gspencley

My wife and I were just watching a YouTube video about the history of the Mattel Intellivision gaming console. If you've never seen one, the thing had wooden panels. It was definitely inspired by an era where your appliances were meant to match your furniture. I remember, as a child of the 80s, seeing televisions that were cased in wood as well.

I would argue that these types of designs made an anti-consumerist statement which is why you don't see them anymore. An appliance that tries to look like furniture doesn't need to do that, it is a non-essential feature of the appliance that the manufacturer chooses to include. And it makes a statement: "I'm part of your home. Care for me. Display me. Treasure me. Enjoy me ... and don't throw me out because I'm not disposable plastic."

The dedicated camera vs smartphone topic doesn't necessarily align with the concept of appliances as furniture, but it does strike me as being the difference between a specialized tool and a multi-tool.

Everyone owns a smartphone. There's nothing special about that. And while taking a good photo arguably requires some degree of skill regardless of your tool, smartphones represent the average consumer; the lowest common denominator. Anyone can, and does, snap pictures with a smartphone.

A dedicated camera, on the other hand, represents a conscious decision to take photography more seriously. To want to focus only on that, free of other distractions. To climb whatever learning curve stands in the way.

Then, consider, that there are people who appreciate history and have no illusions about whether or not a particular historical time period was "better" or not. I follow a historic costumer on YouTube, from whom I learned how to sew by hand and how many historic clothing was constructed. Do I think that living in the Victorian era would be better on the whole? No. I value modern medicine and social advancements that have been made since that time. But do I love the Victorian aesthetic and value the knowledge of how to do things without modern machinery? You betcha. I feel like a more rounded person and, despite coming from a hobby, I have life skills that I didn't have before, like being able to fit, hem, repair and even produce some of my own clothing.

Trends and fashion changes, and the phenomenon of "older is better" is human nature that has always existed. It is easy to find artefacts of the past that are less common, or gone entirely, that you consider to be better than the trends of the present.

This doesn't mean things are worse on the whole now, nor does it mean that those artefacts aren't valid examples of things of value that are no longer produced. I guess it's part and parcel of change.

> Today’s young adults grew up in a time when their childhoods were documented with smartphone cameras instead of dedicated digital or film cameras.

I get that this is a ridiculous nit-pick to kick off a comment, but how do they define "young adult?" Because I'm not sure that that statement is actually true just yet.

I have two Gen Z daughters, the youngest having been born in 2001. Smart phones didn't really start to land on the scene until 2008. It then took a few years until everyone had one and the cameras were good enough that people were getting rid of their digital cameras and switching to smart phones.

Granted, my daughters are several years older now than an 18 year-old, which I would consider to be the "youngest" possible "young adult."

Even then, an 18 year-old today was born in 2006. I suppose that part of their childhood was likely captured on smart phones rather than digital cameras. But being old enough that I remember the 00s like it was just yesterday, and having two "young adult" children whose childhoods' were almost entirely documented using digital cameras, even having packs of old printed photos that were printed at the same places you would get film developed ... I just can't help but question the statement that today's young adults had their childhoods documented on smartphones. Today's children and young teenagers, sure. But the modern smartphone, with camera, actually hasn't been with us for a full generation quite just yet... as much as it feels like it.

"The 5 Laws of Holistic Development" at the bottom reeks of being written by someone who is bitter and falling into the "us vs them" trap.

I get it, I used to get really upset when business "overruled" engineering advise and decided to adopt a subpar solution, such as reaching for a 3rd party vendor or telling me what library they want me to use.

Then I realized that the job of a really good senior engineer is to offer options, be able to discuss the tradeoffs of each and to empower the business to make informed decisions that take ALL of the context into account: budgets, timelines, market pressures, planned shelf-life of the application, what "quality" means to end users etc.

It is the business' role to do cost benefit analysis. Engineers tend to get into the mindset of "there is one, 'right', way to do something." The reality is that there are many possible solutions to a given problem, each with their own tradeoffs. The business hired you to be able to provide solutions that align with business goals, objectives and budgets.

If a manager is telling you that they like a particular tool and would like you to consider it, that's a sign that you have failed at communicating. You have not communicated the fact that you have already explored various options, you have not communicated the fact that you understand that there are tradeoffs to be found among various options, you have not communicated that there are options at all. Most likely you did what engineers are inclined to do: you told them what you think is the 'right' way to do it, and they don't like that because it is too expensive and you didn't give them a single "out" so they are looking for them themselves (even though that was your job).

"Synergy: Value genuine, purpose-driven communication over forced meetings and rigid processes."

That's no different than "people over processes" from the original Agile manifesto.

"Adaptability"

What do you think 'agile' means?

"Courage: Foster an environment where taking risks and learning from failures lead to breakthrough solutions."

Courage is a value that companies either hold or they don't. At my current employer we embody this as "Normal sucks" in our core values. This tends to be a culture problem when companies don't value courage. I don't object to this one, but it suggests that the author is bitter having worked at companies that don't value this and want to maintain status-quo.

"Mastery: Cultivate engineers who combine deep technical proficiency with a clear understanding of the product vision."

Here's the catch-22 when it comes to business:

You want to hire a team of super experienced and talented engineers who can develop your application to an incredibly high standard in a very fast time.

Your first problem is that the labour pool for software is already tiny. That's why wages are high. So you have a hard time just finding these engineers in the first place. Once you've invested weeks into trying to recruit them, some Fintech company with a bigger budget snatches them up from under you.

Now say you did manage to hire a few. These are middle-aged individuals with families who cost a small fortune and have very low tolerances for bullshit. They will not work weekends. They may be willing to work the occasional overtime but only if that's a rare occurrence, they participated in getting the team into the weeds and the overtime is guaranteed to get the team back on track.

This senior engineer isn't looking to get promoted, they are already earning enough comp that more money no longer motivates them. Some of them are approaching retirement while others are looking to move into leadership positions.

Whereas you have less difficulty hiring someone with 5 years experience. This is a young person in their mid-twenties who has something to prove. They want to get promoted so they want to impress you. They are not married with children and so they are way more willing to give up weekends and churn out mediocre pull requests like it's no ones' business.

What the younger engineer needs is guidance and mentorship. They need the people that you want writing the code teaching them how to write the code that you want.

That's another culture issue. But hiring is difficult especially if the person doing the hiring is not an expert in the domain they're hiring for. This will be the case for virtually ALL tech startups that aren't being co-founded by an engineer ... you need to trust that the top engineering talent you are hiring is competent to do the tech hiring for you.

> The ICC largely deals with things that are preemptory norms which apply regardless of if you sign the treaty.

That's irrelevant. Anyone can form an independent organization and proclaim that nations of the world are subject to the rules set forth by that independent organization.

The point is that they have no intrinsic authority.

Authority comes from either moral sanction (of the people, by the people / consent of the governed) or through force.

In other words, the enforcement mechanism has to come from those that opt-in to that organization. i.e: through mutual agreement.

Which means that any "violator" nation can then say "GTFO and I dare you to come at me and see the full force of my police (if you try to arrest my citizens) or my military (if the participating nations declare war on me in an attempt to enforce these 'laws')."

So it still can only come about through mutual agreements between nations. Otherwise it is nothing more than a rogue body that sends armed thugs to try and enforce its rules while nations get to say "We neither recognize nor agree to those rules, nor do we recognize your authority to enforce them. However, you are subject to our laws while you are trying to execute your 'warrants' on our soil. And we will arrest YOU and throw you in our jails if you interfere with the rights of any one of our citizens."

> what do you mean by 'invite to the table'? it's a criminal court, so it's going to deal with criminals

"Criminals" in this context is meaningless. Please hear me out.

We're dealing with the concept of "International Law", which is largely understood as agreements / treaties amongst different countries.

This means that those agreements are no more valid or better or righteous than the countries that enter into them. If the nations involved share certain basic principles and make an agreement that aligns with those principles, the enforcement of these "laws" would come from those nations that are party to the treaty.

BUT - if one nation changes its mind, or changes its internal laws or decides "nah, no thanks" then how do you enforce these so-called "laws"? Do the other nations declare war on this nation?

It gets even worse than that. Because the very concept of "International Law" contains a logical contradiction.

The idea is that we are going make war (force, violence, death, destruction, conflict) subject to some kind of rules. The problem is, you can't. You can have two parties to a conflict agree to certain things: like not to murder civilians, or prisoners etc. if it can be helped. But at the end of the day it's an agreement that doesn't have any kind of binding power or significance because the idea of war means that two groups have decided that they can't reach any kind of rational agreement and so they have resorted to violent conflict.

War, by definition, is the absence of law. The absence of reason. The breakdown of civilization. It comes about when two groups cannot reason with one another; cannot agree with one another on what the rules ought to be.

Law is not a concept that comes out of nowhere. It is the idea that in order to protect individual rights and liberty, the element of force and violence is going to be taken out of civil existence and placed into the hands of a monopoly: the government, which sets the rules and enforcement mechanisms around when force is and is not justifiable within their respective operating jurisdictions.

When you have multiple nations that operate independently, each with their own laws and rules, all you can do is get them to agree to certain things, as long as they have some basis upon which to enter into an agreement.

My thesis is that a free, rights-protecting nation has no basis for an agreement with a dictatorship that routinely violates peoples' rights. That the dictatorship has everything to gain by getting the free nation to agree to what its evil desires want, while the free nation has only things to lose (through compromise, which is part and parcel of coming to terms).

That's what I mean by "invite to the table."

> If Netanyahu and Gallant really think they are innocent, and the allegations are absurd and false, they should cooperate with the ICC. Have your day in court and show how absurd the accusations are.

I don't know if I agree with this.

If the ICC is an honest organization that stands for individual rights, liberty and justice then sure.

If, on the other hand, the ICC is a corrupt organization that invites the worst of the worst in terms of rights-violating countries and dictatorial regimes to the table, then no way. In any compromise between right and wrong, good and evil, the wrong has everything to gain and the good has everything to lose.

In other words, I don't have all of the facts when it comes to the ICC and its history. I know that it is separate from the UN, but I don't know very much about it. Therefore I don't know which alternative I ultimately land on.

But in general and in principle, when it comes to those that are objectively and morally wrong, there is every reason to not grant them legitimacy through recognition or participation.

How does it help the tax payers to have a 40 million dollar asset on display?

Even if it has appreciated after adjusting for inflation (and I'm sure it has), what is the National Gallery's possession of that piece of canvas, oil and pigment doing to help the taxpayers with anything that concerns them in either 1989 or 2024?

In any event, this is a huge digression from the topic. I never meant to start a conversation about whether or not tax dollars should be used to purchase art, and what kind of art. The discussion is what makes art 'good' or 'bad'. And Voices of Fire was controversial in 1989 and still is ... because many Canadians are like "why do rich people pay money for this kind of stuff?"

> but because they’re mostly pounded by either 1) various types of zealots, idiots, and assholes who abuse these kind of “best practices” as an argument from authority, or 2) inexperienced programmers who lack the ability to judge the applicability,

The author might go on to make other points that are worth discussing, but lays out his supporting arguments clearly in the opening paragraph. Best practices do not necessarily do harm because they offer bad advice, they do harm because they are advocated for by zealots and the inexperienced.

My first reaction is how unfortunate it is that this particular developer has found himself in the presence of bad engineers and the inexperienced.

But then, the argument is automatically self-defeating. Why is the rest of the article even worth reading, if he states upfront what his arguments are and those arguments are very easy to refute?

It is deeply irrational to judge the merits of an idea based solely on who is advocating for that idea.

My advice to the author is to reflect on the types of positions that he accepts, the ones that have him so put off by the people that he works with that he is openly writing about abandoning what he admits could be sound engineering practice, solely based on who that advice is coming from and how it is being delivered.

Developing software is complicated. It is constant problem solving. When solutions to problems come about, and we abstract those solutions, it is quite easy for individuals to misapply the abstraction to an inappropriate concrete. To drop context and try to retrofit a lousy solution because that solution was appropriate to a slightly different problem. But at the end of the day, these abstractions exist to try and simplify the process. Any time you see a "best practice" or design pattern acting as a complicating force, it is not doing its job. At that point you can either be objective and exercise some professional curiosity in order to try and understand why the solution adopted is inappropriate ... or you can take the lazy way out and just assume that "best practices" are the opinions of zealots and the inexperienced who blindly follow because they don't know any better.

I was tempted to create a top-level post suggesting that they just call themselves "Museum" since "Of Bad Art" is redundant, but I figured the joke would get lost and I'd just get down-voted into oblivion.

I'm fairly creative, I can draw (at one time in my life I seriously wanted to be a comic book illustrator) and I'm a musician. I appreciate that art is subjective, often difficult to do well and that technical skill is not the only factor that matters.

But when I looked at their "collections" page my first thought was "How does this distinguish itself from the bulk of what goes on display in modern fine art exhibits?"

The serious question being posed is: "What makes this particular collection 'bad' but something like 'Voices of Fire' is so 'good' that it was worth charging the Canadian tax payers $1.8 million dollars in 1980s money to acquire for the National Gallery of Canada?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire

I had a similar experience but I dropped out of high school.

For years the social stigma about being a high-school dropout got to me, and I was determined to enter University as an adult student and get my CS degree.

The problem was that I already had steady work as a software developer. And the entire reason I wanted to go to school in the first place was to level up those skills. It didn't help that, in my late teens / early 20s, I was working for a dot-com startup and we had coop students from the local University, and they weren't being taught anything that I didn't already know or understand.

Eventually I came to the opinion that, at least for me (not necessarily for others), formal education institutions amount to little more than institutional child abuse. For hyper-independent and high IQ students, particularly those with aspergers (I've never been diagnosed, but even my mother says it would put my childhood into perspective), class rooms are not a positive experience.

And I can't honestly look back at my time in public school and identify a single subject that I learned in class, as opposed to independently. According to my parents I was literate before entering kindergarten and I taught myself maths and history as an adult because school taught me to hate both (I don't hate either now, but the way they were taught in school divorced them from our day to day lives, created busy work and the impression that what we were being taught was irrelevant and unnecessary).

I tried online learning for a little bit in order to get my GED but I abandoned that as well because it still felt like boring busy work.

EdTech seems like it might offer the solution to younger children with my personality type. But honestly, I personally learn best by reading books, experimenting (hands on learning) and having goals that I actually care about and can relate to. If school had taught us to prepare a tax return, balance a household budget, that history gives us predictive "power" by examining how humans dealt with certain situations historically, if English class focused on effective communication rather than trying to guess at metaphors and hidden messages in the writings of dead authors who can't be asked to comment on that conjecture... maybe I wouldn't have loathed the experience so much and felt like I was just in a prison for children.

In other words, my personal experiences with EdTech has seen these trying to take a standard public school curriculum and package it in a digital "work at your own pace" format. Whereas my issue with school was at least in large part the curriculum itself. The pace was a factor too ... just not the only one by far.

I have zero interest in playing games on Netflix. It's just not what I subscribe to Netflix for.

I know that the Black Mirror thing was a success, but I didn't even really like that. Gaming, and sitting back on my lazy ass to watch content passively are two very different mental modes.

When I want to play games, I put on a game.

When I want to get fat or fall asleep after long work day, I put on Netflix.

I have no idea how representative I am of the average subscriber, but if most people are like me then I would like to offer a big "I told you so" because it made no sense to me when Netflix announced that they were starting to branch out into games.

I mean, if Netflix has grown to peak numbers and needs new markets to enter, then by all means produce games but they might want a more suitable distribution channel like Steam or producing console games for mass retail etc.

Is this a riddle? I don't want to click on the article until I've tried to crack it.

Is the answer a switch statement?

Edit: ah no, we're actually talking about human language and characters.

I agree with you but you're missing the point.

As I said, women's reproductive issues ARE important to them. It does come up in discussions.

The point is that people often tend to be single-issue, or few-issues voters... and there are policy issues that are just way more important to them right this very second. Issues like the economy and the housing crises.

My wife and I were living on our own and starting a family when we were our daughters' age. Our daughters not only still live with us but they have abandoned any hopes of ever being able to own a home of their own.

Our oldest daughter, who will turn 25 soon, wanted nothing more in life than to have a family and she is seeing the time window for that slip by. She thought she'd be married with a home and kids by now. She found her partner, he lives with us now too. Why would the abortion message resonate with her when what's bothering her most is that she wants kids?

From what I've heard in the news, the women who were single-issue-voters on abortion tended to be older women who are concerned about the rights of their daughters and grand daughters.

But I do wonder how many young women are in similar situations to my oldest daughter. Women who are more concerned about whether or not they can have kids versus whether or not they could terminate an unwanted pregnancy. They might not be a huge voting block, I honestly don't know. But I can't imagine that the abortion message resonated with this demographic at all.

> What can you do about a low information voter?

I already explained this in another reply, but while crime rates might be going down across the board, I'm talking about what my daughters, my wife and their friends are telling me. And they are not low information voters, because crime rates are sky rocketing in our area and the data supports that. We live in what used to be considered one of the safest cities in all of Canada, and now we hear about a new shooting or stabbing in public just about every week. Mostly drug and gang related.

Everything else you said, especially about the abortion issue being a freedom issue, is preaching to the choir. I agree with you. I'm talking about the mindset of my wife, my daughters and their friends and what they say matters to them.

> and most criminals don't have access to guns here so crime is less scary to me

I'm the parent and you did an excellent job of clarifying what I was trying to say.

I do want to respond to this statement, however, since I'm Canadian and in one of those countries where abortion is federally protected (and Canadians strongly favour that across partisan lines for the most part) and I live in what used to be one of the safest cities in Canada.

10 - 20 years ago, homicide was virtually unheard of in our city. I mean, it was like a once in a decade event and almost always domestic violence. Today, we can't go a week without hearing about another stabbing or shooting that happened out in public.

Recently our street saw every single vehicle broken into, including ours. We all filed police reports but no one ever showed up or even gave us a follow up call. The message was clear: the police either don't have the capacity or just don't care to deal with certain crimes now. To contrast, I remember my house being broken into when I was around 13 or 14 years-old, so mid 1990s, and I remember watching the detective powder the windows for prints.

Times have changed here in scary ways. We pay the same taxes and have the same expectations of our government as we always did. Canadians value the social safety nets and gun regulations that we have. The problem is that those don't seem to be working as well as they used to. We earn less due to inflation, pay the same or higher taxes, and get less in return. Most of us know of people who travel to the USA for health care due to our long waiting lists while hearing from Americans how great our free health care is.

> Women's healthcare isn't an issue that resonates with young (read: unmarried) men

Disclaimer: I'm Canadian, not American, so my opinions don't matter.

I'm married with two daughters who are in their early 20s. The abortion issue has come up in my household when discussing Trump v Kamala, but the thing that the Democrats didn't seem to get is that even though it's something that my wife & daughters care about in the abstract, it's not a PRESSING matter for them because they're not planning on needing an abortion ever, let alone any time soon.

That doesn't mean that they aren't pro choice & don't want women's reproductive rights protected at the federal level, like it is here in Canada. But on the hierarchy of things that matter to them today, it is extremely far down on the list. What matters to them most right now is the economy and rising crime rates.

The right wing also spun it as "why on earth do the Democrats think that every single woman is dying to murder her unborn baby?" And while us pro-choicers don't look at it that way, I think that kind of worked as a reminder that while it's an issue, it's just not the most important one affecting their day to day lives at the moment.

I've tried to use Twitter on multiple occasions over the years. The thing that really annoyed me the last time I gave it a go (and once again ultimately decided there was nothing of value to be found there) was that it would show me posts from pages that I don't follow, but that people I follow follow.

That drives me absolutely crazy because that was one way that political crap that I didn't want got shown to me.

Also, this is shocking I know, but I don't agree with or like everything that people I know and/or follow think or like. So a lot of these posts were from pages that I am already familiar with, have already decided I don't like and want to not follow, and yet it STILL gets shoved in my face because people & pages I follow are into something that they are objectively wrong to be into and should thus rethink every life decision they ever made over the years that helped to drive them towards being interested in such garbage.

I know I'm old but all I want in any "news feed" is to show me latest posts from people/pages I follow directly in chronological order with pagination and no automatic refreshing of the news feed etc.

But I guess I'm not the type of user they are chasing .. and I find myself organically being less and less interested in engaging as a result. I don't need to break social media addiction ... the social media "platforms" do that for me with their "features."

It's too bad that you have to take an additional step to do something that ought to be the default behaviour.

That's a valid complaint, and I sympathize because I have no love for Facebook.

My only counter-argument, and it's not even a counter-argument really, is that this is a fact of life that exists with or without Facebook.

My personal pet peeve is that I don't want to own a mobile phone at all. Not even a dumb phone and not even a landline. If I find myself in an emergency without the ability to dial 911 that's a risk I'm willing to take on a personal level. I just don't want a phone because I find the idea of a noise making device that can interrupt me at unexpected times to be a crime against humanity. But more and more essential services like banking are assuming that people have smart phones. My bank would deny services to me if I didn't even have a landline, since they require a phone number tied to their account records. My work assumes that people not only have their own smart phone but are willing to install authenticator apps for MFA etc. And my workplace is not alone.

If it's not Facebook that "everyone" is using that leaves minority opinions wishing for an alternative, it's something else.

In other words, people are returning to how online communication worked before Facebook.

Offline, people have always tended to come together around common interests and values. My wife and I, for example, are part time performing magicians and we're a member of a local magic group that meets IRL.

Prior to what we have come to call "social media", existed forums. Forums were this wonderful utopian paradise of yesteryear where people engaged in long form discussions, often heated but mostly civil, about special interests that they cared about.

The term "social media" didn't start to catch on until the news feed was a thing. That was the "contribution" of both Facebook and Twatter and it was a big PART of what changed everything.

The other factor was the so-called "mobile revolution."

Forums are great when you're at a keyboard. They start to lose their appeal when you are engaging using a small touch screen.

What you are describing sounds like people returning to the state of the world as it existed before social media. Where people come together around common interests and values instead of using the news feed where you get fire-hozed with random shit that "the algorithm" thinks might trigger you into engaging with it.

> engagement bait, daily outrages,

I have a pet theory as to why social media causes many people to feel like it's draining them, and why I avoid news on social media like the plague ... I also tend to mute or silence people that share political content (regardless of partisan affiliation).

Social media, unless you are trying to build a business, is ultimately offering the service of entertainment.

Even if you use Twitter or Facebook as your news aggregator, unless you're engaged in some kind of productive and time-scoped research project, you're doing this on your leisure time.

That means that you just got done work, or you're on a break, or you finally got the kids to sleep or finished all of your household chores and you're now in a position where you can "enjoy" a bit of leisure time.

Which means that you approach social media PRE-drained. You're already tired and you're looking for cute cat memes when what should happen ... you get hit with a rage-bait headline, or one of those douche bags that vote differently from you just posted an opinion about a controversial topic that you have very strong feelings about.

We (on HN) all know that the algorithm is trying to promote what gets engagement, and anything that provokes a strong emotional reaction is likely to trigger engagement.

My thesis is that people turn to social media when they are already in an emotional state that is incredibly inappropriate for engaging with "serious" topics on a rational level.

So everyone just gets angrier and angrier at each other and you leave social media feeling even more exhausted than you were before you signed on looking for entertainment to spend your precious leisure time with.

And then you realize that you just wasted that short precious time that you needed to use for relaxation ... and if you don't do anything to rectify it then your stress levels just gradually creep up, your sleep starts to suffer, you might start to compensate with stress eating or consuming more alcohol or cannabis than is healthy and it just spirals.

I suspect that JetBrains is trying to respond to the fact that Microsoft gives VSCode away for free and that's likely what is spurring the massive adoption of VSCode.

A colleague of mine at work, who is almost retirement age now and has 10+ years on me in the industry told me that the ONLY reason he uses VSCode is because it's free.

I'm with you, there are IntelliJ features (particularly the refactoring features that I use all the time and couldn't live without) that I just take for granted. And when I watch other devs do things the hard way in VSCode I wonder why it's is so popular. I think most devs just either don't know what they are missing, or it just comes down to cost.

I also often chuckle when people say "Oh there's a VSCode plugin that can do that." I'm not certain, but I don't think I've ever installed a single plugin in IntelliJ because it just does everything I need out of the box.

I agree with most of the article but want to nitpick this last part:

> I’m not a fan of TypeScript, but I appreciate its ability to perform static type checks. Fortunately, there’s a way to add static type checking to JavaScript using only JSDoc comments.

If you're writing JSDoc comments, then you're not writing what the author considers to be "self-documenting code."

I wish the author had explained why they are not a fan of TypeScript. Compile time type-safety aside, as the author acknowledges by implication adding type specificity negates the usefulness of JSDoc comments for this particular situation.

I'm personally a big proponent of "self documenting code" but I usually word it as "code that serves as its own documentation because it reads clearly."

Beyond "I would personally use TypeScript to solve that problem", my case for why ALL comments are a code smell (including JSDoc comments, and in my personal opinion) is:

- They are part of your code, and so they need to be maintained just like the rest of your code

- But ... they are "psychologically invisible" to the majority of developers. Our IDEs tend to gray them out by default etc. No one reads them.

- Therefore, comments can become out of sync with the code quite easily.

- Comments are often used to explain what confusing code does. Which means that instead of fixing the code to add clarity, they do nothing but shine a spotlight on the fact that the code is confusing.

- In doing the above, they make messy code even messier.

I am slightly amenable to the idea that a good comment is one that explains WHY weird code is weird. Even then, if you have the luxury of writing greenfield code, and you still need to do something un-intuitive or weird for really good reasons ... you can still write code that explains the "why" through good naming and separation of concerns.

The only time that I would concede that a code comment was the best way to go about things in context is when you're working with a very large, legacy commercial code-base that is plagued by existing tech debt and you have no good options other than to do your weird thing inline and explain why for logistical and business reasons. Maybe the refactor would be way too risky and the system is not under test, the business has its objectives and there's just no way that you can reasonably refactor in time etc. This happens... but professional developers should ideally treat incremental refactoring as a routine part of the development lifecycle so that this situation is as unlikely as possible to arise in the future.

IMO even a home-level, per-user tmp directory isn't ideal (though it is better). In a single-user environment, where malware is the biggest concern in current times, what difference does it make if it's a process running under a different user or one that is running under your current user that is attacking you?

In other words, for many systems, a home-level temp directory is virtually the same as /tmp anyway since other than system daemons, all applications are being started as a single user anyway.

And that might be a security regression. For servers you're spinning up most services at bootup and those should either be running fully sandboxed from each other (containerization) or at least as separate system users.

But malware doesn't necessarily need root, or a daemon process user id to inflict harm if it's running as the human user's id and all temp files are in $HOME/.tmp.

What you really want is transient application-specific disk storage that is isolated to the running process and protected, so that any malware that tries to attack another running application's temp files can't since they don't have permission even when both processes are running under the same user id.

At that point malware requires privilege escalation to root first to be able to attack temp files. And again, if we're talking about a server, you're better off running your services in sandboxes when you can because then even root privilege escalation limits the blast radius.

Hebron is not part of Israel & is not governed by Israel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebron_Governorate

Also, and I don't want to take a position here, my advocacy is for learning as much about the history and current state of affairs as possible in order to form an informed position, because not only is there fog of war going on right now, but there is a decades long conflict with lots of narratives and propaganda.

I say that to offer a counter narrative in pursuit of objectivity: if you ask an Israeli, there are many areas in the West Bank that are deemed "no go zones" for for Jews, but there are none that apply to non-Jews.

And as for the security and the "check points", those are applied equally to everyone who is there, regardless of citizenship or ethnicity or any other considerations. So even if it's a shitty situation, it's not targeted at any specific ethnic group.

So given that a) Israel does not govern Hebron and b) the security check points are not specific to any ethnic group, how is Hebron a data point that supports the "apartheid" charge?

> Additionally you can't sell a perpetual license when you don't need it anymore

You make some good points but I'm not sure that this generalization really holds. It will depend on the terms of the license but I have heard of buying, selling & trading software licenses (at least on an individual basis, it might be harder for companies to do that).

> CAN-SPAM really only helps you get unsubscribed from marketing emails, not actually spam at all

Some of us consider ALL marketing emails to be "spam", with the sole carve out being if the user consciously and actively opted in.

I have no problem with marketing newsletters existing if people enjoy receiving and reading them. But if you email me without my active solicitation then it's no different than a door to door salesman physically knocking on your door when you don't expect it and don't welcome the interruption.

I will happily concede that legal definitions may differ from my own. But on a personal level, I apply the "Hollywood principle": "Don't call me, I'll call you." If you call me (or email, or knock on my door, or mail me a physical snail-mail letter) and I'm not expecting it, and it is of a commercial nature, it's my definition of spam.

> where if you cancelled early they would charge you an exorbitant cancellation fee.

I'm currently in the process of de-Adboe'ing my life because of the subscription model.

It's not htat you get charged an exorbitant cancellation fee, per se. It's that, from Adobe's point of view, you entered into a year-long contract. And so if you want to cancel after 3 months, the only option they give you is to pay for the rest of the entire year upfront.

This has a lot of artists really pissed off and many are saying they're finally done with Adobe.

Fortunately, I think we're finally in an era where Adobe doesn't actually offer the best products anyway.

For Photoshop I'm playing with Affinity Photo. It has a six month free trial and after playing with it for a couple of months I think I'm going to pay for it when the trial is up. And it's a flat fee / perpetual license.

I've been playing around with Inkscape as a FOSS alternative to Illustrator and it's OK. I might give the Affinity Designer trial a go since I'm enjoying Affinity Photo.

For video editing Davinci Resolve is so far ahead of Premiere that it makes me wonder why Premiere is still used by anyone regardless of other considerations. What's bonkers is that BlackMagic gives the standard version of Resolve away for free... and I have yet to find myself needing features that are in the paid Studio version.

It has its own FX tool called Fusion built-in, so After Effects also gets replaced by Resolve.

I never used Adobe Animate but am starting to get into 2D animation and really like Moho Pro. It's not free but it has a perpetual license and apparently the first version of this software was created for BeOS 30 years ago, and then got ported to Windows and Mac as AnimeStudio... so it's been around forever, has a cool history and is starting to get used by a lot of pro studios since it gives you 3D style rigging for 2D / "cutout" animation which was its killer feature for me.

Anyway Adobe is one of the largest companies in the world but I suspect big changes are coming in a few years because I can't think of any reason to buy into Creative Cloud in current year ... like not a single reason. Maybe if you've got some PSD files laying around that can't be opened in alternatives like Affinity Photo because they take advantage of very specialized features or something then you might be screwed but I haven't ran into any issues opening my old PSD files in Affinity.

Yeah but the crucial piece of context is who that statement is made to and how it is received. We typically call this process "lobbying."

And what it usually looks like in practice is that regulators will extend an open invite to "industry leaders" to chime in on the proposed regulation. During that process, the interest groups advocating on behalf of the "industry leaders" will utter statements that aim to shape the regulation in a way that is beneficial to the corporation being lobbied for.

The end goal is typically to land on a new bill that will

a) give the regulators new fodder for legislative resume, so they can show their voting constituency that they accomplished something and

b) are not too expensive for the "industry leaders" to comply with. During the regulatory process this will get shrouded in language along the lines of making sure that the regulation won't cost jobs etc. But, if all goes according to plan, the regulation will

c) be insanely expensive for new startups to comply with, thus ensuring that any negative consequences that are caused by the new bill will be "invisible" because they will largely apply to hypotheticals (new startups wanting to enter the market) and small players that aren't on anyone's radar

Thanks!