lame88

I had to integrate Azure Pipelines and wanted to shoot myself in the face. The idea that you are simply configuring a pipeline yaml is just one big lie; it's code, in the world's shittiest programming language using YML syntax - code that you have no local runtime for, so you have to submit to the cloud like a set of punch cards to see that 10 minutes later it didn't work and to try again. Pipelines are code, pure and simple. The sooner we stop pretending it isn't, the better off we'll be.

I do have a bias against front end development being from my perspective quite a mess, in the same way that physical scientists often look at the social sciences, though the social sciences are still quite important. But for what it's worth, I consider myself somewhere in that median band, and my perspective is motivated by and applies to front end as much as other parts of software dev/delivery.

I agree you can tell the difference, though I would place blame for those situations more on an organization than the developers who get shifted toward that work out of their specialization. It could be some dubious values, but it also could be project budgets.

Plenty of discussion has been had around incentives and I agree with all that, but also there's another angle here: aside from dark patterns, I think the problems of terrible front-end experiences are most prevalent in the middle of the bell curve - the front-end products developed by rather mediocre skill levels and budgets. Which is usually a pejorative, but thinking of it as literally in the middle, not great but not terrible, a wide range of skill levels where people are more or less competent at their jobs. These are where I start to notice the worst effects of the median trying to adopt the technologies and practices that high skilled developers at good companies with huge budgets are able to utilize effectively, or outright make themselves, especially when there is so much churn that being "up to date" with technology is like a pipe dream to most people. These median teams inherit all the complexity, but due to budget or time pressures, etc. aren't able to overcome it effectively to produce a product with high quality, and users feel the sluggish experience and bloat that comes as a result. This pertains to more than UI of course but eventually manifests to users that way.

Something feels wrong. The median should be able to inherit the benefits of technology produced at the high end without such inheriting massive costs.

I was a little underwhelmed by Tarkovsky's take on Solaris; the book was written with a lot more evocative prose, especially with respect to color, which made the film seem just so plain. But I really liked Stalker - then again I hadn't read Roadside Picnic. My understanding is that Tarkovsky's adaptations are usually quite different from the source material.

One small error (I think) - I noticed your link to pathfinder linked to someone's 2020 fork of the repository rather than the upstream servo repository.

Every time I am unfortunate enough to do something front-end it's just as bad as I remember.

Edit: professionally, that is; when I do front-end related stuff for myself, it's fine, but they are small and I keep things simple - vanilla JS where needed, etc.

I was thinking the same thing as I was reading. Seems like feedback lag while drawing brush strokes would be frustrating for an artist. But then again, we have examples of surprisingly good response time in the game streaming world.

Motivation from within is the strongest, and requires that work be aligned with personal goals, either in developing skills or making something happen. In these conditions, I've found that I'm at my most productive no matter where - I'm working against the clock to realize my own ambitions within the many constraints of my job.

However, this could simply be a mental health thing in anyone's case. There is nothing to lose and nothing to be ashamed of by consulting a professional about it.

How much of this is specific to Kubernetes and how much is more accurately because you moved from managing your own VM infrastructure to using managed services? Cloud providers have (often long had) ways of saying "run this code" without managing a VM and without involving kubernetes, including with docker support. And they are often very easy to use though not without their faults. An example being Azure app service.

I do agree that kubernetes is a pleasant experience from an application developer perspective with an existing cluster, but in my experience it was not without excessive pain and long hours by those administering the cluster. A year doesn't surprise me in your case, which brings to mind this question.

My experience is that the support is shit. Azure has good parts but if the grass isn't greener elsewhere then I weep for the state of the field.

I originally read this as question of whether any startups are hiring that are "solving for software engineering" and was very confused.

The right answer to this, as usual, is probably somewhere in the middle. Perspectives like this are pessimistic, but important because the industry has age bias and yet we need to understand where technology might be going full circle. But instead of taking that as a bad thing and stopping there, we need to understand why and how the context is different this time and what that means. Managed services in general seem to be the ultimate cloud computing offering so far, and aren't reinventing the wheel. They are expensive and costs can be hard to reason about (probably on purpose), and cloud computing companies are profiting greatly from inefficiencies, but they take care of entire categories of operational concerns. This feels like the natural progression of the field. We can take advantage of these things selectively while being conservative in when and how we adopt them.

Complexity is a difficult topic, not the least because the many ambiguous meanings it has taken on. When people bring this up, they talk about it like it's a fixed thing that could go to 0 if only someone actually tried hard enough. Yes, complexity is a problem, but that complexity is always increasing is inevitable as long as technology advances. The first episode of the 70s series "Connections" comes to mind. We need to be able to identify and eliminate waste while dealing with this fact.

Specifically, performance optimizations and reliability improvements. More generally, applying my most unique and valuable skill set compared to the people I work with and advocating for good design decisions toward those ends.

I think you've been a role model in how to build and maintain a popular software project while keeping the spirit of FOSS and promoting a positive community around it. I look forward to seeing what you get up to next.

> And then, I didn’t hear anything back from anyone at Microsoft for six months.

This does not mean he did not ask during that time.

Fuck anyone callous enough to take something as far as an onsite trip with the pretense of a job and then just ghost them. I can't think of a much clearer way to show that much disrespect of someone and their time. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in this case. Remember things like this whenever you see the "microsoft <3 linux" slogan and the rest of the PR facade people are all too willing to swallow.

I briefly looked over this project when this link first popped up and didnt think much of it, but then i was surprised to see this huge surge in votes. I dont do much in the javascript and related world - can someone explain what in particular about this project has generated such interest? Even after reading the top comments, I feel like im missing the bigger pitcure.

A capitalist blames a lack of demand for the deep socioeconomic flaws that disasters like this shine an ugly light on. By his logic, if people wanted these things, capitalists would be able to make a ton of money off of them, and so it's everyone else's fault for not creating the demand.

And I don't know the original quote, but the idea that "capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know" is a hilarious feat of mental gymnastics to frame such a inherently self-centered economic system as some sort of inherent altruism.

He challenges the public sector to make better things than the private sector without even acknowledging the massive and growing asymmetry in the resources available in the private sector to accomplish these things.

And lastly he attempts deflect criticism like mine by writing off any counterpoint as "attacking" his ideas and instead asking we talk about what we would "build" and therefore take his deeply biased assumptions as axioms.

It's not the only factor, but to look at this problem without critically evaluating capitalism's role is like ignoring the elephant in the room. Now that we are in a point in time where the more wealth and power is being accumulated by an ever shrinking pool of people, capitalists like Andreessen have more power than ever to employ these kinds of changes. If the supposed demand is not there, then maybe take that one of many signs that capitalism is a dead end.

How timely. I found this series after watching The Ascent of Man, which I found after watching Cosmos. Highly recommend all three, especially the Ascent of Man.

James Burke has a way of conveying a sort of fundamental optimism about society that I find invigorating. I remember listening to an interview with him from the past couple years and after all this time, he still sounds as sharp as ever.

"Why? Because coding a percentage in COBOL would take an estimated five months."

Five months to code a percentage, or five months to add the calculation, integrate that data point with other systems (does this need to be shown as its own field on any unemployment forms or reports? etc.), test it to the point where it has been demonstrated stable enough to be included in a critical system, and then deliver this change?

I don't know the first thing about COBOL but the fact that government is (for good reasons) slow to move, the stability needed in critical things like unemployment processing, and all the other things that go into "coding a percentage", explain that timeline a hell of a lot more than what language was used.

Sounds nice. And idealistic. The reality is at this point the newer is often not much better, or may be just a step sideways rather than forward, and therefore does not replace anything, but rather siphons off a portion of the investment in the pool of alternatives around it. The benefits tend to not justify the costs associated with skill fragmentation and time and effort needed to learn them. More concretely, im not talking about jumping from C to Java. Im talking about things like the thousand different web languages that dont need to exist at all.

A constantly cycling proliferation of different languages, frameworks, libraries, etc. that all do the same things in a different way and are most often mutually incompatible with each other and have entirely different ecosystems with their own comparative advantages but also major pitfalls. This causes tech workers’ investment in skills to get more out of shallow knowledge and trivia than on deeper concepts, creates silos of employment opportunity based on the trivial knowledge workers have, and hinders the ability for the software engineering field as a whole to have a large pool of shared knowledge and develop and evolve stable, relatively timeless systems and tools of high quality, both as end products and in intermediate tooling toward those ends.

I'm speaking specifically to this quote which seems to have drawn from it and hardly seems separable in this case. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” As if the FAANG-type companies are somehow the centerpieces of modern intellectual activity, which is such a tech industry thing to assume.

...are probably working in a particle acceleration lab or something. I know the quote.

Problem is the video card performance is absolute garbage on that thing. Somehow seeming to perform even worse than a prior model I had.

You may have, but I've never met such a person, and that's a false equivalence. And it is not really ironic; when you use an inflammatory term especially in a headline, you use it knowing what the term evokes and it's a clear sign of what kind of audience you're pandering to. And I will judge that person accordingly. That said, considering the post came out in 2015 (which I didn't know at the time of making that comment), I think it had not yet totally become a blanket term synonymous with "liberals" so I can mostly reserve judgement in this case. Again, though, i don't think this is really all that relevant to the topic of stallman.

I'm well aware of the problems people like antirez face from others who deem themselves the moral/language internet police, and it is definitely an ongoing problem, but none of this is limited to the tech community, and I'm not really convinced that situations like those are sufficiently comparable to what we see with Stallman here.

Using the term SJW alone destroys the credibility of any substantial claim using it. If you really want to persuade people, find a term that isn’t mainly employed as incendiary jargon of far-right ideology to categorically dismiss anyone left of their viewpoint.

Quantum bridge: its in a superposition of open and closed and will collapse to one of those states when you try to cross. Also its made out of glass and runs on the block chain.

Comically absent in this description of ML which includes hard technology like NLP and actual use cases like self-driving cars is the elephant in the room of advertising and surveillance. It's just like Andrew Ng's machine learning course on Coursera - lists all these uses of machine learning....except mining user information for advertising and other purposes. If anything, it's buried under "image recognition" and "recommender systems". And yet it's what brings in the dough. Pretty telling that the overwhelming majority of this technology's current application is too unpalatable to acknowledge.