gspencley

The word "need" is loaded and almost seems to be besides the point to me.

Your father-in-law wants to talk a human rather than self-serve. What's the problem with that? Honest question. The fact that he can self-serve is an undisputed fact. But why should he be expected to?

It might be more expensive for companies to offer the level of service that a lot of customers are asking for. If they want to offer that level of service they might have to raise their prices. If people want to pay those prices in order to get that level of service then who cares?

At thbe end of the day, a company is selling its products to people. And people come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and have all sorts of varied preferences.

There are people out there who do not want to own a smart phone. Who don't want to have to study a web page. They paid for something, they want it to "just work" and when it doesn't they want the burden of fixing it to be on the company they are giving their money to.

If a company doesn't want to offer that level of service, they don't have to. But they should expect to lose a certain demographic as a result. I don't think the chief complaint is that self-service options exist but that industries in general tend to chase trends. AI support can keep costs down for a company, great. But the trade-off for that is that there are people willing to pay more for human support and they often find themselves without options because everything always seems to be "all or nothing" with trends in business.

Yeah I don't remember anyone liking Windows 8 at the time. I'm honestly a little bit surprised to hear that there is nostalgia for it at all.

In most legal jurisdictions that I know of, kids aren't legally allowed to be able to access to pornography either. How is that working out?

The only way to even attempt to enforce these things is with government mandated age verification. Few people want that as it represents a massive violation of privacy and effectively makes anonymity on the Internet impossible.

You're not wrong, but that doesn't mean they weren't still in "growth" phase.

Their pricing, and their doubling down on account sharing policies over the last few years have shown that they are no longer in a growth phase.

I cancelled my Netflix account a few months ago because I had gotten the "You're not accessing this from your typical location" blocker. Even though I was trying to watch from my permanent residence and I was the account owner / payee.

The reason that happened was that my wife and I own two properties. We are happily married, not separated, but we just like our space... especially with two adult daughters who still live at home with one of their significant others also living in the house.

We are a single family "unit" but have two locations. Furthermore, my wife has sleeping issues and was using Netflix at night in order to fall asleep. To have to get me to check my email for an access code, was a total deal breaker since I would be fast asleep. So that cut her off from her typical usage of Netflix.

And the reason Netflix thought that I was accessing the service from a different location was that I hardly ever watched it. Every time I'd pull it up, I would spend more time scrolling for something to watch than actually watching anything.. and typically I'd just give up and go watch a 30m YouTube video instead.

So I was paying more, receiving less ... mostly had the account purely for my wife and daughters who watched it the most ... and then the final deal breaker was logistical barriers preventing me from being able to use what I'm paying for.

Fuck Netflix.

> when I'd actually written most of the Wikipedia article on said subject. The irony... Wikipedia doesn't just use unpaid labour, it ends up undermining the people who wrote it.

Surely it would be relatively easy to offer to show the edit history to prove that you actually contributed to the article? And, by doing so, would flip the situation in your favour by demonstrating your expertise?

The fact that you should have to is pretty annoying but also fairly edge case. And if a teacher or institute refuses to review that evidence then I don't think the credential on the table worth the paper it's printed on anyway.

> How the heck is that even possible? :o

Because what the cheater is trying to accomplish is to avoid having to think.

It's an act motivated by either laziness, apathy or rebellion (or some combination thereof). Not motivated by trying to get a good grade.

> But, please, don't call it a "trade-off" - that implies that you're getting some positive benefits on both sides, which is inaccurate and misleading - you should be framing mutation as "safety price for necessary performance" - just like Rust describes unsafe blocks.

I would have agreed with that statement a few years ago.

But what I am seeing in the wild, is an ideological attachment to the belief that "immutability is always good, so always do that"

And what we're seeing is NOT a ton of bugs and defects that are caused by state mutation bugs. We're seeing customers walk away with millions of dollars because of massive performance degradation caused, in some part, by developers who are programming in a language that does not support native immutability but they're trying to shoe-horn it in because of a BELIEF that it will for sure, always cut down on the number of defects.

Everything is contextual. Everything is a trade-off in engineering. If you disagree with that, you are making an ideological statement, not a factual one.

Any civil engineer would talk to you about tolerances. Only programmers ever say something is "inherently 'right'" or "inherently 'wrong'" regardless of other situations.

If your data is telling you that the number one complaint of your customers is runtime performance, and a statistically significant number of your observed defects can be traced to trying to shoe-horn in a paradigm that the runtime does not support natively, then you've lost the argument about the benefits of immutability. In that context, immutability is demonstrably providing you with negative value and, by saying "we should make the runtime faster", you are hand-waiving to a degree that would and should get you fired by that company.

If you work in academia, or are a compiler engineer, then the context you are sitting in might make it completely appropriate to spend your time and resources talking about language theory and how to improve the runtime performance of the machine being programmed for.

In a different context, when you are a software engineer who is being paid to develop customer facing features, "just make the runtime faster" is not a viable option. Not something even worth talking about since you have no direct influence on that.

And the reason I brought this up, is because we're talking about JavaScript / TypeScript specifically.

In any other language, like Clojure, it's moot because immutability is baked in. But within JavaScript it is not "nice" to see people trying to shoe-horn that in. We can't, on the one hand, bitch and moan about how poorly websites all over the Internet are performing on our devices while also saying "JavaScript developers should do immutability MORE."

At my company, measurable performance degradation is considered a defect that would block a release. So you can't even say you're reducing defects through immutability if you can point to one single PR that causes a perf degradation by trying to do something in an immutable way.

So yeah, it's all trade offs. It comes down to what you are proritizing. Runtime performance or data integrity? Not all applications will value both equally.

We shouldn't forget that there are trade-offs, however. And it depends on the language's runtime in question.

As we all know, TypeScript is a super-set of JavaScript so at the end of the day your code is running in V8, JSCore or SpiderMonkey - depending on what browser the end user is using, as an interpreted language. It is also a loosely typed language with zero concept of immutability at the native runtime level.

And immutability in JavaScript, without native support that we could hopefully see in some hypothetical future version of EcmaScript, has the potential to impact runtime performance.

I work for a SaaS company that makes a B2B web application that has over 4 million lines of TypeScript code. It shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that we are pushing the browser to its limits and are learning a lot about scalability. One of my team-mates is a performance engineer who has code checked into Chrome and will often show us what our JavaScript code is doing in the V8 source code.

One expensive operation in JavaScript is cloning objects, which includes arrays in JavaScript. If you do that a lot.. if, say, you're using something like Redux or ngrx where immutability is a design goal and so you're cloning your application's runtime state object with each and every single state change, you are extremely de-optimized for performance depending on how much state you are holding onto.

And, for better or worse, there is a push towards making web applications as stateful as native desktop applications. Gone are the days where your servers can own your state and your clients just be "dumb" presentation and views. Businesses want full "offline mode." The relationship is shifting to one where your backends are becoming leaner .. in some cases being reduced to storage engines, while the bulk of your application's implementation happens in the client. Not because we engineers want to, but because the business goal necessitates it.

Then consider the spread operator, and how much you might see it in TypeScript code:

const foo = {

  ...bar, // clones bar, so your N-value of this simple expression is pegged to how large this object is

  newPropertyValue,

};

// same thing, clones original array in order to push a single item, because "immutability is good, because I was told it is"

const foo = [...array, newItem];

And then consider all of the "immutable" Array functions like .reduce(), .map(), .filter()

They're nice, syntactically ... I love them from a code maintenance and readability point of view. But I'm coming across "intermediate" web developers who don't know how to write a classic for-loop and will make an O(N) operation into an O(N^3) because they're chaining these together with no consideration for the performance impact.

And of course you can write performant code or non-performant code in any language. And I am the first to preach that you should write clean, easy to maintain code and then profile to discover your bottlenecks and optimize accordingly. But that doesn't change the fact that JavaScript has no native immutability and the way to write immutable JavaScript will put you in a position where performance is going to be worse overall because the tools you are forced to reach for, as matter of course, are themselves inherently de-optimized.

I ran a highly trafficked adult website for 18 years. In the early days, CDNs were unattainable for me and I managed my own rudimentary network by hosting bare metal servers in data centres around the world, using geo-ip aware DNS servers to send traffic to the closest data centre to them.

My most significant running expense was bandwidth cost. So I never switched to cloud since the bandwidth costs would have instantly bankrupted me. Cloudflare, on the other hand, was the single most significant development when it came to my bottom line. Adding a basic, $200 / month business account saved me thousands per month on bandwidth + server costs.

DDoS protection was just a nice perk.

Most small websites are hosting with cloud providers these days. If their websites are at all media rich (and most are these days), and those assets can be cached by a CDN ... the cost savings on bandwidth are not marginal. They are often the difference between being able to afford to host your website or not having one at all.

There are, of course, ways to optimize and reduce those expenses without a 3rd party CDN. But if Cloudflare still has their free plans for smaller traffic volumes, it is often a financial decision to use them over your cloud provider's CDN options.

My wife and I own a small theatre. We can process orders in-store just fine. Our customers can even avoid online processing fees if they purchase in-store. And if our POS system went down, we could absolutely fall back to pencil and paper.

Doesn't change the fact that 99% of our ticket sales happen online. People will even come in to the theatre to check us out (we're magicians and it's a small magic shop + magic-themed theatre - so people are curious and we get a lot of foot traffic) but, despite being in the store, despite being able to buy tickets right then and there and despite the fact that it would cost less to do so ... they invariably take a flyer and scan the QR code and buy online.

We might be kind of niche, since events usually sell to groups of people and it's rare that someone decides to attend an event by themselves right there on the spot. So that undoubtedly explains why people behave like this - they're texting friends and trying to see who is interested in going. But I'm still bringing us up as an example to illustrate just how "online" people are these days. Being online allows you to take a step back, read the reviews, price shop, order later and have things delivered to your house once you've decided to commit to purchasing. That's just normal these days for so many businesses and their customers.

I can understand that sentiment. Just don't lose sight of the impact it can have on every day people. My wife and I own a small theatre and we sell tickets through Eventbrite. It's not my full time job but it is hers. Eventbrite sent out an email this morning letting us know that they are impacted by the outage. Our event page appears to be working but I do wonder if it's impacting ticket sales for this weekend's shows.

So while us in tech might like a "snow day", there are millions of small businesses and people trying to go about their day to day lives who get cut off because of someone else's fuck-ups when this happens.

> But it ultimately doesn't matter either way. A major selling point/part of the "contract" the web platform has with web developers is backwards compatibility.

The fact that you put "contract" in quotes suggests that you know there really is no such thing.

Backwards compatibility is a feature. One that needs to be actively valued, developed and maintained. It requires resources. There really is no "the web platform." We have web browsers, servers, client devices, telecommunications infrastructure - including routers and data centres, protocols... all produced and maintained by individual parties that are trying to achieve various degrees of interoperability between each other and all of which have their own priorities, values and interests.

The fact that the Internet has been able to become what it is, despite the foundational technologies that it was built upon - none of which had anticipated the usage requirements placed on their current versions, really ought to be labelled one of the wonders of the world.

I learned to program in the early to mid 1990s. Back then, there was no "cloud", we didn't call anything a "web application" but I cut my teeth doing the 1990s equivalent of building online tools and "web apps." Because everything was self-hosted, the companies I worked for valued portability because there was customer demand. Standardization was sought as a way to streamline business efficiency. As a young developer, I came to value standardization for the benefits that it offered me as a developer.

But back then, as well as today, if you looked at the very recent history of computing; you had big endian vs little endian CPUs to support, you had a dozen flavours of proprietary UNIX operating systems - each with their own vendor-lock-in features; while SQL was standard, every single RDBMS vendor had their own proprietary features that they were all too happy for you to use in order to try and lock consumers into their systems.

It can be argued that part of what has made Microsoft Windows so popular throughout the ages is the tremendous amount of effort that Microsoft goes through to support backwards compatibility. But even despite that effort, backwards compatibility with applications built for earlier version of Windows can still be hit or miss.

For better or worse, breaking changes are just part and parcel of computing. To try and impose some concept of a "contract" on the Internet to support backwards compatibility, even if you mean it purely figuratively, is a bit silly. The reason we have as much backwards compatibility as we do is largely historical and always driven by business goals and requirements, as dictated by customers. If only an extreme minority of "customers" require native xslt support in the web browser, to use today's example, it makes zero business sense to pour resources into maintaining it.

ML has been around for ages. Email spam filters are one of the oldest examples.

These days when the term "AI" is thrown around the person is usually talking about large language models, or generative adversarial neural networks for things like image generation etc.

Classification is a wonderful application of ML that long predates LLMs. And LLMs have their purpose and niche too, don't get me wrong. I use them all the time. But AI right now is a complete hype train with companies trying to shove LLMs into absolutely anything and everything. Although I use LLMs, I have zero interest in an "AI PC" or an "AI Web Browser" any more than I have a need for an AI toaster oven. Thank god companies have finally gotten the message about "smart appliances." I wish "dumb televisions" were more common, but for a while it was looking like you couldn't buy a freakin' dishwasher that didn't have WIFI and an app and a bunch of other complexity-adding "features" that are neither required or desired by most customers.

> This works very well for the local wealth crowd

It works well for everyone. The problem with government that is for and by the people, is that wealthy people are people too.

You're effectively saying that because you're worried about the "local wealth crowd" "capturing" government, you would prefer to make change in government more difficult and representation farther removed for everyone.

It's not clear how that would make it easier for the "non local wealth crowd" to affect change while it makes it harder for the "wealth crowd" ? Although maybe "local" is the key word here? I mean, that would imply that you're OK with global mega-corps capturing the federal level as long as they are not local companies. But I think I'd be straw-manning you to assume that's your position, and I'm not trying to strawman you. I'm just illustrating the logical conclusion of your idea if I take it at face value.

For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of protectionist economic policies. But if I were, I might offer that "local wealth" at least provides value at the local level (jobs, economic growth etc.) whereas global mega-corps have interests outside of the country.

In any case, it's not at all clear how making it less difficult for the "local wealth crowd" makes it easier for the "non local wealth crowd." As I see it, you just make government farther removed for everyone. Disadvantaging both groups equally. But if you're ideologically driven by a hatred of wealth and of capitalism, then maybe that's well understood and we are all sacrificial lambs on offer.

> But the design clearly is not fit for where our society is or the direction it is moving, people have much more affiliation with the national entity than with the state entity

For better or worse.

I would argue that government serves you much better the closer it is to you. A municipal government is going to be a lot more responsive to people who live in that city vs the State / Provincial level, who have a much broader constituency. And the State / Provincial level is going to be a lot more responsive to its constituency than the Federal level.

Politics is the direct result of the philosophy of a culture. The more culturally people identify as "American" instead of "Californian", "Texan", "Virginian" etc. the more you're going to see the scope of the federal level expand, because that's what "the people" are asking for.

The problem with democracy is that people don't always vote or act in accordance with their objective best interests.

And not to go off on a tangent, but the cultural attitude towards democracy itself is indicative of my point. Culturally people tend to equate democracy with "freedom" even though democracy is but a tool. A perfectly appropriate tool for certain things (should we spend the city budget on a new sporting stadium or upgrades to our roads?). But there are other matters that should never, under any circumstance, be put to a vote (ex: what groups of people have rights).

I switched to Mint (Mate) around 2012 or so because of radical UI changes made by Canonical. At the time, the "mobile revolution" was the big industry trend. Windows 8 had come out which was designed for touch screens (and people hated it) ... and Canonical released a new default desktop environment (I think it was Unity? Memory is fuzzy). It was shocking to me and when I complained about it, a friend recommended Mint.

The nice thing about Linux is that you have max choice. That can pose problems for new users who might be a bit overwhelmed but we shouldn't pretend that Canonical "owns" Linux or that everyone is necessarily going to land there. I recommend Mint when people tell me they're thinking of giving Linux a try. Haven't given Ubuntu a second thought in years.

Sure but I hope you get my point. Fighting takes effort, cooperation takes effort. Most people have other things to worry about and don't care about whatever it is you're fighting or cooperating over. People aren't motivated enough to try and sabotage the wikipedia articles of others. Even if they could automate it. There's just nothing in it for them.

> In my experience when humans are given the choice to cooperate or fight, most choose to cooperate.

Personally, my opinion of human nature falls somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.

I think when humans are given the choice to cooperate or fight, most choose to order a pizza.

A content creator I used to follow was fond of saying "Chill out, America isn't headed towards another civil war. We're way too fat and lazy for that."

More colloquially, people would say that Wikipedia could not be trusted because "anyone can edit the pages or write whatever they want."

Of course that's demonstrative of the genesis fallacy. Anyone can write or publish a book, too. So it always comes down to "how can you trust information?" That's where individual responsibility to think critically comes in. There's not really anything you can do about the fact that a lot of people will choose to not think.

I'm not worried that I'm going to lose access to V2. I'm worried that they are moving in the same rent-seeking direction that Adobe did that caused me to migrate to Affinity in the first place.

Creative tools are, to artists, like IDEs and git repositories are to coders.

Imagine you spend years getting very proficient at specific development tools, and you use a repo host like GitHub. One day your dev tools providers tell you that they are moving to a subscription model. You can continue to use the legacy stuff to access your source code. But if you choose to migrate to a new vendor, all of that legacy source code is now coupled to your old dev tools. Hopefully you have some sort of export -> import functionality so you can migrate. But this doesn't help the fact that you spent years honing your craft in a particular eco-system and now that ecosystem has deal breakers AND make it cumbersome and difficult to migrate away.

An artist has "source" files just the same as developers. They are the project files that have all of the raw layers and assets that would allow tweaks and revisions to be made.

For some artists, this can even make contracts difficult. I own a business, outsourced the creation of our logo to a local artist. Years down the road, if I wanted to ask her to send me the file in a different format, or make tweaks etc. she may charge me money for that, but it is totally on the table.

Imagine one day that happens and she has to tell me "Sorry, due to vendor lock-in and bullshit I had to switch to a different program and no longer have access to all of the project files that went into creating your logo."

If it's a one-time license validation, no. That's fine. If it's "login every time to be able to use the app" then that is something that, while is not necessarily a deal breaker in all cases, really annoys me.

Thyat's a fair question and the honest answer is I don't know and I'd have to sift through the feature comparison chart to see if there's anything I actively use today with my paid license that is moving to a Canva Premium subscription.

My real point is that Affinity had two selling points that "converted me:"

- Artist word of mouth. Photo & Design were becoming popular as an alternative to Photoshop & Illustrator so when artists started recommending it as an alternative I listened and checked them out.

- Perpetual license / no subscription model. That was THE NUMBER ONE SELLING POINT that got me on board as a customer. The second I even need to login to an account to be able to use the thing I paid a one time fee for, it's going to rub me the wrong way. It feels like a bait and switch.

A lot of this type of stuff boils down to what you're used to.

My wife is not particularly tech savvy. She is a Linux user, however. When we started a new business, we needed certain applications that only run on Windows and since she would be at the brick and mortar location full time, I figured we could multi-purpose a new laptop for her and have her switch to Windows.

She hated it and begged for us to get a dedicated Windows laptop for that stuff so she could go back to Linux.

Some of you might suggest that she has me for tech support, which is true, but I can't actually remember the last time she asked me to troubleshoot something for her with her laptop. The occasions that do come to mind are usually hardware failure related.

Obviously the thing about generlizations is that they're never going to fit all individuals uniformly. My wife might be an edge case. But she feels at home using Linux, as it's what she's used to ... and strongly loathed using Windows when it was offered to her.

I feel that kind of way about Mac vs PC as well. I am a lifelong PC user, and also a "power user." I have extremely particular preferences when it comes to my UI and keyboard mappings and fonts and windowing features. When I was forced to use a Mac for work, I honestly considered looking for a different position because it was just that painful for me. Nothing wrong with Mac OS X, a lot of people love it. But I was 10% as productive on it when compared to what I'm used to... and I'm "old dog" enough that it was just too much change to be able to bear and work with.

I switched to Affinity as part an ongoing effort to "de-Adobe-ize." I had no idea that they were owned by Canva.

This could be good news, but as someone who paid for a perpetual license, I'm worried that some of the features I paid a one-time license for will eventually move to a Canva subscription model :(

The reason that worries me is that when I look at the feature chart, you've got "Affinity" compared with "Affinity + Canva Premium Plans."

Subscriptions make sense for certain services. I'm not opposed to a subscription model in general. But for creative tools, I LOATHE subscriptions. It means that my creative work is now held hostage by rent-seekers who require me to pay them monthly fees to be able to access my art work. NO!

So if I ever need a Canva Premium plan in the future to be able to use certain Affinity features that I've PAID FOR then fuck them, I'm abandoning them as fast I abandoned Adobe after being an Adobe user/customer for 30+ years.

I share your bias, but something to consider is the prevalence of smart phone usage these days, and the fact that reading text on a smart phone can be as awful as trying to watch a video on a desktop when all you want is a quick text summary.

I've always hated the trend of moving towards video as well. But if my desktop was currently in the process of installing the operating system, leaving me without a web browser, and all I have is my phone as a secondary device ... I might actually prefer watching a quick video over trying to read text on a tiny screen and having to pinch zoom and horizontal scroll. Of course this depends a lot on how the text is presented, but in general I think video is easier to absorb on a phone and text is easier to skim / read / zoom / copy-paste on a desktop.

> that was never in question on normal computers.

One of the things that really worries me is that this seems to be creeping in to desktop OS's as well. It's still possible, for now, to install software on Windows 11 without going through the "Microsoft Store", but I remember having to tweak some security settings to make that possible... and was really alarmed the first time I tried to install software on a fresh install and got blocked and directed to the Microsoft Store.

I've always had mixed feelings about RMS and FSF, mostly due to their hardline attitudes (I'm not opposed to proprietary closed-source software even if I have a preference for FOSS... I think there's room for both) but this trend of software installation gate-keeping that came from mobile has me really worried (and I've never been much of a mobile user either, so any creep from mobile into desktop is always unwelcome and alarming to me).

After decades of struggling with weight, I no longer believe in the calorie religion. That's not to say that calories are useless or don't matter at all. I just think that calories matters a hell of a lot less than people are led to believe and that the idea of calories in vs calories burned is an oversimplification so extreme that it is useless, and can actually lead people to making bad diet decisions.

I have put myself on extremely restrictive diets where I was consuming 1,000 -> 1300 calories per day. After a few weeks of initial weight loss, the rate of loss completely plateaued and maintained for long enough that if what we have been told about calories were true, my lived experiences would contradict the laws of physics.

The human body is insanely complicated, and from what I've read in research, hormones seem to be the single biggest contributor to body composition and weight management. And for what it's worth, my thyroid is perfectly healthy. I'm not talking about people who have medical conditions impacting their hormones.

Rather, consider that our bodies are basically chemical factories and when we ingest something, our digestive process is a process of chemical reactions. The particular chemicals and nutrients that we are deriving from foods can trigger or suppress certain hormones. When it comes to energy allocation, insulin is the most significant. When your blood sugar spikes, insulin is released in order to direct your cells to absorb that blood sugar. When that becomes saturated, your fat cells are going to begin absorbing. One of the reasons that a lot of people find success on extremely low-carbohydrate diets is that carbs tend to spike insulin.

But there are other hormones that can impact weight as well, such as cortisol (stress hormone), ghrelin (hunger response hormone) etc.

I'm convinced that the reason my ultra-restrictive diets saw plateaus despite sticking with them has to do with what I was eating and less to do with how much I was eating.

I'm not an advocate for any particular diet. I have friends who have switched their lifestyle to a mostly ketogenic diet to great results. I've known other people who eat vegan and do well. I've done those same diets and not seen the same results. What ended up working for me (and only me) was largely eliminating plant-based foods. Given the fact that when I step outside, I am allergic to pretty much every plant that lives ... I wonder if there's some kind of mild dietary allergic reaction at play in my body when I eat certain plants. When I eat pretty much just meat, the weight starts to melt off, I gain muscle mass (makes sense - I'm consuming more protein) and I feel better. My wife can't eat the same diet, though. Gives her heartburn. For her, she seems to look and feel better on a more "Mediterranean diet."

I'm not a fan of fad diets, I'm not an advocate of them. I think it's obviously about long term lifestyle choices. I just think that calories has become a sort of religious belief. I don't think we have ANY data that suggests "You can live on an all cheesecake diet and, as long as you restrict your calories, your body composition will be healthy baseline." And we would need that to be true in order for the calories in vs calories out hypothesis to hold. But research actually suggests the opposite: not all calories are created equal. I even recall a study that was shared on Hacker News a while back where they served two study groups the same daily calorie intake but they were different food types and they were able to observe differences in body fat accumulation in the different groups. I wish I could remember what to search for to dig that up.

My first paid position as a software developer was for a small, dot-com startup in Windsor, ON Canada. We co-located in Detroit - which meant border crossings (though this was pre-911 so crossing as a Canadian citizen was easier) - and had just a couple of servers on a rack. We were software engineers and had people who knew what they were doing. So yeah we were technically proficient. But I'm not sure I'd call that company among "the most technically sophisticated of organizations". We were tiny. In fact, when I first started working there, we were working out of a house with a workforce of like 25 people max.

When that company went under during the dot-com crash, I started my first business shortly after. It was 2003, I was 21 years-old and this business allowed me to work from home and feed my family until I re-entered the job market in 2018. For 15 years, I was a one-person organization, and because my business operated "free" adult-entertainment websites, bandwidth was my most significant expense. For that reason, even when Cloud became a thing (which it wasn't in 2003), I never migrated because of the bandwidth costs alone. Cloudflare was a major game changer but even it didn't exist when I first started out. There were CDNs like Akamai but they were crazy expensive and out of my league. So at its peak, I had about 12 bare metal servers around the world (all rented from the same hosting company - original called Server Matrix it then became Softlayer and then was bought by IBM and went to shit and is now IBM Cloud). I admin'd those on top of writing and maintaining all of the code and running the business independently with occasional help from my wife.

I am obviously very technically competent. I'm a Principal Software Engineer today. But technically sophisticated? There wasn't much sophistication about it. I did bare metal servers because it was the only cost-effective way to run my business. It was attainable and it worked. And it worked in a way that Cloud couldn't when Cloud came on the scene - so I never went Cloud with that operation just due to cost alone.

> "Oops, Jim Bob tripped over the power cord, guess we won't get any emails until the IT guy shows up" - this used to be a routine experience.

You're not entirely wrong, but you're being hyperbolic too. I'm actually curious how old you are / how long you've worked in tech, because I started out pre-cloud and things weren't nearly as bad or as limited as you suggest.

First, on-prem servers are not the only alternative to "cloud." Many businesses, including the ones I worked for, did co-location. The companies owned their own bare metal servers, but would rent a rack in a data centre, and certain things - like the network admin - was entirely outsourced to the data centre / hosting company.

You could also rent managed bare metal servers (you still can). This means that you can pretty much outsource your entire IT department, but you're still not doing cloud services. Meaning you've got bare metal servers, someone you're paying at the hosting company is handling security updates and troubleshooting. You don't get things like auto-scaling or serverless or other cloud features, but you also don't have to worry about Jim tripping over the power cable either.

There's also still virtual servers. Which is basically a VM running on a server that hosts multiple clients.

All of this is to say that the alternative is not "cloud" or "box in a closet." The alternative is "cloud" and a ton of different server options: owned, rented, co-located, on-prem, dedicated, virtual, managed v un-managed (outsource IT vs admin your own) and the list goes on and on.

> It's cruel to encourage coldness in such an environment.

You're straw-manning. The person you're replying to never once mentioned being cold, let alone encouraged it.

They simply expressed a preference for companies that don't try to pretend that their mission and purpose is something other than what it is.

I've worked in tech exclusively my entire 25+ year career. And I've worked for way more companies that try to put on a front of "we're a family" than the opposite.

As someone who has worked as an employee and owned businesses (often simultaneously), I'm on board with the parent. I don't want coldness in the workplace. But I also don't want employees or co-workers who don't respect that we're here to build something that we're offering for sale on the marketplace either, least of all in a highly competitive landscape where we're under constant threat of going out of business if we don't get productivity and efficiency right.

I want my businesses to be enjoyable places to work. But at the end of the day, if I'm paying money for someone who isn't pulling their weight then I am extremely resentful of anyone who tries to get in the way of me correcting the fact that they are effectively ripping me off and, by doing so, hurting every single one of their co-workers by hurting their employer.

Succeeding in business is hard. And while there are a lot of shady businesses out there, and a lot of big corps do things we take issue with, 99.9% of businesses are making the world a better place for you to live by producing everything from the concrete that paves your sidewalks, to the shippers that get food from farm to your table. The anti-business, anti-capitalism attitudes that are so prevalent in the west are truly disturbing.

By all means be pro-worker. But there really ought not be a conflict between business and employee since, at the end of the day, it is a mutually beneficial relationship. Business can't succeed without its employees, employees don't earn a cent if the business doesn't earn a profit. And lets not forget that what a business can afford is irrelevant. The business doesn't exist to employee people. It exists to produce the goods or services that it set out to in order to turn a profit. And there is nothing wrong with that. An employee that hates the profit motive is one I don't want working for me. You're hopefully profiting by being employed. Otherwise I don't know what you're doing with your life. So stop the hypocrisy and double standards. We're not a family, and we don't need to be cold to each other, but we're in this shit show together so let's act like reasonable, rational actors and do our fucking jobs so we can all take home money and feed our families and savings.