geekraver

https://pnewman.org/engineering_mgmt_checklist.txt is about the best signal/noise ratio I have seen.

All coups are undemocratic by definition. Anti-democratic might be a better description for 1953.

Delete the app; use the web interface?

A free-threaded Python will be harder to make faster for single-threaded cases. So this could be a win for those who want to write multi-threaded code at the expense of everyone else.

They were put in an untenable situation, IMO. If they said no, there would be howls of protest, and a possible schism in the community, and the next SC elections could be an ugly competition between pro- and anti-GIL advocates. A "yes, but..." approach was about the only option.

This is my experience too. If you plan your trip, it’s really good about predicting the % battery remaining. I never put it on miles display anymore; that’s evidently going to be inaccurate because it doesn’t take into account many other factors. But if I enter in a route, now it actually has something to go on and can do a good job.

An argument somewhat undermined by the example “in an age of synthesizers, the acoustic guitar…” which sounds pretty tool-focused to me, lol.

This seems to be an insinuation that guitar playing is a skill while electronic music is some form of cheating. I’ll grant they’re different, but as someone who can play passable guitar who is interested in getting into electronic music, I’d hardly say the latter requires less skill. On the contrary; I find the number of things to learn (rhythm, drums, bass, string, leads, synthesis principles, sound design, effects, putting all that together, mixing,…) quite overwhelming in comparison.

A decade ago I worked on building AI systems that made (legitimate, paid) use of the Twitter “firehose”. At that time more than 99% of the data was garbage. It’s worse now. The value then was largely in two areas: historical trends (something like Google trends), and breaking news; and only the latter was really that interesting. I doubt it’s a high value data source scraped in bulk; it could have value in a much more targeted approach. Seems unlikely to require the addition of “large numbers of servers … on an emergency basis”.

It’s overstating the case to call this a “struggle” between factions; it’s an important discussion with a lot of ramifications (and while it is unresolved a lot of work is stalled).

https://discuss.python.org/t/a-fast-free-threading-python/27...

No Acorn Atom. ZX80 or ZX81, or Sinclair QL. All that I owned before a PC. :-(

But these are awesome.

Walled gardens suck. Once we had “the blogosphere” and it was great, and then Medium came along and did their best to ruin it. I tend to avoid any post on Medium and will never give them a dime. And as the OP points out, there’s tons of mediocre content there anyway. It’s almost always possible to find better content elsewhere, just needs a bit more search tweaking.

The precedence should be: "typing" folder in workspace root -> project "extra paths" -> python search paths -> pylance bundled.

If that's not working for you you should open an issue at https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release.

Pylance is used in a number of Microsoft products, quite a few of which are not open source, whereas the previous language server was only used in the VS Code and VS Python extensions, which are open source. There's your license difference explanation. As to why the old language server was retired, it had a different architecture which involved reindexing all the code all the time, and the team couldn't make it performant enough; pyright lazily evaluates just what is needed at the point it is needed.

Dual-pane file managers like Midnight Commander. Been using these since the days of Norton Commander on DOS; I even wrote my own for Unix/DOS in those days before Midnight Commander came out and I got lazy (https://github.com/gramster/gc3). I would live in Midnight Commander if not for the constant “the shell is already running a command” bugs.

Quite. Code is a liability. LOC is an utterly idiotic metric of programmer contribution, as it incentivizes increasing liability, over all sorts of other better contributions like good design, more automation, mentoring, customer obsession, etc.

(And for those arguing that “but the least amount of lines is not necessarily best”, yes, of course, that can obscure logic; the point isn’t to flip the value of LOC as a metric, the point is to not treat it as a good metric).

Phantom braking coming to Twitter?

This guy is full of terrible takes. Like his claim that typing catches "one bug a year".

If I have a function that returns something in a list, why not declare it as such? The pain in Python typing comes more from bolting a largely (but not entirely) nominal type system on a structurally typed language. That can be addressed by Protocols.

Encapsulation is a concept that is orthogonal to whether or not you use typing annotations in a language. You're conflating two completely different things and wrongly assuming that typed code is ipso facto poorly encapsulated. As most of your arguments stem from this premise, I find them very weak.

Type classes in Python are meant as annotations; they are not for run-time. They essentially get erased (not exactly, as they are available for introspection, but they aren't your typical code).

58, started when I was 12. I never really felt ageism until the last few years but now it’s very evident (and dumb; I still help and mentor much younger people a lot and am regularly reminded by this that I still am highly competent). No intention of ever stopping coding, if it’s not my job it’s my hobby.

The only song you need: https://m.soundcloud.com/smixx/smixx-developers-feat-steve

If you’ve never read it, a fun article on Bob from some years back.

https://www.wired.com/2013/01/comedy-in-the-hacker-world/amp

I was lucky enough to be working on the Dart team in Seattle at the time with Bob, who is one of the smartest, funniest and nicest people I have ever met (although the whole team was an exceptional bunch).

When this article was first published I contacted the author and told him it was misleading; Scrum (or large portions of it, like time boxed iterations, daily stand ups, and sprint boards) is popular in a number of big tech firms (I’ve worked at 3 on teams that have used it).

Most of the extensions are open source and you can see the telemetry being collected, which is used to understand feature usage and diagnose bugs. The suggestion (with no evidence) that the telemetry is somehow insidious is FUD.

Nothing about this surprises me. Google is an engineering driven organization that has no idea how to utilize PMs properly and where being the “smartest person in the room” is incentivized so there’s little to no humility and curiosity and it’s more about individual “winning” than best outcomes for customers; if you operate in a mutual learning way you’ll just have worse but more aggressive/ambitious people end run around you. These things are fixable (and there are some pockets in the company that don’t have these pathologies) but there seems to be little interest in doing so company wide.

But maybe I’m just a disgruntled ex-employee who prefers a Satya Nadella to a Sundar Pichai.

Couldn’t agree more. I took a level cut when I went to Google from Microsoft after being assured by the recruiter that, as a tech lead, getting promoted would be easy. Unfortunately due to two teams using the same code names I was put in Ads, last place I wanted to be, and took a non-lead role in another team instead. It quickly became apparent that the game at Google was very dysfunctional, and the “manager-bias” problem they were trying to avoid, while sometimes a real problem, was still a much better system that Google had cooked up. I lost interest in trying to get promoted and tried to focus on interesting work for the next four years. Meanwhile, I saw crappy engineers around me get promoted (and sometimes immediately use their new level to jump to Facebook) while hard-working engineers who cared about glue work, quality and meeting customer needs get overlooked (and sometimes leave too in frustration). Combined with having line managers with 16-25 reports (rendering them effectively useless), it was a pretty broken culture.

(This was 6-10 years ago; I know some things have changed, but I hear from people there it’s still crazy).

I've worked at startups, Microsoft (Ballmer days), Google, eBay, and back at Microsoft (Satya days). eBay was nice but not great infrastructure. Google had great infrastructure but was like a headless chicken, and after a while having that much autonomy and lack of leadership and vision gets old. Microsoft is slower, more staid, more hierarchical and incremental (and the focus on enterprise customers means that won't change), but has good leadership who show genuine care for the workforce, and knows how to execute, day in and day out. And the scope of what Microsoft does means you should never be bored. I'd recommend eBay and Google as good places to work, but Microsoft is a great place to work.

So, he’s stirred the pot over and over, including bringing in people who’s main claim to fame is grievance, but he still had a job at the university, and he quit, for amongst other things, too much grievance.

I’m not sure that this proves it’s the university that’s intolerant (although I’m sure some faculty and staff are). Or that he’s capable of enough self-reflection that he should be teaching reflection to others.

Plenty of blame to go around. Resignation letters are attempts to write history, but as he himself should be teaching, there are surely differing views here.

At age 57, it's easier for me to point to books, and I think there's three main inflection points for me. When I was about 15 I read Philip K. Dick's "Confessions of a Crap Artist", which really opened my eyes to how we each live in our own subjective version of reality. At age 17, I read Ram Dass's "Be Here Now", which exposed me to eastern spiritual traditions (I'm an atheist, but this was still very eye opening and, with Dick, made me realize that religions can be interesting and valuable while also being full of bullshit). Much later in life, learning about Robert Kegan's theories of adult development helped me understand people better and be a much better coach and manager (a good practical introduction is in Jennifer Garvey-Berger's "Changing on the Job"). And a book I really like for having a lot of condensed wisdom is Laurence Endersen's "Pebbles of Perception".