slipperydippery

When all your examples in actual use are bloated…

I’ve never seen another basic tech used to develop other programs that’s so consistently obvious from its high resource use and slowness, aside from the modern web platform (Chrome, as you put it). It was even more obvious back when we had slower machines, of course, but Java still stands out. It may be able to calculate digits of Pi in a tight loop about as fast as C, but real programs are bloated and slow.

Whatever efficiency may hypothetically be possible with Java, you can in-fact spot a real world Java program in the wild by looking for the thing taking up 10x the memory it seems like it should need… when idle.

Yes yes I’m sure there are exceptions somewhere but I’ve been reading Java fans using benchmarks to try to convince me that I can’t tell which programs on my computer are Java just by looking for the weirdly slow ones, when I in fact very much could, for 25ish years.

Java programs have a feel and it’s “stuttery resource hog”. Whatever may be possible with the platform, that’s the real-world experience.

IDK I have one large Pendleton blanket, a robe, and about ten of their shirts, plus an old ex-army blanket that I suspect they made, and they’re pretty great. All but one of those items (one shirt) is long-fiber wool, so it’s the itchy kind, but 1) it gets a ton less-itchy with time & use (and I don’t mind anymore, regardless), and 2) I wear them as outdoor and work shirts so if they were fine wool or short fiber merino stuff, that’d be no good.

Yeah it’s not Italian super 150 or whatever, but I’m not wearing it in fine clothes, I hike and chop wood and shit wearing this stuff.

I buy wool sweaters from Europe. I don’t know of US equivalents to what I buy, and I doubt they’d be as cheap if I did find them, even with (expensive) shipping from Britain and Nordic countries.

I bought a linen sheet from Lithuania this year. I couldn’t find any in the US that weren’t just similar probably-imported-from-Lithuania-or-Italy foreign ones marked way up, or that didn’t set off my “this is low-quality bullshit sold at a premium” alarms.

I don’t know of a US equivalents to Dent’s Gloves. Not at the same price/quality combo, in those styles.

Raber Garbage Mitts from Canada. Dunno of US equivalents.

Last time I ordered Meermin shoes they shipped from Spain. They have or had some presence in NY too, but Spain’s where they shipped from.

If you want equestrian leather shoes, I dunno of anywhere but places that ship from Spain and Portugal that won’t empty your bank account for them.

Western riding shoes (“cowboy boots”), best bang for your buck by a long shot will probably come straight from Mexico. Or maybe Argentina.

Best bargains in decent hats I know come straight from Canada, the EU/Britain, Mexico, or Australia.

[edit] OK, so then what do I buy that’s made in America? Red Wing boots, Darn Tough socks, Rancourt and Company for loafers and mocs and such, Pendleton wool blankets and shirts (the cloth’s made in the US, anyway, though the sewing’s usually elsewhere) and a bunch of other MIUSA (and some Canadian and Italian) clothes but I only buy them used because I don’t make FAANG or finance tier wages (stuff like Sid Mashburn, made in NYC) so I’m not actually giving those companies money.

They're setting the ACA up to "naturally" fail anyway, so this doesn't matter to them, or is even a step in the right direction.

They kicked out one of its three "legs" (the "individual mandate") so this right-wing heritage foundation promoted healthcare scheme is now guaranteed to face a price death-spiral anyway, unless that changes.

They gave up on repealing it, because it was so popular, and have settled for breaking it in ways that most folks will have trouble figuring out they should blame Republicans for (those chickens won't come home to roost for years, and I guarantee it's only a tiny minority of voters who understood the necessity of the mandate for the whole thing to work, anyway), so eventually it'll be popular to get rid of it.

Our GDP would take a really bad hit if we stopped wasting 10+% of it overpaying for healthcare (a white-collar make-work jobs program—like, god, couldn't we just start up the CCC again? At least they built nice stuff that we're still enjoying... imagine what they could do with 10% or more of GDP!)

I suspect this, plus other ways the US reports sheer waste as GDP to a much higher degree than most peer states, is the main reason folks report the US feeling a lot poorer than second-tier EU countries that on-paper have far lower GDP/capita, even with PPP adjustments. But the fake-healthcare-GDP is probably the single biggest culprit, being absolutely enormous.

Python with a library like Pydantic isn't bad—I wouldn't rate base Python as being near Go's level, at all, though you can get it up to something non-painful with libraries.

Go (and lots of other languages...) wreck it on dependency management and deployment, though. :-/ As the saying goes, "it was easier to invent Docker than fix Python's tooling".

The benefit of the language being small and "normal" idioms mostly followed and the std library being good-enough that people rarely import another dep for something it can handle is that it's by far the easiest language in which to read my dependencies that I've ever used.

If I hit a point where I need to do that in pretty much any other language, I'll cast about for some way to avoid doing it for a while (to include finding a different dependency to replace that one) because it's almost always gonna be a time-suck and may end up yielding nothing useful at all without totally unreasonable amounts of time spent on it, so I may burn time trying and then just have to abandon the effort.

In go, I unhesitatingly hop right in and find what I need fast, just about every time.

It's the polar opposite of something like Javascript (or Typescript—it doesn't avoid this problem) where you can have three libraries and all three both read like a totally different language from the one you're writing, and also like totally different languages from one another. Ugh. This one was initially written during the "everything should be a HOF" trend and ties itself in knots to avoid ever treating the objects it's implicitly instantiating all over the place as objects... this one uses "class" liberally... this one extensively leans on the particular features of prototypal inheritance, OMG, kill me now... this one imports Lodash, sigh, here we go... et cetera.

The people stewarding the Web platform have neglected a lot of nice things, among them this—a major version two major versions ahead of what's in browsers, is eight years old.

That it still has any use on notable sites at all seems like a decent cue to at least try not neglecting it before declaring nobody wants to use it.

... however, it's mostly useful for doing things that owners of walled Web platforms have no interest in, like working with interoperable protocols & formats. They've been killing those through active moves and neglect for 15 years, so why would they do something that makes that easier & nicer?

They're just trolling. This is far too silly a line of argument to treat seriously.

I have a CS degree and have been in the industry for 25 years and man I hope "memorize syntax" was never supposed to be a notable component of any of that, because I certainly haven't....

Having a reasonably complete and well-performing set of XML tools available in the browser is really nice.

The counterpoint seems to be "well it has Javascript so we don't need actual features since you can theoretically write anything in JS" but one of the nicest things about it was having that toolkit available to Javascript. You can spin up a DOM for arbitrary XML and apply a bunch of natively-compiled, fast tools to it, coordinating and supplementing that with JS. Then present that to the UI as HTML. It's very nice.

I'm on team "the right move is to upgrade these, not remove them".

If they want to remove things to simplify the spec I've got a list I'd suggest, but it's mostly stuff added in the last decade.

My wife's seen this at multiple non-tech companies, and it's a disaster every single time. Most (like... 95+% of) folks can't use these things very well, being forced to use them kills morale because they're frustrating as fuck (and managers largely have no idea what they're actually capable of doing productively, so expectations are all over the place and often fantastical) and dealing with the output of co-workers who can't use them well is even more frustrating than the LLMs themselves are. It's sometimes coupled with attempts to realize the increased "efficiency" before it's even proven it exists, by firing significant chunks of staff at the same time as adopting "AI processes", further stressing out remaining employees and ruining ability to actually get things done.

It's trashing whole departments. The come-down from this high (which high is being experienced pretty much only by the C-suite and investors) is gonna be rough.

I'm fairly confident there's going to be no shortage of work for programmers who actually halfway know what they're doing for the remainder of my career (another 20ish years, probably), at least. So that's nice.

Though cleaning up garbage fires isn't exactly fun. Gonna need to raise my rates.

Yeah, the safest professional tone to adopt is now something like what you'd use talking to someone else's very-stupid dog than to a co-worker you respect. It's gross.

The two biggest causes of major UI problems I see are:

1) Exactly what you wrote: power users don’t even realize they clicked through five things in ten seconds any one of which would have derailed a weaker user, because they’re so used to bad UI that it’s almost invisible to them.

2) Zero care given to what’s most natural for the platform, for cost of development & maintenance, or what’s easiest for the user, when (bad) designers and (bad) “product folks” get involved and are way too into the wrong kinds of “consistency”, especially brand and cross-platform consistency (yo, I’m not sure it’s worth spending extra money fucking up contrast and platform norms on your inputs so your fucking radio buttons are “on brand” or whatever, like, I’m deeply skeptical of the actual business value of that kind of thing, though I can see the PowerPoint presentation value… and that’s why it happens)

They do indeed often have zero ordinary cashiers.

... except at the "PRO" checkouts. Which are actually just ordinary check-out lanes. Anybody can go through them. The signs mean nothing whatsoever.

I never go through their self-checkouts unless I've only got one or two pre-packaged items. I usually park on the "PRO" side, enter through those doors, check out on that side, and leave through those doors.

Time flies, and he’s been on my to-read list for… a while. Need to finally get around to it I guess.

I’ve seen nobody talking about this, so it’s probably wrong, but I can’t shake the feeling that a lot of the seemingly-nuts things we’ve seen the last 20ish years, from house prices going to the moon to LOLWTF P/E ratios sustained for years on end, and even the magnitude of VC activity, are an outcome of having way too large a proportion of our money in capital, desperately seeking investments to buy, with an underlying economy (ignore stock prices and net-drag economic activity like over-paying for healthcare, I mean actual productivity) that hasn’t grown anywhere near fast enough to give that money anything useful to do.

No! They still do that? Reading this thread had me thinking back to an early Nexus phone I had back in my Android days, maybe around 2012, and here’s this post! I had no idea that wasn’t some odd one-off problem.

You could place the phone back-down on a surface a marble wouldn’t roll on, and 20 minutes later it’d magically be on the floor. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. I can’t believe they’re still doing that (how, though?! And why?!!)