pnathan

Tried vs code recently, remembering old vs.

Yeah not even in the same room of competence imo. Just a cranked up notepad++ in electron and with add-ons imo.

This is a good resource.

A core of the matter here is that good software development is heavily involved with _wisdom_, and in some sense, wisdom can not be stated badly, but must be oblique.

The basic problem is you're wrong and also right: it all depends.

That is widely understood as the senior+ swe mantra.

The SWEBOK, on the contrary, asserts "it does not depend" and that in a sense is the core problem.

For a detailed takedown, the ACM's is the most famous, there are others that v3 sparked. I'm sure v4 is sparking it's own detailed analysis ... I'm bowing out to go do my day job now. :)

I'm more than happy to sign onto a reasonable certification. Many good reasons for it. I am, personally, fond of the idea that an ABET certified BSCS should be ground floor level. Other ideas have been floated...

But this particular work is really, really, really awful. For reasons that are well documented.

In the most fundamental sense, the IEEE doesn't understand what professional SWEs need, in appropriate portions. It confuses SWE with PM, badly. And it has done so, historically. To the point of wide condemnation.

The Master might say something like this, if translated crudely -

Software engineering is programming professionally, with a dialogue on quality. Everything else is details.

The IEEE has been riding this horse for a very long time, in the face of very serious criticism (see the ACMs comments from a quarter century ago).

The presentation of it is _not even wrong_. It reads like a mid level manager at a very old enterprise firm wrote out what important at their firm, and took no material care for other ways. The SWEBOK has been that way for as long as I can remember ( an aside: my experience of Software Engineering academia has been so deeply negative to the point I wrote the field off in 2013. Decoupled from reality, PM oriented, toy studies- irrelevant. The SWEBOK is an artifact of that world. I should dip back in... Maybe Google & MS Research have done the real work here...)

There's a body of _practice_ that is mildly incidental. Most acronyms are fads. Lots of ephemeral technologies that only exist as painful grimaces. IE- CORBA- SOAP, etc...

Project management and quality management are also essentially contingent. One company does this. One that. Waterfall here. Agile there. Whirlpool the other.

What you're left with as non contingent and timeless is in the area of compilers, algorithms, etc. Which is not SWE at all.

If I were to write a swe body of knowledge, it would be in koan form, more than likely.

Swebok is an attempt to look at the whole ox

Cook Ding was cutting up an ox for Lord Wenhui. As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Jingshou music.

“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wenhui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”

Cook Ding laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.

“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”

“Excellent!” said Lord Wenhui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ding and learned how to care for life!”

Being a music teacher is a well-established play that winds up being a reasonable money maker. It's not super lucrative but it is understood and legible.

I mean I don't disagree. But this is a bazaar problem and a rebundling problem.

I have used Debanoids for decades and they just work. It's very nice.

Gentol works very nice too. I usually whack systemD and enjoy.

I do want to get a Fedora system going but eh. Just work is nice.

I've done that; I set it up so that the table was the record stream, then a materialized view with the current state would be refreshed asynchronously when an insert happened. Fast as lightning. Wouldn't do it by default for everything tho.

So, my hot take on this is that it's an advanced GUI for AWS with change management built in.

1. Is that a good summary? 2. Why would I pick this?

I know you LOVE it, it's your baby. But why should I love it? :-)

> People write well about what they know.

Its my long standing observation that people with a varied and interesting life history make the best fiction authors, rather than those who loved books and went straight into writing fiction.

which probably is the problem.

the seattle freeze is real. also a lot of people dipped out for other parts of the country.

let's rewrite to "no living human encountering the text" and we find that, e.g., we can delve deeply into early 1800s texts, worldviews, and experiences and produce something shocking and strange to encounter.

there's a whole light genre of cracked-esque material "10 things you had no idea about from back when" that exists, just dial that up to 11. Get _deep_, and you will put the player / reader into someplace most will never have dreamed of. ( https://writerthereseoneill.com/ makes a specialty of doing pop history in that genre - I recommend her books)

imo when you dig hard enough into a very different human society, you start getting into the heavy questions of "what makes us human", and that is _interesting_.

I know what you mean.

There's a huge retrojection problem going in a lot of fantasy right now.

I really wish authors would write books that authentically described an alien society, rather than wish casting "vague liberal fantasy with different clothes"(usually liberal, but libertarian authors do it too, same problem, different lumps under the clothes).

Now, I wonder: would that sell? I dunno.

But I might scream the next time I read or see an "other" society dumping duty for individualism as per European upper crust romanticism. Again.

Look up the Seattle Rust meetup. Its still around.

The whole Seattle scene imploded in 2020.

> But, what's the alternative?

Ban YouTube. Have only 1 movie/TV night.

Mandate books as primary entertainment.

Stock the home library with classic tales of heroism and adventure. Own an encyclopedia set.

Reject the brainshinker system and look to works of more enduring worth.

Videos should be thoughtful. If that's not possible in the family dynamic, shut it down.

Curious, does rsyslog support metrics or traces? My impression has always been it's log lines.

Fwiw I run more than 'a' site. EBS is great for 'a' site. Last I checked, it had serious cost consequences past the one site.

But yeah, if I only wanted a thing, Ebs works.

I have done mimir deployments. I am generally very happy with mimir. It's very cost efficient. It does require someone to know enough to admin it though.

I didn't pick thanos because I really like the horizonal scaled blob store architecture the Grafana crew put together.

You can't separate tech from the rest of the world.

Millennials grew up. And we found that it cost a crap ton of money to just survive, let along thrive. Student loans were the first bodyslam, then figuring out owning a place to live. A ton of precarity is out there.

No kidding people get locked in on economic incentives.

yeah, I know, that's the only reason I'm even thinking of using it. but tbqh I don't really install many things, as you can see...

if you take the time to understand k8s and have a straightforward k8s deployment, these things aren't really a problem - and you don't have to do the custom sysadmin timesinks that need to go into the "simple" suggestion. What is suggested here is "easy". But it is not simple: it proliferates custom work.

I have had great success with a very simple kube deployment:

- GKE (EKS works well but requires adding an autoscaler tool)

- Grafana + Loki + Prometheus for logs + metrics

- cert-manager for SSL

- nginx-ingress for routing

- external-dns for autosetup DNS

I manage these with helm. I might, one day, get around to using the Prometheus Operator thing, but it doesn't seem to do anything for me except add a layer of hassle.

New deployments of my software roll out nicely. If I need to scale, cut a branch for testing, I roll into a new namespace easily, with TLS autosetup, DNS autosetup, logging to GCP bucket... no problem.

I've done the "roll out an easy node and run" thing before, and I regret it, badly, because the back half of the project was wrangling all these stupid little operational things that are a helm install away on k8s.

So if you're doing a startup: roll out a nice simple k8s deployment, don't muck it up with controllers, operators, service meshes, auto cicds, gitops, etc. *KISS*.

If you're trying to spin a number of small products: just use the same cluster with different DNS.

(note: if this seems particularly appealing to you, reach out, I'm happy to talk. This is a very straightforward toolset that has lasted me years and years, and I don't anticipate having to change it much for a while)

I don't see any peer reviews of quint's work on their site or GitHub. Am I missing them?

I was looking at TLA a few months ago to consider what it would take to prove multiregion fail over worked correctly. Considering I'd never looked at it before.

I did not find it straight forwardly grokkable, which makes me sad. Maybe it needs a library of axioms? I feel there's probably a very nice way to work through it without ingesting effectively a graduate school course in proving software.

It really is just math and proofs, it shouldn't be so hard... to start.

Well, that's my take. Could be wrong. Might just need to hit the books.

Anthropic and other models are roughly par with OpenAI.

I would value each of those companies' practical revenue potential as equal for now.

The operating costs themselves are eye watering, and the hardware is deprecating. So that has to be subtracted from revenue projections to get something like a real valuation.

I would invest in anthropic today, they seem to understand use cases better at the moment.

I also think LLMs are wildly over hyped, and they will be shunted to a niche in the next few years, essentially providing autocomplete or search for business tasks for the most part, with strong inroads on video analysis, automated translation, and other classic machine learning & neural net tasks.

Interesting.

I really invested heavily into the Alexa system. It is super cool and futureistic! I have dots, the wallplug, echo show, studio, etc.

I just wish Amazon had invested in the usability of it more!

Yeah, I missed that bit.

I use the Philips Hue system, and it works super reliably. But the Amazon integration is... getting iffier with that. No idea why. But yeah, voice controlled lights are nice.

I found that it only recognizes something like 30-50% of the bands/songs/composers I like.

really aggravating.

and last I checked, there was supported web ui or cli to play music from my other devices outside of the (horribly slow) Alexa app.

IT COULD BE SO MUCH BETTER.

Alexa is a wonderful idea in search of a serious use case.

It does timers, tells the weather, and, uh, shouts at me from Ring when someone is at the door.

Handy when cooking and I don't want to touch something.

The voice recognition is iffy, the misunderstanding is constant, the vocal command line is painful. The plugins don't work seamlessly at all.

But it's a good timer.

I relate to them really well too!