morelish

Good read. I’ve used chocolatey a lot plus a lot of other Microsoft installation tools. Windows has been crying out for a decent package manager for years. It’s amazing how little of a sh*t Microsoft seemed to give about stuff that open-source systems provide as a first class citizen.

As they care next-to-zero about decent tooling, it’s no surprise they care even less about independent developers like Keivan.

I’m pretty sure Windows is going to turn into a Linux kernel with a Windows API translation layer and specialised UI system for ordinary Joes.

I think it’s probably a lot more efficient that way and Microsoft has already lost the kernel battle to Linux. With the shift to the cloud, I assume Azure will become Microsoft’s dominant revenue stream, with Office second and Windows third.

At least that my guess.

Guess that’s the thing. When it shows up in your search result, we do expect it to be ready to read without paying for it. This is partly Google’s fault for not making it easier to exclude paywalled content. Would paywalled content-providers like Google implementing that feature? I doubt it. But also we can use something like 12ft.io.

Every time Nuclear comes up (rational) people complain of two things: 1) cost, and; 2) safety.

I think the cost argument is really an irrelevance. The electricity grid is probably the most important engineering system ever developed. Everything really relies on the electricity grid. Without it, we'd do so much less. (Think about everything that depends on it. Is anything else so significant?) For example, the National Academy of Engineering considers the grid the greatest engineering achievement since 1900. See https://www.nae.edu/19579/19582/21020/7326/7461/GreatAchieve...

In that regard, producing a stable electricity supply should be considered nearly the most cost-effective investment we can make. Arguing that nuclear is more costly than other forms is just arguing about a few pennies in the dollar. The dollar is the benefit we get from electrification. The pennies are the 'extra' cost of nuclear. (Tbh, I don't think nuclear is more costly. I think we can just _calculate_ the cost of nuclear better than alternatives. What's the cost of fossil fuels when you add in the external climate change impact? Who knows? What's the cost of renewables when you consider they don't always produce power/might not be able to meet demand/need significant grid reconstruction to work? Who knows?)

Regarding safety. This will always be a big consideration. But how safe is the world if the climate warms? I'd say not very. From what I've seen on nuclear engineering, it seems nowadays westerners really do understand how to run the nuclear plants safely. I don't believe there has been a really bad accident in the West. (5 Mile Island came close but was controlled. Fukushima was operator error compounded by cultural issues associated with Japanese management.) There will always be some risk of an accident. But, from what I've seen, actually it's pretty safe. The accidents I've heard of, can be explained as poor operation choices.

I think what really gets people in the energy debate is they are hoping for 'perfect' solutions which have no downsides. Unfortunately, there isn't one available right now.

The other thing that gets people is they consider choosing nuclear to be more risky than not choosing nuclear because they feel they know nuclear is dangerous. Whereas, from what I can see, _not_ choosing nuclear is a lot more dangerous than choosing nuclear. If we are to believe the climate change warnings, it seems that danger is much much greater than anything nuclear poses.

TLDR nuclear is risky but that risk is a lot less than climate change or bad electricity supplies. People weight nuclear risk too heavily because we understand it more and people perceive nuclear as dangerous to their person. They fail to properly account for risks they cannot easily perceive that are associated with the alternatives.

Go France!

Personally I’m happier to use wireguard to access my network. I don’t know when I’d ever want a pure SSH tunnelling solution.

Cheers, I'll have a look at that.

How do you mean?

Think the idea is a good one. As S3 becomes standard, it would be nice if someone could rip amazon's face-off (like amazon have done for other open-source companies, e.g. elastic).

Really? Gawker published intimate photos of someone without their permission. What Gawker did was very wrong. I don't get why people defend Gawker.

My 2 cents, not that it's important, is that Facebook killed it's own product by A/B testing for user engagement. The product went from a cool place to see what your friends were up (bit like insta was for a while), to this sh*thole place filled with junk viral videos, adds, whacky content from a few insane friends, etc. It became like a cheap social porn dumping ground.

I really just want to see what my friends are up to. I don't want to feel that the posts I get are heavily filtered by algorithms or that 'unpopular' opinions are hidden or whatever.

The original Facebook product back in 2008-2010 was really good. If anything, I think Facebook shows how important is it to develop a product vision that is more than just 'clickbait+++' which is basically Facebook's strategy. [Around 2010, I imagine a bunch of overly nerdy socially maladjusted 20-something programmers sitting around Fakebook HQ describing to robotic-Mark how an excel-driven click-bait approach can make Fakebook way more popular than ever. "Look popularity with maths".]

Now the only thing I really use it for is business pages. [I don't even know why Google don't have a slightly better business-page experience on their maps.]

Zuckerberg, I think is a bit of a genius, but seems to lack much capacity or instinct to display technological 'taste'. That rare thing Steve Jobs valued and talked about. It's why Apple is and remains cool and why it's able to handle PR better. Apple are just much more sophisticated at controlling people's perception around the appeal of the brand. Apple provide a 'luxury' brand experience to 50% of the (developed) world. Facebook's brand is so toxic it decided to change it's name to Meta. [Note, timing the change to Meta not long before the growth slows a lot. I'm surprised Facebook was really even growing much. Well I heard most growth has come from outside the developed economies and it's a waste ground among the young in the West.]

Zuckerberg - from afar - looks like a robotic alien trying to work out the grandest legal pump and dump scheme he can pull off. I do salute him because he's so successful and I still think he'll work out how to make Meta's transition. He's got lots of cards to play in his hand and he seems pretty good at business poker. So, I also congratulate him.

Oh, I actually totally disagree with the original commenter's statement "The cold war didn't go hot because we were lucky, not because MAD changed the basic dynamics of total war." Erm. No. MAD definitely did change the basic dynamics.

I don't know about the demographic claim but definitely the French could not imagine _fighting_ another war and so their preparations were poor. They built the Maginot Line as a way of avoiding having to fight again. And I believe the political culture in the country and army all rotated around the idea that they never wanted to fight Germany again. This also extended to the Treat of Versailles were they tried to cripple Germany's ability to raise an army again. I don't know about the demographic claim, but he is sort of right that WW1 wrecked Frances fighting spirit.

For REST api design I've always kind of been pissed that GET doesn't come with a body. (Yeah I know you can do it anyway.) Just because encoding complicated parameters into the URL is pretty sucky at times.

I suppose a QUERY would really solve the problem. Maybe it's the best compromise.

My interpretation is that REST is such a complicated definition that no-one bothers to understand it. It's just too complicated (insert reference to Fielding dissertation). At least, whatever Fielding wrote, terms and languages are too esoteric for people including me to bother with it.

REST is now in practice an API using JSON over HTTP with appropriate verbs. And it's 'stateless' in that the server doesn't have to track the clients prior requests to understand the current request. That's about it I think....

Does anyone think that's stupid?

The same advice applies for university exams. (Note, particularly in essay based subjects.) Don't provide against the grain answers no matter how smart or well thought through. Your university professor wants to hear how clever he/she is and wants you to write opinions that agree with their point of view. It's the best way to get marks. Just copy the party line. I was told this by a very clever university professor. It still makes me smile lol

Haha that PS note is great. "Not only did we abuse you, we're going to tell everyone you loved us"

Interesting. Thanks for pointing me to Watermelon. I'll take a look.

This looks very good. Especially avoiding lots of repetitive backend code. Anyone know if Supabase can manage something like firebases offline data capabilities? E.g. https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/manage-data/enabl...

I'm pretty tempted by this stack for business applications that really are mainly storing stuff in a database.

I have found HomePod (mini) to be not great. Doesn't work well with third party services like Spotify or radio providers, so it's content is limited. There's also a very large lag (5 seconds ish) for the sound to stream from my phone or Mac to the HomePod. Pausing or starting sound is delayed by 5 seconds (ish). The lag is so large you cannot really use the HomePod as a speaker attached to a Mac, if you watch a video, the sound comes in 5 seconds delayed. Bit of a pity. Hopefully the next versions will improve the lag. Even providing physical audio cable input would be good. As the speaker itself is fairly nice.

Yeah I did wonder that. Dunno how far Dolphins echo location is effective from. But presumably it's further than most people probably can see underwater. Especially if the water is murky or dark. It could allow the dolphin to detect the diver beyond the perception of the diver. Then presumably the dolphin is trained to rush the diver and 'bump'/smash into the diver before he has time to react or even see the dolphin.

Still does all sound fairly risky for the dolphin. Think I'd still rather be the dolphin given it's much better suited to water than humans and probably has the perception advantage with echo location.

Ah I see, it was the website user SuperAdmin the hacker got into. Cheers.

I wonder how the hacker got network access to the database? I couldn't work out from what I read. It said the DB had a weak superuser password. But it didn't say how the hacker managed to make network calls to the DB. Presumably there was some initial entry point to get inside the network? It sounds like maybe the web-application user verification was poor and the app allowed admin users to make arbitrary DB calls?

Sure. Yeah, I apologise if I was aggressive. I agree with you that yeah profit maximising has no necessary relationship to the happiness of workers. But, I was surprised when I read Ford's biography that a lot of (aggressive) practices I thought 'hey this is just bosses being bosses', actually might be poor management.

Re, VC money creating a rat-race, I think you're probably right.

Though I think there must remain a slice of the market that's not determined by the rat race. But it could well be the slice of the market that VCs aren't interested in funding because it's not big or fast enough. I guess I would cite something like Linux as an example. It's not really a start-up but by not being fuelled by money, and being open-source, it was able to under-cut and out-compete Microsoft and a bunch of other OSs in the hobbyists -> server -> mobile. But I suppose it became a platform that a bunch of other businesses like Redhat and Android were able to launch off.

But yeah I guess the general trend is profit invites competition, and competition is amoral.

Read Henry Ford's autobiography. You'd think he'd agree with you. He'd want to overwork his employees to produce more cars. But, actually, he was much more of a perfectionist around all the things that go into producing things efficiently. And over-working employees certainly wasn't efficient, partly because turn over is high and also work place injuries go up. (For example, he introduce a 40 hour working week https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/01/24/henry-ford/.)

There is certainly a culture of over-working employees in some businesses. But is it really a _universal_ rule of capitalism that overworking people is profitable? Look at Germany. Highly productive economy, very strong labour laws and no (/limited) culture of overworking.

Have you not missed the 'meta' the article is talking about: that it's an Americanism to think that more hours == more product.

"Image 'slow productivity' in a startup" - what? How long did it take the inventor of bluetooth to invent bluetooth? How long did it take scientists to develop the internet? How long did it take the people to develop computers and electronics? People talk about "fast" productivity in start-ups because there's money involved and investors are greedy and no-one wants anything slowly. But, you know what, plenty of good products take 10 years to make or more. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/21/good-software-take...

Successful businesses aren't merely defined by being profit maximising. It's fine to create a good business slowly that has a positive net impact on society. That's in some ways better than a business that abuses everyone to make a small circle rich.

If you judge the success of a business merely by it's profitability, you're a fool. There's more to life than profit.

"I can't help but think he's missing the meta we're all playing within: profit is the motive (not human flourishing)." No, we are not all playing within that 'meta'. We reject that. Playing purely for profit is often sick and deranged. Get a life. Experience something more meaningful than just profit. Reject those procrustean views.

Yes, we all need to make enough to get by, and that means making some profit. But no, we don't have to define or constrain ourselves to being trapped in a pure-profit game. That's for the foolish.

Congratulations!

Any ideas which ones are the best? I would quite like to use a good open-source api, am happy to pay for my own compute. (I've just used googles before because it was handy. But I wouldn't use it the way telegram have done.)

Quite a lot of libraries exist to do this. But doing this in an app with a large user base looks offensive. Solution would be for some decent open source translation APIs to appear.

What? How will blocking giphy in the UK help?

From the regulator “ Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy would reduce competition between social media platforms and that the deal has already removed Giphy as a potential challenger in the display advertising market”

So the finding is Facebook has too much control in the market. Blocking giphy just shows how much control they would have if the acquisition is completed. If anything, blocking giphy makes it worse.

Will this pan out well for the regulator? Who knows, who cares. But it shows if your business gets a bad reputation like Meta has, you’ll find regulators starting to kick you about.

I’ve wanted to try Ada and Spark for a while mainly to try formal verification and because a professor I listened to for a while keep banging on that most bugs don’t need to be written if you use Ada properly. (Shrug.) Who knows, I’d like to try it sometime.