pnathan

My take is that acted video on demand is ripe for collapsing into a few services.

The next big streaming target is sports. That will, in my opinion, be the determinant of the streaming success in the next decade.

> Maybe it'll pick up again in a decade or so when I'm not getting summoned to wipe a kid's butt or screamed at because I used the wrong cup or plate but it doesn't really feel like

when it's this time of life, this part really sucks.

I do mean debuggers in embedded systems, but slightly above the JTAG level.

Think something like an Arduino.

I would be 100% shocked to learn that there are no quiet and private search engines for Fediverse covering the vast majority of posts.

I would also expect, given increasing mainstreaming of Mastodon and the well known discovery issues, a commercial Fediverse search engine to go live in the next year, and to do well, despite the community pushback.

FWIW, I futzed with Upwork years ago. It became super clear that it wasn't where I could sell my skills (deep backend, sre) effectively and come out with outcomes good for me and the client.

I do FTE work but occasionally dream of the side income (less so these days ha). :)

Yes, I mentioned gdb's reversible debugging capability late in my comment. :)

My experience was that C++/Java debuggers beat interpreted language debuggers shockingly well. So much so I still don't touch interpreted language debuggers today. I should check in sometime on Python soon.

Debug code has to, essentially, include debug symbols and tracking, or, alternatively, there's that supervisor monitoring all source-code relevant locations. Things will be slower ... on a conventional x86 chip.

I would suggest that its plausible today that a separate _core_ could be developed for internal system monitoring (think on-SoC JTAG and you get the idea) and that core could be dedicated to more OS functionality otherwise. Notice that this involves a different ISA.

The core tooling advancement problem I believe reduces to this:

> because a little bit of state and system’s understanding proves sufficient most of the time

After a decade being an industry professional, I would say most is 99.5% or greater. 5 out of 1000 bugs seems about right.

So the genuinely advanced tools only start to come into play in very difficult situations - with the implication that only groups with difficult situations will _pay_ for the advanced tooling - with the implication that there's virtually no commercial market, and open source developers have to do this on their own time. Which in turn seems to be generally decreasing IMO - I believe the problem is approximately (say, 90% of the way) isomorphic to "cost of housing market" discussions essentially (how do I spend 1-2 years being someone who can understand graduate-level CS/SWE papers and write high quality code, and then write this state-of-the-art tool that no one will pay for, and still have housing, food, make debt payments etc).

Polyglot environments have to have an element of a debuggable protocol baked in at a pretty deep level to really make it work at, say, the level of Visual Studio in 1999 or something. There's all sorts of issues there around non-aligned interests that shouldn't need to exist. For example, a simple polyglot problem is "how do I send structured data from one process to another in a standardized way". The standard Unix way is "line structured", which works until it doesn't, and then you're staring at writing your own marshal/unmarshal system, which is, definitionally, only your standard. If we don't have _that_ solved, then the social pressure to have a interop debugger between, e.g., Python and Ruby is ... well, take your own guess there.

I think there's absolutely space for a hardware-software codesign to occur which builds out a hardware system, a compiler qua LLVM, a standardized interpreter layer, interop protocols, etc, and to produce a developer system that is a quantum leap beyond what we have today. But that would be a decade long project and have a very long term payoff.

the tl;dr then, imo, is that profound advancement in the field only directly benefits a few, and then only sometimes; so the incentive problem is the basic issue.

In general, our debugging tools today are just terrifyingly crude. Some improvements have been made since my thesis in the industry state but overall... yuck.

To get us to the state of the art debugging research in the 90s:

- FOL scripting trap on every variable, function, etc. essentially you need this "monitor" or supervisor behind the scenes observing the total state of the system _as it exists in source code, not in hex_. - reversible programs that can go forward and backward in program state & history. Not sure if the 90s research had a full "tree" of possible executions you could walk or if it was linear. - if you attach something like a Lamport state matrix with the a transport layer you can move to a parallel/concurrent debugger

OTel and friends are essentially trying to build points 2 and 3 there, but its very mushy, since you're not actually capturing a full system state as part of the system, but whatever the coders chose to put in the system capture.

I remember in 2012, 2013 or so, Green River came out with a single core reversible debugger. gdb had one too in '09, or so.

Some cool information in an old SO thread: https://stackoverflow.com/q/1470434/26227

yes he did. the level of effort a good video makes is off the charts. and then you're rolling the dice of luck/marketing.

I noticed the same thing when doing my Master's (graduated 2012, work in embedded debuggers), for which I read a heck of a lot of early papers, both the better and the worse (Sturgeon's Law is very real). My SWAG is that a lot of early CS papers were being written by people doing very serious programming; they often did a few years in industry (or they were doing very focused Physics coding) before coming back for the PhD. Too, they were not worried about working within the dominant operating system framework - such things didn't quite exist. So they could give things a fresh go by the simple virtue of starting out on a new computer.

I think the straight BS->PhD pipeline has introduced an "academic" bias, in the bad sense of the word. I also think that the dominance of Linux, Windows, etc have put blinkers on our research.

In any case, you can trace the evolution I describe in the journal https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1097024x which has been around for decades.

Some people love video the medium.

I tried doing a video of myself talking off the cuff on a topic. Watching myself, it was painful. I obviously needed to write myself a script, do editing, etc. I would rather just write the text, and skip the video bit. :)

BEC is one of the best YouTube channels. Not per se because of the legos, but in how the videos assess and iterate. Also, as another HN commentator pointed out, its not "baity", (s?)he doesn't do any of the stupid BS to hype him(her?)self.

Yes, I'm in the target audience: middle age male in US.

I think this is the perfect example of a niche area with an whale/long-tail distribution. It demonstrates the futility - to me - of doing any serious "YouTubing" as a professional plan - its something you have to strike luck and then build on.

long tail bikes fit 2-3 kids.

its easier when it's an E-bike. But they were geared for and used before the electric assist became popular.

Yes, that's an interesting choice. I remember when trikes were pulled in the late 80s- very risky. Two wheels up front made a return in the last decade.

I'm going to be following this. I think a Trike will be enormously popular because of the stability, but it has to be stable. Rad tends to design for low cost... I hope this wasn't a terrible choice.....

The holidays are rolling in the US, too, so I expect that getting scheduled for interviews is going to be pure grief until Jan.

I strongly concur that this is a thing. Toxic and senior engineer - particularly in the SRE/sysadmin space - almost were synonymous. Also saw it in QA some.

It's so much better to not do this.

months and months ago. Thanks for the heads up. I'll look into that.

reddit mod management is a bit haywire. I am mod at a rather largish subreddit (> 750K subs/readers), and despite the top mod being gone from the subreddit for something like 6? years now and virtually inactive on reddit, I can't get him removed. I've gone through channels but, sigh.

That's a good breakdown of the second age.

I would concur with the article's assessment that the Galadriel character is not true to the world.

> . The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending.

I confess, I rather prefer that approach. Really don't like anti-heros and villains as protagonists.

In my teens, I had public school friends who succeeded, some who failed. Some who abused the system. The textbooks were lousy as a rule, stuffed with low-entropy material and images. Teachers varied, wildly. Some bad. Some good.

What I learned then and over time is the difference parents make for someone who cares. Looking back, that was a critical difference why my family had great academic success and other families - same homeschool group, my friends - struggled. My parents expected academic performance. Not just "doing ok", but "knowing". Some years ago, my dad laughed that they were "Tiger Parents", around the time Dr. Chua's book came out.

I do think that my generation - late 70s - late 80s kids - is reaching an age and life stage where we can reflect on our homeschooling and assess whether it was good or bad, not just looking at the "k-12" time but holistically and how it affected our course of life.

I actually loved _being_ homeschooled, at the time. It's only as I've aged that I've grown more and more negative about it.

anyway, peace.

I'm keenly aware that some public school districts do really badly. E.g., Albequerque PS has 75% of kids under grade level in math - one reason why we didn't move there!

On the policy level, removing the option to legally homeschool without some sort of court order would be my choice to start improving that; to force alignment between wealthy and poor (the wealthy don't get the option to shrug and send their kid to a good charter/private school - they have to work to improve the district). There are other angles around funding that are well known to be problematic.

I don't believe that a million homeschoolers all doing things differently is the right thing for society or for learning interaction. The point I am trying to make is that "dealing with the Public is an important skill that you don't get when its just your little clan"

> apparently net positive outcome for you and your immediate family

My point is I don't think it was net positive. I'd estimate a net negative. I actually think I spent 10 years overcoming serious limits in post-homeschooling areas in social areas. Now, 20 years after I finished homeschool, I don't see any difference in the end between now-peers and myself, even comparing with the homeschool group I was involved in (as I mentioned, I'm on the upper end of "society's success" with that group... most were far less academic than my family).

> I want my children to be honest, thoughtful, compassionate, diligent, respectful, and courageous. These aren't society's values today so I homeschool.

The number of people who have good values who don't homeschool demonstrates that it is not required.

I was homeschooled: k-11. I have a graduate degree. My sibling has a similar path. The academics I received as a homeschooler were, frankly, probably 90th percentile, maybe more. Yet, simply going to a good school district with good teachers and supportive parents would, in all likelihood, have given me similar outcomes. And now, looking back twenty-plus years later, I don't think that it produced a materially different effect than others of my age group. Certainly my family's homeschooling did wonders for our academics; others in the homeschool group variously finished high school or did minor college. Nothing remarkable. Just like the public school kids - some did great, some did ok, some scraped by.

Barring some _exceptionally_ unusual cases - lets say 4th std dev cases, I feel, sharply, that homeschooling is a bad idea.

On a broad social level, it removes expected bodies of knowledge suitable for having a useful society; on an individual level, it leaves them in a bad place for interacting with peers. I also believe that most parents are not qualified to actually supervise modern education past a certain grade level- being a parent is a remarkably easy thing to start doing, after all.

The social interaction is a profound and subtle problem. There's this thing about dealing with the mass of peers that homeschooling doesn't teach - but the work world and other situations require. This is not going to come with homeschooling.

I also note, in passing, that I am assuming that parents are _trying_ to do exceptional education and are not trying to play particularly ideological games. In other words, something roughly analogous to normal schooling goals. However. This assumption does not hold true in much of homeschooling discourse. Much of homeschooling is an explicit religious approach; some of the homeschooling curricula and groups are actually a religious-political project attempting to build political power with an alternative education system outside. So discussions of homeschooling have to address that elephant in the room.

Also in passing, any homeschooling policy worth its salt should ensure that children are simply not being educationally or personally neglected; those cases do exist, unfortunately.

tl;dr: don't homeschool. take it from a former homeschooled kid. send the kid to a good public school, please.

it also fundamentally incorporates "disagree and commit" as an ethos.

there's no need or requirement for consensus for the community to move forward; there's only a need to acknowledge that the community must go one.

I have some half formed thoughts on this.

Once, I lived in a small rural college town (land grant - the U of Idaho). I could walk or bike anywhere I needed to go. Cars were required in practice if leaving the city.

I used to live in outer ring Seattle proper (Roosevelt/Ravenna n'hood junction). It was a drive to the store, but an easy walk to the bus. Buses got me where I needed to go, mostly - if I needed to go to specific zones. Most of the surrounding blocks were SFH, with a business corridor nearby.

Later on, I lived just outside of the 'urban core' of Seattle( Lower Queen Anne ). This was a full mixed use zone. I could walk to daily needs, but busing was frustratingly constrained to specific target areas (Downtown, Capitol Hill) in practice.

In both of the Seattle scenarios, I lived in an apartment building. Neighbors were deeply uninterested in talking to each other, as a rule. While I could get to know some of the baristas, in general, social behavior was limited to organized clubs, not place-based friendships (unlike the usual predictions). This is a known thing about Seattle.

Now I live in a smaller city (Spokane), in a 1900-1920 era neighborhood, and I can walk to my daily needs still. I live here in a SFH. The local culture is much more welcoming than Seattle.

One of the angles that I personally ran into and found frustrating is that apartment buildings _as they are built_ are not set up for families with children. Things from outside decking (painful to fall on) to railings (easy to fall over for climbing kids), lack of adequate play space, etc. LQA in particular was _remarkably_ unfriendly to children, and most families I encountered in the daycare seemed to be on the road to moving out - as I did as well. Part and parcel of increased density thinking - for it to be successful as a long term strategy - has to incorporate design elements that address the full human lifecycle and experience: children are a pretty fundamental part of that, that is _left out_ of much (most?) urban buildouts in the past 1-2 decades.

There are other issues in density - if you hold crime, drug abuse, and homelessness constant per capita, when you have more people per sq mile, you have more social issues per square mile, and _that_ seems to be a problem the United States hasn't solved in its cities at all.

Back when I was working for a company that was heavily into GIS, I wandered one day into map rendering code, trying to render _something or other_, and man, it was an ed-u-cation. Not in "yeah Mercator is not literally true" (this I thought was common knowledge) but also there there are a ton of different projections and ways to deal with said projections.

It's a fascinating niche of computer graphics.

> It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.

what's really bleakly funny is that you're right - that's how it's taken, but that's actually a major _point_ of intersectionality.

https://ciq.co/ | Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer | Full time | Remote (USA)

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CIQ - Ctrl IQ - is building Fuzzball, a "Cloud 2.0" system, designed for the needs of very interesting HPC workloads on multiple clouds. We have a fantastic customer list that I can't talk about (yet?). We are also involved in building and supporting Rocky Linux; we're one of the leaders there. My work is 95% on the Fuzzball side. Part of my work there has involved building the cloud pieces I wish I had had when working with other clouds.

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Tech Stack - Go, Kubernetes, different clouds & on-prem work. Front end in React.

Comp - Market.

Perks - full remote. Medical, dental.

Series A startup ( https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/459489-25 )

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I'm a "Senior Principal Engineer" at CIQ.

Contact me: pnathan@ciq.co if you have any questions about the roles.

That's my take as well. Police have carved a lack of accountability for themselves, and so the social system is starting to route around them.