fvdessen

> There might be some queries expressible in your GraphQL that would have severe performance problems or even bugs, sure, but if your frontend doesn't actually make queries like that, who cares?

People with bad intentions can make those slow queries happen at high volume with custom tooling, they don’t have to restrict themselves to how the frontend uses the queries

I recently rewrote a 40K lines application to 2K lines. Mostly by using newer tech and better design patterns. (Java to TS, Terraform to CDK, lambda soup to single app, etc.). It was a POC at work to show how things could be different. You'd think this would have made some devs rethink their approach, but no they're using AI to write even more code faster in the old approach.

Yes, sorry, corrected

Unfortunately research shows that nowadays we're actually getting dumber, literacy rates are plummeting in developed countries.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2024/12/ad...

The problem is who pays to maintain the system. There are systems that allow you to share your age anonymously (among other things) and they’re already widely used in Europe but the system knows what you’re using it for since the second party pays for the information, and some accounting info is needed for the billing. It would be completely illegal for the system to use that info for anything else though.

Well I can’t read a sentence since it’s paywalled

I always hear about tariffs but isn’t part of the trade imbalance due to corporate taxes being usually much lower outside the USA, incentivizing American companies to outsource production and keep the money abroad ?

Its not just women, maga men wear makeup too

Shouldn't the manager of the 'bunch of workers' notice the guy is underperforming and understand why ? Maybe that manager is the one that shouldn't be doing that job

I've a good track record of having my programs work without bugs, I don't think it's too hard. The way I work is to restrict myself to using building blocks that I know work well and produce correct results. For example: using state machines, never breaking out of a loop, tackling all the edge case before the body, using simple data structures, don't use inheritance or exceptions, don't interact with files natively, don't use recursion, etc. etc.

When I face a programming problem I map the solution to those simple building blocks, and If I can't I try to change the problem first.

Formal methods are hard if you want to prove the correctness of a hard algorithm, but you can almost always do without a hard algorithm and use something really basic instead, and for the basic things you don't need formal methods.

The people who write the most bugs in my experience do it because they don't fully understand the building blocks they're using, and rely on other things for correctness like the type checker or unit tests. They view code as a stochastic process, write code they don't fully understand and have accepted the resulting bugs as a fact of life.

Those are incredible but unfortunately you need the right topology to build them. I don't know about the US but I doubt there's much more of those to be built in Europe.

It's not economically optimal for one country to manufacture all the jewelry and its neighbour all the tanks, because this situation quickly becomes one country

As the paper says:

A true Italian grandmother or a skilled home chef from Rome would never need a scientific recipe for Cacio and pepe, relying instead on instinct and years of experience.

I'm looking at the data and there is zero relationship between inflation, interest rates and personal savings in the USA. People save in time of crisis (2008, covid, etc.), and don't when the economy is good (1990 -> 2007)

They don't save because they don't need to since there's always a job available as hiring is so easy. In Europe we need to save in case we want to quit, since then we lose all rights and protections and need to wait months before finding a new job.

It was burned down twice, in 1914 and 1940

The flemish nationalists supported the nazis long before they invaded. I don’t think Russia will invade the USA any time soon, but it can invade other countries and throw liberals out of windows over there, normalizing the practice and diminishing the power of liberalism worldwide

My great grandfather was the vice rector of the university at the time, as an historian he took the initiative to covertly collect evidence of all the nazi crimes, evidence which was used in the nuremberg trials.

But more interestingly, there was a nationalist movement in Belgium at the the time, and a debate on which language to use at the university. The international language (french) or the local language (flemish). He was of the opinion that both had their place, which put him in opposition to the nationalists. Since he was one of the founders of the flemish literature movement, and the prime expert on flemish history he was hard to attack directly by the nationalists. So they denounced him to the gestapo, hoping they would get rid of him while keeping their hands clean. Fortunately for me it didn’t work, as the nazis were also reliant on his academic work for their pan-germanic narrative and refused to attack him directly as well.

Nowadays we see as well western nationalist movements with ambivalent support for murderous regimes such as Russia, and I think this support comes in no small part from the idea that those regimes can be used to do the dirty work that they are too cowardly to do themselves

There's no VC money in Europe, you have to be profitable early on

I don’t think the manager needs a button to remember he’s responsible for the decisions, usually it’s the other way around, devs having to remember they’re not; I’ve been too many times the manager putting it on zero only to hear, “You can’t do that it has to be at least a nine !!!”.

It’s not just VW, there aren’t many companies and countries that are able to compete with China when it comes to manufacturing commodity products

We’ll get farmer riots and extreme right governments who on top of being racist have extremely self destructive economic programs

The latest batch of chinese EV looks really excellent, with exciting and practical vehicles at incredible prices. I’m afraid the whole European car industry is going to get nokiaed. Maybe not on our home market due to protectionism but abroad I don’t see why someone would buy a renault when you can buy this

I was recently in Rwanda where seemingly half the goods of this very hilly country are transported by bicycle, and those are single speed old english style bikes with steel frame reinforced with rebar. (they carry hundred of kgs on the racks). The bike are run 8 hours a day for years and cost $100.

Speed bumps and high curbs

Do you rewrite your auth system to modern standards or migrate your infra to k8s ? Some projects take months to complete and don’t deliver value until fully done, so it is valuable to spend some time to do some upfront planning to weigh your options

IMHO the syntax & other nitpickable matters should be caught by the linter. The regressions should be caught by the tests. And the fact the code runs and works should be a given. The discussion should be around the architecture of the solution & the long terms consequences of solving it that way. I also like to do the reviews in person, where we just go over the code together and talk about it. Small remarks can be immediately fixed

Also I think work in progress should be pushed often in a wip PR/MR, that way people can give early feedback

This looks super useful, but from what i've heard, if you try to do this at any meaningful scale your scrapers will be blocked by Cloudflare and the likes

This documentary on the drug trade in Belgium has a segment on the uberisation of drug dealing and shows the usage of telegram for that purpose: https://youtu.be/9-DwggVrt2c?t=2613&si=SBct_5WUZCoJmcgA

It’s worse than that, the ‘find people nearby’ feature is a public drug and prostitution advertising billboard with zero moderation and has been for years. They’re in a closer position to silkroad than lavabit