emotion the agent conveys with it's speech synth is completely new...

Accessibility. Some people are actually just here to read. That's what the original standard was for, after all.

Being able to feasibly feed it a whole project codebase in one 'prompt' could now make these new generation of code completion tools worthwhile. I've found them to be of limited value so far, because they're never aware of the context of proposed changes.

With Gemini though, the idea of feeding in the current file, class, package, project, and perhaps even dependencies into a query, can potentially lead to some enlightening outputs.

I understand some of the disparaging replies i regards to execution, but if I'm honest, as someone who writes a lot of React, the idea of ditching it for a universally support standard of any kind, is a very appealing idea.

This software design principle is conspicuously absent at this point in time. Sure, Agile is important, and Agile processes do generate good products. But those processes have also come to introduce a cyclic development model, that's permeated back into the tools, and larger tool developers (like, those in the React / NodeJS class in terms of user base size) have abused this good intent.

Software can still be developed iteratively. That's not the problem. With CMake, for example, I don't 'fear' upgrades, because that team values the idea of 'finished' software. As does Microsoft.

On the other hand, the NPM and Apple dev teams do not cherish this idea. And in turn, both their user and developer communities suffer in the long run.

That's how I've come to see it recently.

https://quixical.com/: Discuss your flight and potential routes, with other travellers, in real-time.

More info and some tech notes here: https://raskie.com/post/how-was-your-flight

I feel it's because the main draw of Erlang/Elixir and the BEAM, was scalability. Since the time Elixir was introduced, the Cloud system vendors have developed many solid alternative answers to the scalability question, with products that don't even require developers to learn a new language.

The soft-realtime and failover concepts that Erlang/Elixir champions are still features that are unmatched elsewhere though. I have less experience with Phoenix, but writing a WebSocket server in Elixir with Erlang's Cowboy feels like the best possible way to write a WebSocket server. In fact, in that context (which is admittedly narrow), I think Elixir might be the best possible tool available for WebSocket server programming. Even if it's only used on a single machine.

I also see the Elixir team making efforts to push into the ML space. If they can develop a user friendly solution to Distributed Model Training, based on OTP semantics, I can imagine Elixir pulling some attention away from Python.

But tbf, to get the most out of the Elixir, you need to learn a little about OTP, which is very different. In fact, while I won't go as far to say learning Erlang is a prerequisite to learning Elixir, it helps alot, and that can be intimidating.

And if you're doing webdev work, then Elixir would mean that you also have to manage / maintain your own servers too. Then there's the niche status of all BEAM languages, but that's the 'network effect' I guess.

I mean, Elixir is definitely not a replacement for Rust. I imagine it as being closer to Node, Python, or possibly Java. And even then, it's a wild comparison, because of the way Actor Model concurrency is weaved into BEAM languages, in a way that no other language does.

For perf optimisations, you have Ports or NIFs (irc), where Ports are just knowingly volatile processes, and NIFs are FFIs, which is an almost universal feature across all languages.

But I suppose your experience is based on use case. And I would agree that commercial BEAM language experience is generally thin on the ground, if you're role is to build an engineering team (though I can't imagine Rust expertise being that much more abundant either).

One thing I would add, is Erlang/Elixir's emphasis on multi machine concurrency is somewhat at odds with the serverless future we're moving towards. But ignoring that (especially with vendor lock in issues), I often wonder why Elixir hadn't put a larger dent in the popularity of Kubernetes. Because BEAM's approach to managing multiple services across machines seems both much more powerful, and dev friendly.

Currently reading that. It's interesting. Love the detail.

This is the true legacy of React, and it's awful. It's not just a case of "you're doing it wrong", because even cutting edge codebases (developed in the last 1 or so) are struggling with this.

"useMemo is the solution" many will tell you. Compared to the way things are handled in Vue, useCallback and useMemo are near enough code smells for something rotting in the center of the React codebase.

Wasn't that the paradigm behind Tensorflow?

More detail here: https://www.polygon.com/23696346/humanity-game-preview-enhan...

Apparently, the game is also produced by Sega R&D legend Tetsuya Mizuguchi. Might have to checkout the demo.

I think the studio behind this is headed by Yugo Nakamura, who was famous in the early web development days as a trailblazing Macromedia/Adobe Flash programmer with his http://yugop.com/ experiments.

His UI work has always been of an extremely high quality. Apple like, before Apple even found it's modern identity. I think this game has been in development for a good few years (at least 4, perhaps). Glad to see it might turn out well.