1,063 karma · joined February 9, 2019
So much so that I ended up writing a queueing app for scheduling batches of sequential tasks on the server in Dart just to see how it could work as a NodeJS replacement, and thought the whole dev experience was great.
So out of existential need, I intentionally starting taking on large, creative projects at work that I knew would hold my interest and consume my thoughts. In some cases, this meant undertaking projects of my own volition and "asking for forgiveness rather than permission" at work.
In part because of a couple of articles I read on the scientifically shown improvement of outcomes of cancer patients with positive attitudes, and because I knew my mom already had several negative voices around her daily, I decided my role with her would be relentlessly positive.
An attitude of "we don't know the future, all things are possible, and anything can be overcome with the right set of inputs -- we just need to find what those are". I quickly adopted this attitude for myself, and it allowed me to embrace failure more - because the attitude wasn't predicated on being the best, but rather of overcoming.
Granted, this was all about 6 years ago. Since then, much has changed, and I do find myself facing similar issues again. Without the presence of something "existential" pushing me, I am finding it harder to overcome this time myself.
As with most things, though, feedback cycles are a thing. Negativity feeds on itself, and success begets success, so the first step is finding whatever you can to help break the feedback loop. Catch any negative thoughts as quickly as you can, and redirect them from fatalistic into something malleable.
Catch any random, distracting "I need to Google this" type thoughts as they happen, and write them down on a notebook as something you should Google later, but not right now.
One important thing at the start is that, you don't have to necessarily believe every positive mantra or habit you say, you just have to do it. Over time, the believability will come on its own.
If you can get momentum going towards the positive instead of the negative, break the feedback loop, and get onto the "success begets success" side of it, it gets much easier.
Hope that helps and makes sense. Wish I had an actual, easy answer, but a lot of it is just trying things until you see what works, and being consistent above all else.
Good luck, and if you come up with any of your own tips, please let me know, because as I said - for as much as I've been through this before successfully, I can see it happening again, and I'm realizing it's time to deal with it again myself.
There was at least a year long period in which my thoughts darted and weaved wildly, with every mix of emotion, all at once.
“I need to finish this bug fix. But first I should get some coffee. That coffee in the hospital was so warm and comforting, in that styrofoam cup. Just what I needed in the waiting room… which is when the doctor told me her prognosis.
“Six months, he said. F*k. How can I do this? I need lots of coffee. But coffee is reminding me of bad things. How will I ever drink coffee again? Would be a shame to never drink coffee, though… it’s a big industry after all. Wonder what it looks Like to pick coffee beans? Bet it would be nice to just be picking coffee beans without any other care. But I have my own job to do… that bug fix. I’ll do that instead.”
Random thoughts of work, grief, jokes, and childlike daydreaming, all running together. All day. Every day.
The author of this captured this feeling insanely well, whether that was intended or not.
I can also relate in the sense that, that period of my life was perhaps one of the more intense periods of self improvement and introspection I’ve had.
Something about having so many thoughts, and needing to channel them to something positive to overcome the blatant and glaring negative, led to growth as a software developer, in some cruel way.
That aside, the rest of the piece is timely and relevant for me now.
I feel like there’s so much I can relate to regarding “resistance” and self doubt. Of casting aside bad criticisms from incapable critics as the author described from her MFA experience.
My heart is with the author through all of this. I hope to follow more of her work.
That way, to my uneducated mind, the monitor itself would be handling the CRT shader effects and could accept any input, including real 80s/90s/00s devices.
But it’s quite likely that I’m underestimating what it would take to have a dedicated input processor in a display that works as well as the GPU shaders do, and underestimating the minimum amount of input lag required.
It’s had incremental improvements, but as a desktop OS, it’s a bit rough in my recent (within the last 1.5 years) experience.
If there are specific issues you have with Fedora, and/or you simply want something Debian based, I would suggest a stable Ubuntu derivative like pop_os! or Zorin OS.
Seeking recommendations is great, but as a desktop Linux user myself, I don’t think there’s any better substitute for having a spare “play” computer (even a junker or a cheap mini PC) that you can just try a few distros out without affecting your main PC until you find your match.
A slippery slope is often a legitimate concern.
Using it as the sole means to shut down an idea is often disingenuous, but so, too, is shutting down any concerns of a ”snowball effect” by calling it a logical fallacy.
Your mileage may vary, but I’ve been happy enough with mine for the price that I had already decided I would be choosing Beelink for my next mini PC over a NUC.
That said, I have seen some mixed reports of some issues around thermal throttling and eGPU support for some of the newer gaming focused ones, but I think if you have realistic expectations given the form factor (and especially if you’re not going for gaming) then they are fairly reliable and sturdy little devices.
* Also note, I bought mine barebones and added my own ram and SSD. I can’t speak to the quality of what they ship with, but I also haven’t heard any complaints from others with that regard.
Logically one would think icons and visually distinctly colored ribbon tabs would be better, but (at least for me) they are decidedly worse.
For, say, security implementations for authorization and access controls, or even low level HTTP request routing? Absolutely. The goal there is to adhere to something standard and battle tested by experts, and the third party libraries tend to be fewer in number, and of higher quality, with longer term support and clearly defined upgrade paths.
But that’s the lower level stuff, where your special custom needs are superseded by the primary goal of just “doing the one right thing”, or “adhere to the commonly agreed upon standard”.
For all the other things that make an app unique - things like CSS frameworks, UI components (beyond basic, accessibility-minded building blocks), chart drawing, report generation and caching - my experience has taught me otherwise, the hard way.
Being stuck using a 3rd party library that doesn’t do what the client or business needs it to do, having to juggle our own internal patches and bug fixes with updates to the library itself, all only to have the library abandoned or deprecated in favor of the author’s next pet project, really sucks and often comes with a high opportunity cost and a high development cost.
I now consider third party implementations of higher level features (and especially anything front-end) to be something that needs to be evaluated as equally costly as an internal implementation by default, and not favored just because somebody else wrote it.
Maybe I’ve just been unlucky in my experience, though. I also suspect ecosystem makes a difference. The PHP and JS ecosystems are full of poor libraries with snake oil sales pitches. I suspect this is different with, say, Rust.
Where it really stings is when I do something of my own initiative (like, for example, create a transparent API over memoizing and caching some expensive calculation, or refactor some of our common client customizations into their own set of classes so it’s easier to extend) and he ignores it or scoffs at it.
Only to then find a third party library that implements something similarly. THEN it’s presented to me as a “brilliant idea” that we can take advantage of.
At that point, when I say “we” already do this, he usually rephrases what his brilliant 3rd party library does, as though he can’t fathom that I would be capable of doing something like that myself, and clearly I’m just not understanding what he’s telling me.
I think it’s a defensive mechanism for his ego against one of his peers or employees being more capable than he is.
But it’s also not like he can’t learn this stuff himself, he just doesn’t ever put in the time or effort.
So the go to for every solution is to find a third party library from a “real” witch or wizard, and follow its basic tutorial. Maybe try to customize it a bit at most.
If something breaks, just start randomly moving things around or copying and pasting more code from forums until it works.
I can’t live like that. I need to know why something’s not working, AND why it IS working. I like stepping through my code with a debugger just to make sure things look right, even when they’re working.
I think the craziest part, though, is just how much people with this “software is magic” mindset can actually get just by brute force cobbling things together.
Each part of the process, from investigating and gathering facts, writing, and presentation, presents an opportunity for bias to be introduced, be it implicitly or explicitly.
I don’t think anyone is making the reductionist argument that “knowing things isn’t worth it”.
But our time and attention is finite, and the things the news media is directing our time and attention toward learning is arguably not valuable.
I would also challenge the notion that news media is nothing but a gateway to raw news with bias that we can account for. Most people don’t account for it, most media outlets don’t account for it, and it may not even be possible for it to truly be accounted for.
News media can and does report incomplete facts that can change an entire perception of an issue. They can and do report non facts as well. Apologies and corrections are rare and buried, usually bookended by the next wrong things to be reported.
If we (a) define news media and news as separate entities entirely, and (b) define news as “something that happened”, then it even furthers the argument that news media itself is unworthy of time and attention, even in seeking news as raw facts. Because news media does such a poor job of reporting facts, the facts end up too mangled to be usable.
At this point the question becomes “can the bias actually be accounted for” (IMO, it cannot be), and if not, “how do we get facts outside of the news media”.
Which is still tangentially related to the original article in so much as we’re still discussing which news (facts) matter and where do you get them from… but in almost no case is the answer “the news media”.
I’ve dealt many times with real people, who present me with a real problem, but no single concrete solution.
If the PM doesn’t take the proper time to understand the problem (and try to find the real, underlying problem that often exists) — Or rushes into a solution without proper evaluation — Or just generally wants to quickly churn user asks into tickets — then the result is the same.
I generally agree that, in my experience, a good senior software engineer is well suited to teasing out “the real problem” and getting to a properly detailed solution even without a PM.
However, that doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s potential value in a PM that can set a broader vision of the product and help prioritize tasks. But the good ones do so by working with and deferring often to his or her software dev team, and NOT by working “top down”.
It’s sensationalized, biased, partisan, and framed in an inflammatory manner to make you angry or ignite passion to make you vote a certain way.
It shapes people’s votes because, just like a politician’s own advertisement, that’s the goal.
Regardless of what your choice of news source is or your political party of choice, likely half of the outrageous issues being shouted by the news right now are irrelevant or blown out of proportion.
I’m also increasingly finding that the most important piece of any democracy, isn’t who you vote in, but your willingness to stand by your fellow citizens (including those who voted the other way) in holding the person that you voted in accountable for their results or lack thereof.
And that requires a certain amount of empathy, intellectual honesty, and willingness to reject confirmation bias, that the news, as it exists, simply will not give you.
You have plenty of people both willing and unwilling to face this issue everywhere.
And you might be surprised by the types of people who share your attitude. They aren’t all as woke as you might think.
In the US, any notion of “protecting the culture” is considered taboo. Implying that outside influence would not be your peers, and using terms like “serfs in some content factory in some lawless backwater” would be considered downright racist.
Personally, I can see value in keeping a thriving industry locally (which, again, is almost taboo in the US). I wonder how this compares to countries like, say, Japan or South Korea, which have thriving entertainment sectors of their own. Do they also have protection laws to enable this, or are they able to maintain this organically?
Whenever some new tools or tech comes along that can help us solve real, tangible problems we deal with, the resistance to learning something new is palpable.
Adding to that, any cool new ideas I think we could offer as a business (either as a result of new tech, or even just new ideas using the old tech) is usually met with resistance by people who are seemingly committed to boring stagnancy at all costs.
That’s where I have to walk the line between putting up with boring at work and still have enough energy in me to work on the fun stuff on my own.
However, piecing together more of the case over time, it appears just as you said - very much not a case of individual liberty but one of genuine health concern.
By all accounts, it appears law enforcement has tried to allow this person her personal sovereignty in many ways while still keeping track of her to ensure she doesn’t endanger others.
That it got to the point it has, is not due to some authoritarian overreach, but rather due to a series of flagrantly contemptuous actions that were defying law enforcement and putting others at risk unnecessarily.
Granted, it is frustrating sometimes to see tools that you really enjoy using, be replaced with tools that aren’t as good or as well thought out.
But ultimately, I believe that you can create just about anything, using just about anything, and even if you’re forced to use a toolset that you don’t like as well, there’s usually nothing stopping you from adapting those tools to help you create what you want to create more comfortably.
Also bear in mind - if you stick around long enough OR study your computer science history, you’ll realize most things are cyclical, and there’s very little that’s actually new.
Almost every new trend is a new incarnation of previous concepts. Master the basic concepts, and everything else comes pretty naturally.
I anxiously clicked, expecting to see an overly simple, flat, gradient filled shape with no character.
But this is perhaps one of the few I’ve seen in a long time that manages to maintain a sense of character while also taking just enough from modern trends to feel fresh and like it belongs next to other current day apps.
The only times I’ve been truly successful with weight loss is when I’ve weaned myself off any processed form of sugar. It’s hell for about 2 weeks, but at some point my cravings for processed foods and sweets drops like crazy and I’m then satisfied (mostly) with healthy, whole foods.
If we identify A, B, C, and D as potential rights, and you and I agree on rights A and B, but we disagree on the principles of C and D, then it’s ok that my side violates your rights A and B because if we can’t agree on all of them, then you deserve none.
It’s the kind of thing that ensures that compromise, understanding, and legislation won’t happen by way of conversation or respectful debate, but instead by name calling and force.
Part of what makes the discussion of emulators or alternative means of playing games so difficult, is that the loudest voices are those who make it clear that they have no intention of actually buying the product to begin with.
It makes it hard for any conversation around the publisher’s pushback to “protect their IP” to move beyond their need to protect their income stream, and into the legitimate reasons a consumer would want to have more control over how they play the publisher’s game.
Any resources that you particularly liked when learning, or is the stuff I will find when Googling “raycasting engines” all good enough?
Thanks. That clarifies, considering the article gives the impression this would be a GM-siloed system built in collaboration with Google.
The problems remain mostly the same, and the notion of GM de-facto crowning Google and its Android-based solution the "one true solution" feels like something that will isolate iPhone users.
There's a big difference between being able to use Apple Music because it's an app offered on the Google Auto Services version of the Play Store, and the general-purpose solution of being able to use it because Apple Music supports CarPlay and your car supports CarPlay.
There are other potential issues that I don't know the answer to without a bit more research. What about multiple users? The beauty of the Android Auto / CarPlay model was that my friend could hop into my car, plug in his phone, and immediately get access to his Spotify app, already on his phone, with his stuff. And just as quickly as he does that, he can unplug and let my paired phone take over again.
It's really a beautiful design in its simplicity for the end user - no installing apps, no signing in to an account on "yet another device", if it's on your phone, and it supports CarPlay, then you get it in your car.
Not only does it sound like this replaces that for iPhone users, it ALSO sounds like some of these problems will exist equally for Android Auto users, as once again you are moving the environment of apps and services from the individual user's phone, into the car.
Edit:
Doing a bit more research on Google Automotive Services specifically, I found this in an article [1]:
> Android Automotive is also responsible for every interaction with your car's in-dash display. [...] Even iOS users will launch CarPlay through Automotive, a humorous convergence of the two platforms.
If this applies, then it sounds like CarPlay could indeed be an option, by way of an app downloaded from the Play Store. If so, this mitigates a healthy number of my issues. However, if so, then why the article declaring CarPlay is going away in GM if it isn't?
Just very poor article writing? Lack of knowledge amongst the people interviewed at this stage?
Also, next from the article is this:
> GAS (yes, the acronym is almost certainly on purpose) is all of your favorite Google system applications rolled into one package. As an end-user, you'll never interact with GAS by its chosen name. Instead, you'll see the benefits of this system, specifically if you purchase a car from one of Google's partners.
> Considering how many drivers, especially in the U.S., rely on iOS and CarPlay to get from place to place, it makes sense that some automakers (especially smaller companies) might pass on adopting these services.
So... what does this mean? CarPlay and GAS are mutually exclusive? Can individual auto makers determine which apps are available in the Play Store?
I'm left with about as many questions as have been answered.
[1] https://www.androidpolice.com/android-auto-vs-android-automo...
> GM would benefit from focusing engineers and investment on one approach to more tightly connecting in-vehicle infotainment and navigation with features such as assisted driving, Edward Kummer, GM's chief digital officer, and Mike Himche, executive director of digital cockpit experience, said in an interview.
This is the actual reasoning provided by GM sources in the article. I jumped the gun.
I can very much sympathize with the desire to concentrate engineering efforts, and I’m sure there are things they would love to spend time on that would be eclipsed or ignored if the user lives in CarPlay or Android Auto.
But this is concentrating resources in the wrong direction, for the wrong reasons, with little useful gain.