fogzen

Almost. It’s a process problem. But the process is a step above the organization. It’s a socio-economic process that incentivizes these problems. It’s capitalism that’s the process problem. That’s the process that introduces the problem into the organization. Without the government regulators making them test nothing would have even been done at all. Because the problem is the organization exists within a framework that pits it against safety. Safety is at odds with what the organization is tasked to do within the process that it exists in.

Love this (as someone with a love for rugs). Thanks for sharing.

It might be worth it if it reduces bugs. If you’re running a payments company maybe working software is more important than saving a buck and shipping a day earlier.

Braintree was a pair programming company for example.

I think there's a tension between databases as programs to store and retrieve data quickly, efficiently, and reliably vs. programs to enforce business rules and domain modeling.

I am firmly in the former camp. In my opinion databases should be for storing and retrieving data as quickly and efficiently as possible. But the consensus in the database world seems to be that databases are primarily for enforcing business rules and domain models with foreign key constraints, triggers, views, transactions, type safety, domain modeling of relations, and on and on – some of which is at odds with storing and retrieving data efficiently.

I haven’t worked much with BEAM/Erlang but having worked with real distributed applications I’m quite skeptical there’s much value in helping me send messages over the net between processes. That’s the trivial part of distributed systems. The hard parts of distributed computing like data consistency, consensus, or network partitions are left to the programmer. To say nothing about hardware.

Something simple like a message queue has many ways it can be implemented in a distributed system. In Erlang every actor has its own queue. Great. I highly doubt I could actually use them in a real distributed system but I’d love to see that I’m wrong.

Here's a trivial example from one of my recent jobs: We need to queue Slack messages from different producers into some kind of per-tenant outbox queue that ensures one consumer per tenant, and which consumes at a maximum rate (to stay below Slack rate limits). This queue also needs to be bounded and communicate back pressure to producers. What unique value does Erlang provide here? Usually this kind of thing is built using Go and AWS Lambdas and SQS or Kafka. Where does Erlang/BEAM help here?

I think a ban on the solicitation of tips, including tip jars, would be practical and easy to implement. It would still be legal to tip if not asked/prompted. That would make the tip prompts on payment terminals illegal, as well as tip jars.

I don’t think tipping would continue without a way to demand tips or shame people with prompts.

Sure, they’ll get into Ubers, Waymo’s, and Robotaxis. But almost every American will still drive themselves in their own car. The world of personal transportation looks exactly the same as it did 30 years ago. Don’t forget self driving taxis was Uber’s pitch for a long time before reality forced them tell a different story.

Even if self-driving works well, Americans will drive their own car. Where does Tesla fit in once EV tech is a commodity and the brand is no longer fashionable?

Yes, for some kinds of operations on some kinds of data structures. The keyword/property is "monotonicity". Monotonic functions are guaranteed to terminate under fixed-point semantics.

Look into Datafun: A total functional language that generalizes Datalog. Also be sure to watch Datafun author Michael Arntzenius's Strangeloop talk.

https://www.rntz.net/datafun/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC295d3V9gE

I think this area is still under explored. I built one of my startups using only PostgREST as the backend, and it was honestly amazing, despite the limitations. The main technical challenge was migrations and interfacing with external systems.

The bigger challenge is selling this. Only experienced programmers understand the value, but are seldom in positions of power, or are wary of locking themselves in. This only works for greenfield development. I was able to take this approach because I had been CTO developing an MVP, and even then it was a hard sell to my co-founder. Most people just can't truly grok the value because they aren't experienced programmers.

The mushrooms are speaking, but not in words, rather in ripples of being. The currents beneath your feet are alive. They hum of moisture, hunger, damage, alliance. It's not a conversation in alphabetic language, but a resonance—a conversation in electricity and time. If you could tune in, you might hear the forest breathing, think in fungal pulses, dream in mycelial code.

Marriage is a commitment to stay together for life. Family is the most compelling reason to make such a commitment, as children are naturally a lifelong relationship and long-term shared responsibility. Caring for the spouse is an extension of caring for the child.

Sure, people can get married without choosing to have children. There's just way less on the line. Divorce is much easier. Just split the assets and move on. No need to worry about custody issues, where the child will live, all the relatives that have a relationship with the child, etc.

This is deeply connected to the drop in childbirth. Yeah, if you don’t want children and you just have a friend you have sex with, why get married?

There are no rules against publishing or teaching dhamma in the vinaya except for the (outdated) rules about which specific persons cannot be taught.

“Monks, do not wage wordy warfare, saying: 'You don't understand this Dhamma and discipline, I understand this Dhamma and discipline'; 'How could you understand it? You have fallen into wrong practices: I have the right practice'; 'You have said afterwards what you should have said first, and you have said first what you should have said afterwards';[1] 'What I say is consistent, what you say isn't'; 'What you have thought out for so long is entirely reversed'; 'Your statement is refuted'; 'You are talking rubbish!'; 'You are in the wrong'; 'Get out of that if you can!'

"Why should you not do this? Such talk, monks, is not related to the goal, it is not fundamental to the holy life, does not conduce to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, tranquillity, higher knowledge, enlightenment or to Nibbana. When you have discussions, monks, you should discuss Suffering, the Arising of Suffering, its Cessation, and the Path that leads to its Cessation. Why is that? Because such talk is related to the goal... it conduces to disenchantment... to Nibbana. This is the task you must accomplish”

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn56/sn56.009.wl...

Also please read https://suttacentral.net/pli-tv-bu-vb-pc2/en/brahmali?layout...

Hey it’s your email, trust Google with it if you want. Just know if you ever run into a situation there is no support and they will not help you regain access.

My wife lost her life’s email despite knowing the password. Google didn’t recognize the device, asked to verify using a phone she doesn’t have access to anymore. Despite knowing her login and controlling the recovery email, she couldn’t login. Everything was tied to her email. She lost access to many other accounts connected to the gmail as a well. Lost contacts, lost YouTube account, and on and on. It was honestly traumatic for her, and maddening because she has the password.

Do not use Google for email. Just pay $5/mo for an email service that won’t ruin your life for no good reason.

The exact same, maybe using AI on the backend to improve results, maybe for language translation. But AI is useless in search for the most part. People are looking for a specific thing quickly with the least typing. People don’t want to have a conversation with a chat bot to personalize their results.

I think AI is overhyped right now. Very few real businesses being built on GPT outside of copywriting and blog spam, and consumer toys (avatars, art, funny filters).

I also think Google knows it’s not as disruptive as people think it is.

Doing only what you enjoy prevents you from getting what you want, if what you want requires action you don’t enjoy.

If the pain of not being where you want to be is greater than the pain of remaining where you are, you’ll take action.

It’s great if you enjoy what you’re doing. But often we enjoy where we want to go more than what we have to do to get there. I want a clean house more than I want to clean it, which is why I take action to clean it every day.

The problem comes when we aren’t in tune with what we really want, and we can’t make the choice about what’s required of us. It’s okay to accept that you don’t want to be someone who meditates every day. Or that you want to eat and drink more than you want six pack abs. Be honest about what you want, without influence from the expectations of other people, culture, or tradition.

It's not as complicated as you're making it out to be. You don't need to moisturize, meditate, or keep a journal.

If you work for someone else, you don't need to plan your day. Just show up for work. If you don't have any goals, you don't need plan for them.

The journaling and meditation stuff is mostly posturing. Most people who say they do those things don't actually do them.

Having worked with dozens of startups, "build-your-own-workflow" is a giant mess of one sentence tasks in Linear or Asana.

The debate over user stories seems like one of semantics. Stories exist regardless of whether they are called "story". Requirements exist regardless of whether people get clarity and consensus on them before writing code.

Linear says don't write user stories, that they "obscure" the work that needs to be done. But clarifying use cases and requirements is the opposite of obscuring – it's specifying. They say that there's no need to articulate product requirements for common features like "todo lists". Who believes that? To-do lists can vary greatly in their functionality. I've worked with enough companies for long enough to know that people always have different ideas for how something is going to work, even for "simple" things.

Linear also says product discussions should be kept out of Linear. Fair enough. But then what is Linear really providing? Not much. Why use it?

"Engagement" can mean completely different measurements. Clicking headlines is a measure of initiating attention, video watch time is a measure of maintaining attention. Maintaining attention seems like a great measurement of the relative quality of various videos.

“Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal“ — Earl Nightingale

We can choose our social role. We can choose the market we want to serve.

They always were liable. But of course, people would have to show they were actually harmed in some way by being “tracked”. GDPR makes it illegal to collect data that doesn’t cause any demonstrable harm to anyone.

The cookie is the same for all users. There is no value unique to each user. All that is logged is “a visit to this page occurred at X time” and if the request contained the cookie then it is marked “unique”. The cookie value is the same for everyone.

What should matter is what’s logged. Every request contains an IP that’s how the web works.

I didn’t realize that. That seems pretty stupid. The system I describe doesn’t log any personally identifiable information.

I don’t get it. Why not just set a 24-hour cookie scoped to the path, and every request without the cookie is logged as a “unique visit”.

That gives unique visits by device within a 24 hour period, per page, with no logging of any ID/IP whatsoever. You can pair this with signup counts or campaign codes to get conversion rate by channel, all without any nonsense “anonymized” user IDs.

If the source of truth is SAP, why not just build a service that gets the data you need from SAP?

> has to be imported all at once due to some issue I don't understand that prevents incremental updates.

Has to? Seems like a straightforward problem to solve. Might be good to understand why this “isn’t possible”

> These deployments take place at 2am and require multiple people to be involved.

Big red flag. If it’s a computer process it can be automated. Deployment should be automated. It is totally stupid to have people awake at 2am doing deployments.

It’s sad how many people here cannot see the world through any other lens but money made on the market.

The fundamental issue with our environmental crisis is externalities. Chopping down every tree and strip-mining the planet is not a good idea just because it’s profitable in market terms. Growing food 100 years from now is important. An ecology that supports human life 100 years from now is important. More important than whether you can get rich from depleting natural resources.

You’re conflating FU money with financial freedom.

FU money is being able to quit without worrying about expenses before finding another means of living.

Financial freedom is reaching retirement threshold (financial escape velocity): having enough money to not work anymore based on your desired expenses. That means having enough money invested in index funds such that you could withdraw the annualized return each year and live on that for the rest of your life (typically 4%).

How is that different than saying “Siri, remind me to do X in one hour”