739 karma · joined November 9, 2013
> Concrete's aesthetic really depends on it being clean and crack-free.
... unless you're into the aesthetic of crumbling urban decay? I mean I should know better than to pick pointless fights on the internet, but you kinda teed it up
A specific recurring example: My team works on CLI tools. CLI tools are not web servers, but may need to make network calls and so consume networking libraries. We have a steady trickle of server-side CVEs to triage, and some of them we need to apply the patch just for the sake of someone else's compliance/policy.
Solutions include: - make libraries more granular (e.g. a client-only library which is consumed by the client/server library); - make scanning tools 'smarter' - (e.g. there's some efforts in golang around a scanning tool that only detects vulns in code it can tell is reachable from static analysis) - e.g. I wish i could declare to a scanner "you are scanning a CLI that does not and cannot start a persistent webserver" -- there _might_ be room in the industry for a concept like SBOM but for behaviors - SBOB? - a consulting firm selling the fortune 500 type co.s on a more nuanced CVE stance?
Unfortunately I don't think there's any money to be made solving this problem, and in general the incentives of CVE scanners are misaligned, much like how anti-virus software thrives when it tells you how many viruses it just blocked....
I'm not personally aware of signing something that says "I'll keep all internal details private" though I agree I'd be highly unlikely to refer to anyone below the SVP level by name -- but I think that's exactly what OP did?
This is very true. However I still think among people I knew, wealth counts for more.
For example when I was in grad school one of the professors in our department liked to proudly remark that he was proof that you could have a viable career even if you change your field substantially in a second post-doc. Eventually I heard someone else explain it as, "Well, if your parents make a large donation to the lab then the PI will accept you as a free (no cost to the lab) post-doc and train you." In contrast, people I knew from academic families but with relatively middle-class financial means still got railroaded / pigeonholed into the areas where they specialized, even though they were much better at navigating academia than I was.
I know, the above is just anecdotes. How could we resolve it? I dunno, run a study? But as you say wealth is much easier to measure than culture, so we may be stuck with our respective perspectives for a while...
So I checked just now, and my hello world for go was 1.9M. And you're well within your rights to just declare "the fact that go is even worse doesn't make Janet good" but let's be honest - plenty of people have accepted go's compromises, so something coming in at better than half the size is relatively much better.
edit: out of curiosity i used gcc to make hello worlds in C and C++, which came in at 32k and 37k respectively.
I think the economics prize was a group of people with ties to money and power trying to add weight and credence to theories that would support their continued access to money and power.
Neither is flawless but one is much more ... noble?... than the other.
or maybe put it this way: the big-ball-of-mud formed by metaprogramming tricks feels like it has boundaries that are permeable in a particularly arcane way, whereas the big ball of mud formed by microservices has boundaries that are permeable "merely" by distributing or spanning of both humans and logic.
IMO one of the challenges I've never personally seen solved well is how to truly share the fruits of success with all the people who were necessary for it to happen. In this example it's of course not clear how much of a team there is, but I'm sure any non-founder employees are also working below market and would love for their wages to increase as revenue grows and the product matures.
I'll share that I've been slowly turning into a buddhist, which is not the religion I was born into. I think there's a few things in common, including a sort of universal love and a perspective that could be phrased "it's not about me", but that there's something bigger/higher/more-powerful going on and my specific life experience isn't the most important thing in the universe. Those two things - love, and humility (maybe that's the best single word?) go a long way towards reducing inter-personal frictions large and small.
I hear you on the compilers, and I do miss them at least a little whenever I don't have them. But my goodness, there's really something fun in Ruby. I think it shines in smaller codebases, situations where you can have some hope of understanding 90% of everything that's going on as a single developer (and honestly part of the sales pitch of microservices is that you know there's no funny business crossing the wire, so you only need to know the magic bits of the services you work in). But there's really so much joy in stringing together a few functions in a single line, knowing that there might be a few different types being passed around depending on context but knowing that all the functions can handle all the types, and not pausing after every line to check whether an err was nil... Honestly when I have a compiler i miss the magic, and when I have the magic I miss the compiler.
I had slightly complicated taxes that year and actually called them and spoke to someone who helped narrow down the number of forms I needed to dig up and submit to just a single form from one employer, and confirmed that it was due to the above withholding anomaly. I sent that form and a couple months later they sent me a letter indicating that my original number was basically correct. for some reason they preferred a number that was lower by a few dollars and I really didn't care, so I happily cashed the refund check (which was for several $k (IIRC between $5-10k, which i did care about).
The next year I had to file an extra form - apparently FTB had held my refund for long enough that when they sent it back to me they also paid me interest on my refund, and I had to file for taxes on that interest...
I'm pretty sympathetic to the argument that these drawings should be extremely inexpensive ($1?) and there should be some transparancy where the fee goes.
Also not mentioned in the article - I'm most familiar with how Yosemite and the parks in the sierras do it, but in those parks for popular trails there's a 6-month-in-advance lottery system, but there's also something like 10% of the quota reserved for 1-day-in-advance walk-up tickets only. So you either have to win a lottery that favors the preppy planners, OR be willing to wake up in the middle of the night and stand outside a park office for a few hours until they open. Not perfect, but it gives some options.
- a windows 2000 laptop that I only stopped using (a while) after win2k stopped getting security updates, and the linux i put on it didn't work very well.
- a flip phone that was gloriously good at doing the only two things it knew how to do (calls and sms) that I had to stop using because it literally stopped having compatible towers to talk to.
- a 2013 macbook with a keyboard that still works, but it can't get the latest OS updates anymore, much like OP's XP machine.
I feel like there's a willful blindness -- it's very profitable for companies to keep everyone upgrading all the time, but it creates a lot of trash and there's really no need. There's a huge swath of the population who doesn't mind having 20 year old appliances or cars, and who views their digital tools as just another appliance to be replaced as infrequently as possible.
Those of us in tech need to consider the moral prerogative of slowing the trash cycle and the frugality enabled by letting things work for decades. And to stop pretending there isn't a user base out there who will insist on using things for decades even if we tell them it's not advisable.
One other thing about whatever you want to call the contemporary continuation of classical music - you're right that there's often a lot going on. I've heard it described as "fragile" music: in contrast to pop songs that still work if you're on a train, if they're interrupted by an announcement, if you only listen to the second half, etc., a lot of this music is written to be listened to by someone who is relatively calm and undistracted, in a quiet environment. And honestly some of it has additional expectations of its audience, like a better than average ability to remember melodic snippets and recognize their transformations, or an ability to track "advanced" harmonies and key changes. But imo the general rule "90% of everything is crap" applies in this genre as well, and most of the pieces that everyone will speak of in glowing terms have a way of 'working' for most listeners without demanding advanced education, study, or above average musical-listening abilities.
honestly, I don't know who to believe about anything anymore, but luckily this particular controversy is pretty low-stakes relative to a number of other current topics.
I guess the article does say: > Note that these words only represent the list Wordle uses for possible solutions; there are many more guessable 5-letter words.
there's been other threads on this site where people talk alot about how much they learned in either or both their compilers or operating systems course. This rings true for me -- the value of my first few semesters of CS was that it prepared me fully to tackle a short list of really helpful courses. Honestly finishing the major wasn't all that much more helpful (in terms of what I learned), but the degree itself has worked out fine.
One last thing, but for me there was a sort of retrospective signal -- I did have a second major and other areas of study, but eventually I realized that I had always saved my computer science homework for last because i found it the most fun, and gosh, maybe that was a hint of where to build my career. So to make it more general, the other "use" of a bunch of mediocre CS coursework is that you can gauge your own interest level. We're all built differently, but honestly taking a wide variety of courses to learn what you're interested in while in your late teens / early 20s isn't such a terrible thing (if you can do it without too much debt).
For ~6 years my wife and I lived in Santa Barbara without owning a car. We'd occasionally rent one to get out of town - there were a couple times I left my bike locked up at the airport for a long weekend.
I used to fantasize about making a documentary called "the disappearing bike" where you would video somebody cycling around town but every time the bike lane disappeared and then reappeared a quarter mile later, you'd show them just gliding across the street without their bicycle.
Even in SB, which has a much more chill attitude on the roads than anything south of Thousand Oaks (as you head into the LA metro area), some drivers would be bizarrely unsympathetic to the fact that you were traversing a short strip with no bike line in order to connect two bike lanes, with reactions ranging from honking, yelling, revving the engine to loudly pass, "buzzing" you by passing much too close, ... but I think it generally follows that rule that most of us are kind and some small constant percentage (5? 10%?) of the world is jerks.
most of us get raised for about two decades, right? I mean acknowledging that 240 months is at least 2 months in the most literal sense but even if we think that it's reasonable for the mother of a 2-month old infant to be working full time surely there's still almost 2 full decades of potential precarity around food, housing, healthcare, general wellness...