fivea

> Imagining boatloads of complexity involved with the blinking cursors according to markets, profiles and geographic locations and whatever else really doesn't make it sound any better at all.

These basic everyday requirements are oblivious to those who have zero first-hand contact or experience with professional user-facing problems imposed by business requirements.

However, just because you're oblivious or unfamiliar to these requirements, they don't mean they aren't requirements.

Think about it for a second. If it's necessary to target a service to specific geographical markets to comply with legal and/or business requirents, and given it's considerably more profitable to target a shop to a customer based on their personal interests, why would you ignore that and naively presume that the hypothetical "blinking cursor" is straight-forward to implement? And I'm not even touching hard technical probs which most developers aren't experienced or competent in, such as security and reliability.

There is a widespread problem in software development which is this this tendency to be very opinionated over all problems in spite of being totally ignorant and oblivious to the underlying problem domain. Everyone is an idiot except themselves, who always hold the answer in spite of not even knowingwhat the problem is, let alone understanding it.

> Dan Luu also elsewhere makes the argument that most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.

The keyword "impactful engineering" needs some clarification though.

It does not mean there's a 100x guy walking around the office while everyone is slacking off.

A specific proof of concept hacked together by a guy in a week might eventually become the company's flagship product. That's impact. However, the thing needs to be rewritten from scratch to become production ready or even deployable, and that takes far more work that does not fit the definition of "impactful".

I personally know a principal engineer of a FANG which single-handedly wrote the proof of concepts of more than a few projects that thousands of users use every single day. From his own words following one of his recent presentations, "this needs to be rewritten from scratch as this would get me rejected from our job interviews".

> When you have engineers working into the wee hours of the morning because you don’t want a cursor to blink on a text field, (...)

You're grossly misrepresenting the problems being faced and what forces engineers to work into the wee hours of the morning.

Just because stuff seems done to you or you notice no change, that does not mean nothing is being worked on.

Let's take basic A/B testing. To you, it's a blinking cursor. For the company, it's a bunch of business metrics being reported from N different components feeding into a data lake, with different versions of the same feature being deployed simultaneously to specific subsets of all customers based on their profile. But the cursor blinks differently depending on the market, and needs to comply with accessibility guidelines, on all X supported browsers regardless of their quirks. Some markets might not even have a cursor at all. Perhaps your cursor is only expected to show in a specific geographical location.

But you see a blinking cursor, and as you are oblivious to everything then you think it's just a tag somewhere. To you that's just a line of HTML, right? How hard could that be?

> But you find a few 1,000 people online with bad experiences (...) and assume you have a complete picture but you're only looking through a pinhole of information returned with biased search results.

Oh I know a good story.

I know a woman who unfortunately isn't the most educated person in the world and happens to have a nasty health issue where both her feet are all swollen up and makes her hard to walk around.

She's been seeing doctors left and right to solve or mitigate her condition.

One time, when she went to an appointment at the local hospital, her doctor handed her a form for her to sign and told her just to sign on the dotted line and don't worry about it.

The form was a consent form to amputate both her legs.

I happened to come across her when she was going to get a second opinion with the very form in her hands, completely furious.

She still has both her legs, even though she still suffers from the same issue.

Oddly enough, the hospital which handed out the leg amputation form also had a malpractice suite where they amputated the wrong leg of a patient.

Moral of the story: even though medical professionals are expected to be more knowledgeable about health topics, they are still human and far from infallible. More importantly, ultimately you're the person responsible for your personal health, and you need to have a say on what's done with your life based on the info that medical professionals make available to you. If you do not take an active role on these decisions on your health, others will eventually make these decisions for you, and they may not be good or have your best interests in mind.

> But above all, "pseudoscience" is something different and is certainly not the right word to describe this issue of terminology.

The definition of pseudoscience is "a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method."

Arguably the idea that neural networks reproduce how brains work is pseudoscience.

In the very least, it's a deeply misguided marketing blurb. It's now considered a metaphor, just like the ones driving some corners of the artificial intelligence field.

> I generally hate this type of thing: retry mechanisms are a lazy band-aid that can mask real problems.

They can, but beyond the old "it broke once it deployed" obvious pattern, 9 out of 10 times retries only sidestep basic nuisances from transient errors such as a request timing out.

GitLab, Travis, circleci, Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, etc etc etc

In fact, I cannot come up with a single CICD service which fails at this, except GitHub.

> This is why UI is hard.

Is it though?. I mean, pretty much all mainstream CICD services do this right out of the box. GitLab does this so well it's even totally transparent and never an issue.

How come GitHub actions, which succeeded all of its alternatives, managed to turn a solved problem into a constant source of headaches?

> A fork implies that the projects are going diverge,

...which is exactly what you're doing when you branch off a release branch and start applying your own commits with no plan to merge them back to mainline.

> which it seems they don't want to happen.

They are already doing it. They are only arguing that they can reapply the same patches over the next release branch, but that doesn't really change anything.

> Until now, I think Twitter's not-so-slight political lean has been viewed as detrimental to the company (and public discourse).

Can you point out what is, in your personal opinion, the best example you have of Twitter's "not-so-slight political lean" and how you interpret it as "detrimental to the company (and public discourse)"?

> Look for monitors which advertise thunderbolt and a charging wattage.

I have no idea what led you to believe that someone searching for monitors that charge MacBook pros with thunderbolt did not checked if the monitor charged MacBook pros with thunderbolt.

> PhD is not schooling. It's a research job. You get paid to do a PhD.

No not really. A PhD student at most receives a scholarship, and currently at least in Europe has to undergo a curricular part comprised of a dozen or so courses. How does that not count as schooling?

If I'm not mistaken the only exception to the schooling requirement is if a student is able to publish a few research papers on a topic that are coherent and related to a concrete research topic that could support their thesis.

>>I don't know what you need to be huffing to consider a master student at the final stages "untrained".

I don't know what could possibly lead you to believe that someone just starting off his master's thesis has any experience whatsoever in research, and has any contact with any academic topic beyond the standard curriculum that every single one has to go through to get a degree.

Does that count as experienced in your book?

> If you use a laptop with an external monitor, a better idea is to get a premium monitor which handles charging, video, and data transfer of USB devices connected to the monitor for you.

I made this mistake, and I ended up with a grossly overpriced monitor which fails to charge a MacBook Pro and whose video through USBC support is hit-and-miss, in the sense that it doesn't always work.

> EDIT: It looks like SQLightning got adopted and has been worked on by the SQLite team under the name LumoSQL.

I see none of your claims being supported by your link.

It seems LumoSQL is just an umbrella term that refers to a bunch of patches applied over SQLite. I'm not sure if that's enough to not call it a fork.

Also,I saw zero references to the people actually involved in LumoSQL, other than the project being supported by the NLNet foundation.

I'd expect that a small project managed and hosted by the SQLite team to be hosted in www.sqlite.org, but this looks like a completely independent and unrelated effort.

I think you are discussing different things, and in the process missing the whole point.

It's one thing for an object to be immutable throughout is life cycle. That's immaterial to this discussion.

It's an entirely different thing that the same object cannot be changed within specific contexts.

If you want to ensure that a thread has read access to an object and it cannot be changed accidentally then passing a const reference to that object already ensures that. That's pretty much the whole point of const.

One outstanding example is not much in the way of a proof.

A masters thesis is a few month's work from an untrained student going through an idea that's already being explored by the school's research group. A PhD typically involves far more deep independent work that's deemed relevant by at least one research institution.

> Const means the object cannot be altered via the const reference, but can be altered by mutable reference to the same object.

Given that this discussion is already going deep into the implementation level, isn't it possible to flag an object as immutable if it's declared and initialized as a const object, or is a const reference to said const object?

> no, `const` means you can't modify the data through that `const` variable (excepting shenanigans), not that it's immutable.

But that's the whole point, isn't it? I mean the selling point of these lifetime annotations is to allow developers to specify that data within a thread cannot be modified by the code running in that thread.

Isn't that exactly what const does?

> For example, if we have a const Car, we can reach into it to grab a (non-const) Engine through which we can modify things.

Isn't that already deep within undefined behavior territory?

That hardly is an adequate example, given that it spells an eggregious fault, the kind that's covered by any intro to C++ course with clear indications that it's nonsense.

> C++ doesn't have a concept of immutable data, or data not shared by another thread, which is part of the challenge.

Does it really need it, though? In the real world C++ apps already use higher-level constructs to handle this sort of semantics. For instance, Qt offers it's moveToThread member function to specify thread affinity.

What problem does this actually solve?

> Precisely. New functions can be written to treat all pre-existing memory as immutable, and we can be confident that that data won't change.

Isn't that the point of const?

> Vale solves this by isolating threads' memory from each other (except in the case of mutexes or Seamless Concurrency).

Given the whole point of threads is concurrency while sharing a memory space, and given we already have semantics on which data is thread local and how the ownership of heap memory should be handled, what's the point of that?

To me it sounds like some people fail to understand how the complexity they are trying to pile onto C++ is slowly killing C++ due to the sheer volume of all the cognitive load they're trying to add.

> Ironically, I wish they would publish it as HTML broken down by chapter and section.

I wish there was an EPUB version of the document. Do PDFs support reflowable content?

> What's the problem with moderation?

The OP mentioned a bunch of problems spawning from the platform's lack of moderation, among which there's spam and scams.

> There are not alway 86400s in 1 day. Midnight is not a whole number of multiples of 86400 after Jan 1st 1970.

Isn't that an issue with the format you want to convert UNIX time to ?

I mean, UNIX time is quite clearly and unambiguously defined as the number of seconds that passed since January 1st 1970. How are UTC's leap seconds any relevant?

> Naw that would make way too much sense. Instead, unix time ticks backwards 1 second to sync up with UTC:

Doesn't that mean that UNIX time is in fact a stopwatch, but to express it in UTC you need to factor in UTC's quirks such as its leap seconds?

> (...) but I don't get how this is related to what you quoted or any other part of GP's comment.

If you read about the topic you'll soon discover that Meta/Facebook has been systematically imposing demands for preferential treatment, including demanding circumventing laws to allow agricultural land, some of which they don't even own, to instead be used to build high-density industrial buildings.

This, in a country where Amazon and Microsoft already operate their own data centers. In fact, Facebook rejected the location already used by Amazon and Microsoft, and instead decided to force their way somewhere else.

It's also worth mentioning some of the apparent corruption aspects of Facebook's deal, abusing preferential rights of the municipality to exclude competing bids.

> maybe for very predictable workloads.

Predictability has nothing to do with it. Volume is the key factor, specially its impact on cost.

> arrogant of you to say adopters haven’t done their homework

Those who mindlessly advocate lambdas as a blanket solution quite clearly didn't even read the marketing brochure. Otherwise they would be quite aware of how absurd their suggestion is.

> Data centers are a hard sell in general because they don't really provide too much benefit to a community.

The Netherlands is already the home of some FANGs (AWS has a few edge locations in Amsterdam) and dominant hosting providers such as Cloudflare.

I'm sure they'll be able to overcome the loss of Facebook.