kokanee

The coolest thing I made is probably my two-tier, 3-kettle, 240v E-HERMS homebrewing system, but that was probably only about 15% fabrication and 85% integrating off-the-shelf hardware.

For some reason, the thing that still feels the coolest was the RC hovercraft (converted from RC airplane parts) that a friend and I made for a science fair. It was a bit silly because it wasn't cordless, but that attribute doubled as a nice safety feature given that this was being piloted in a gymnasium full of kids.

I had a similar situation, but I had him go with PEX and sweat connections. I suppose I would have considered it for a connection in my garage, but this was deep in my crawl space in an area where you only visit if you absolutely have to. Not a place to mess around with products that have half the life expectancy of the tried-and-true methods.

I wonder if any builders are using this approach - solder in the crawl space and behind drywall, but shark bite in accessible areas.

We had a government customer who essentially asked us to raise our prices so that they could request a larger budget.

I'm seeing a mix of 503s, 522s, 500s, and once in a while a successful page load on the website. No word on the root cause at this point.

Not exactly related, but I preordered a Rivian SUV and waited in line for about 2 years. By the time my turn finally came up, lots of other manufacturers had announced plans to release off-road or towing-capable EVs, many at lower price points, so I ended up cancelling. I really hope Rivian succeeds and I'm excited to learn more about their second vehicle line, but anyone purchasing right now needs to have a true early adopter mindset, because they're paying a huge premium to get a Rivian today instead of a similar car for half the price in a year or two.

Also, I have to admit, as much as I love what this company is doing, both the R1 line and the Amazon van look totally cartoonish to me.

I spent 5 years working on one of these startups. I'm not sure that the highway lane constraint is fundamental to the reality that contech startups tend to fail, but I think the assessment about the hubris of contech startups is fair.

The first lesson to learn is that construction doesn't happen behind a laptop or on a phone. From your user's perspective, time spent fiddling with your app is time not spent on real work. So naturally you focus on selling to the "office workers" who spend more time on planning and administration. The problem with that segment is that the tools they already have are good enough. Construction projects always take far longer and cost far more than expected because of what's happening in the field, not because of what's happening in the office, so software simply isn't a bottleneck in this industry. The fact that your tool was specifically designed for their use case, or has an AR feature that allows them to walk the site virtually, or whatever -- it's cool, and you can get a few sales that way, but it's not going to result in better project economics, so it's not going to revolutionize anything.

It's sincere if you tell people that you sell shovels. It's insincere if you tell people that you will make all their prospecting dreams come true.

This is a fantastic point, but Zoom would never have been a candidate for me personally for several reasons:

- As important as reducing our use of fossil fuels is, using less energy is not a solution to the problem of a non-renewable energy system. In that sense, it wouldn't meet the criteria for someone who wants to work on a climate solution.

- While WFH drastically reduces auto emissions, it increases gas & electricity use in the home.

- Zoom is not a mission-driven company and (to my knowledge) their KPIs are not directed at or correlated with their GHG footprint; I would think they see themselves as productivity software, not climate software.

- If Zoom never existed we would be working from home at the same rate, using any of hundreds of other video conferencing apps. In carbon offset terms, their impact does not provide additionality.

I work on software at a hardware startup that is designing and manufacturing a next-generation electrolysis plant for the production of green hydrogen. My personal experience has led me to believe that opportunities to participate meaningfully in climate tech are exclusively available at hardware companies. Anyone attempting to solve climate change with software is at best skimming value off of the work being done by others in the physical world, and at worst creating markets for corporate greenwashing.

huh I clicked around for a while and I like the vibe but I can't find any directory or feed of pages/projects to explore; it looks like it's all documentation and chat rooms for developers. Is there a way to browse the indie web as a consumer rather than a developer?

Hmm maybe I’m not being fair but my initial reaction is that this uses SQL.js as a database and browser tabs for backups. And then restores from the backups before each query instead of just reading from the in-memory db.

Playing devil's advocate, maybe they would argue that "we" refers to the organization that operates the service, and that in the event that the ownership of the organization changes, the statement could still be true - "we" did not sell your data, but during the acquisition "we" were sold.

I’ve heard some people say that as a child they thought the letter before P was “Elemeno.” So it certainly tracks that if you ask kids to recite “and per se and” that they might think the whole phrase is the name of the letter.

Agree with the sentiment, disagree with the assignment of blame. Blame legal, marketing, design, or PM. No web dev decided this was how they wanted to spend a day.

They sell ads, but now they also charge for API requests. Unlike most forums, a significant amount of Reddit interactions happen via the API. They have all the best communities on the internet, but their software is HORRIBLE, so the community has created all kinds of popular 3rd party clients, tools, and bots for engaging the community without having to use the god-awful Reddit software.

My take on this specific example is that when a device is found to be leaking refrigerant, the owner, installer, and manufacturer should all be fined.

> All you need to track a user is data you send as part of a HTTP request.

Browsers impose a limit on concurrent requests (usually 6 per hostname) for a reason - HTTP requests, be they too many or too large, are one of the largest performance problems in a typical site. Just because it's easy to fire-and-forget an HTTP request doesn't mean it doesn't have a performance impact, especially in apps that are already network-chatty. I think you know this because you go on to list "the volume of data we're transferring" as a performance bottleneck, and obviously that's done through HTTP requests. Also, in the real world analytics installations virtually always include installing a third party library i.e. google analytics, so you're taking hits to download the library, interpret the source, run the code alongside your app, usually in the same thread, all before you've fired any of those HTTP requests.

> A/B tests just means settings/feature flags and metrics

I'm aware of the definition. If you are implying that conditionally loading settings or feature flags and tracking associated metrics doesn't have a performance impact, I would disagree. It is usually possible to implement a given A/B test with minimal performance impact, but in practice these are absolutely a contributor to the kind of bloat I'm frustrated with.

> sessions are recorded since ever with zero performance penalty

It sounds like you're talking about logs. I'm talking about "session replay" features provided by companies like FullStory and Sentry that allow you to replay every mouse move and keystroke of your users.

> It's trendy to shit on the status quo but it also is low-effort and lacks any insightfulness.

By this point in your comment I think you forgot what we were talking about. I was arguing that the architecture of modern SPAs shouldn't bear the blame for bad performance; my point being that whether or not we continued to use server-generated HTML we would still be suffering from similar problems of bloat today. The "status quo" that I'm shitting on is taking lazy approach to performance management and injecting way too much cruft; unless you work for an analytics provider I'm not sure why you would be opposed to that stance.

An idea I would be interested in is some kind of public-private partnership for operating internet services like social media, search, and wikis, which are necessary for the public good but have no viable economic model. The government provides the public funding and private entities build and operate the services, because no one wants to log into a government-operated reddit clone to look for onlyfans leaks. Maybe this could be accomplished with grants instead of donations?

I have a fairly negative/pessimistic take on this model, but it’s my truth: Wikipedia, in my experience, is littered with some of the most aggressive, psychologically manipulative, and persistent ads of any major site. They just happen to be ads imploring me to donate to Wikipedia.

An idea I mull over occasionally: what if you could spend your karma points to boost any given post? This would ultimately be another form of paid advertising, except that the currency used would be earned by contributing to the community. Then, allow people to sell their karma points for fiat currency. Companies would buy karma points directly from users in order to promote their self-promotional posts, but those posts would be subject to the same rules and moderation as any other post. That way you're actually paying your best users rather than charging them.

No one is protesting ads, and most redditors support the idea of a reasonable monetization approach for third party apps. But u/spez is pretty open about the fact that he views third party apps as competitors and/or leeches, and he's killing them off with a fee that no one can pay. The end goal is clearly to make the platform less open so that Reddit itself can control (monetize) all aspects.

I agree. I recently went to great lengths in the React app I own to make it so that only the affected components would re-render on each input keystroke, and the result is gross but performant. My opinion is relatively nuanced: I am a proponent of SPAs in situations where they make sense, but if I had a choice I would never use a framework. They always impose at least as many problems as they solve, if not more.

I attempted to build a startup product using a vanilla JS SPA when I was a founding engineer, and the result was predictable: it worked great for me, but nobody I hired wanted to learn some random guy's vanilla JS codebase. I've since resigned myself to using React simply because that's what developers expect, despite all the headaches.

For what it's worth, we ended up migrating to Mithril in the V2 of that startup's product. We all enjoyed Mithril and it scaled really well for us, but my team did have some apprehension about their React skills falling behind.

The entire internet is slower because it's being squeezed to oblivion for monetization and tracking purposes. No matter what technology you choose to render HTML with, your company is going to have a slew of systems for injecting 3rd party scripts, running A/B tests, collecting analytics that include recording user sessions, etc etc. Back "before SPAs" we just weren't doing as much crap in the browser.

Another incumbent is https://gofuckingdoit.com by the bootstrapping cult icon Pieter Levels.

Governments are composed of citizens; this is the same problem at a different scale. The point remains that racing to stand up an open source uncensored version of GPT-4 is a dangerous proposition.

The great downfall of hooks, IMO, is that they allow you to create components that look clean and legible, but act unpredictably because all of your state updates are triggered by variable reference changes. The idea is that this makes your state updates happen automagically so you don't have to think about them, but this is a classic example of an abstraction that works until it doesn't.

Redux mainstreamed the concept of reference changes triggering updates, but I think this is a horrible pattern - we don't even have an operator in JS for explicitly passing by reference, so you end up destructuring large objects constantly in order to change one property and create a new object reference, which is a totally inefficient alternative to calling a render method. Plus javascript developers don't generally think about the concept of passing by reference vs value anyway, in large part because the language gives us so few tools for making those choices.

As a result, there is a class of bugs where the only solution is to change the list of dependency variables for a given hook. It doesn't take a huge amount of complexity for the implications of those dependency trees to bend the mind, and the "clean" syntax of hooks comes crashing down.

Sure, React still supports that, for some reason. But good luck getting a job offer or even a PR approved if you're using `this.setState()` in 2023.

I do this when possible. Caching can be a pain to get right though. If you’re set up to do hashed filenames for JS and CSS already, you can leverage that for cache busting your json, and then you need to inject the hashed filename into the app somehow.

Thanks for your thoughts! Appreciate it.

I'm in my mid-30s and facing the reality that I do not want to be a manager, but have a hard time picturing myself coding into my 60s. I'd be curious to hear more about what in your eyes separates "certain parts of our industry" that aren't suitable for older devs from those that offer good jobs which pay what you're worth. What kind of attributes would you look for in a company or product if you were searching for a job right now?