softfalcon

I mostly agree with you, as a person who went to a middle-of-the-road public school.

I will point out though, anecdotally, my spouse went to the highest tier of public school in our city. She has a good balance of "seeing the world for what it is" while also having an edge of being personally networked to a ton of folks who are rich, well-connected, and capable.

I look at the friend groups I built when I was a kid, and then I look at hers.

- My old friend groups are all stuck in a range of poverty to lower-middle-class.

- My spouses friends are all doing very well for themselves, live all over the world, prestigious careers, active hobbies, highly intellectual, cultured, etc.

It's a stark contrast.

There is something to be said for ensuring your kids go to the best schools possible. Those early networks are pivotal in forming an above average life.

Competency is secondary to connection.

We can barely tolerate the latency and throughput limitations between Europe and the US for data center processing... and now we're okay with data being wirelessly transmitted (read: super slow) from Earth to the Moon?

Building something on the moon would be cool, but a data center? Unlikely.

Too bad a lot of devs love to greenfield, slap it together, then bugger off to the next project pronto.

I've honestly come to find flaws in most of what I build over time. This isn't to say that the products I build or the code I write is inherently bad, it's that I keep learning new ways to be better over time and deadlines always necessitate making trade-offs.

The truly great moments though, are when you go back to a "tried and trusted" solution to a problem. In the past I might have used a more complex algorithm or framework, but my experience tells me to keep it simple and build on something I know is more applicable.

Those are the moments when mere knowledge is surpassed by experience and that's when I truly feel proud of what I've built.

Unfortunately, the article ends by pointing out that the Halo armour also has many glaring mistakes.

Unfortunately, the likely solution to this is to keep banging out work at wherever you can gain experience as a software engineer.

Modern hiring practices are too rigid and filter-friendly for you to likely appear as a strong candidate based on the fact you have good accounting experience on top of your growing software skills.

What will really help you though, is having friends who work at a bank in the software departments. It's almost always who you know in this world. You need to network, network, network!

The main highway going East-West (Trans-Canada 1) requires you to put on snow tires during the winter.

I think it might only be an Alberta, BC provincial thing though.

It's required all throughout the East Kootenay (Golden, Radium, Invermere, Cranbrook).

Michigan is similar to parts of Canada. All-seasons that are rated for snow are pretty common here too.

Then there is every doofus in a Suburban skidding around like a kid on a 2-ton toboggan rocking summer tires as they tell everyone, "my truck is heavy, it pushes down THROUGH the snow!"

Some people refuse to even buy an all-season even when they know it exists.

This is exactly it. People don't want to think about that kind of stuff.

I was over giving a neighbour a can of spray foam. The complexity of it was no more than that of spray paint. You point the nozzle into the hole, pull trigger, it fills with foam. Done.

They spent more time asking me how to use it than it would have taken to patch the hole (~10 seconds).

It's the same for Canada if you choose to drive any of the mountain highways passes. The cops will fine you if they catch you without a "mountain-snowflake" graded tire.

This is the truth. They’re digging out under a massive overpass in my area right now to fix water main and gas piping issues as we speak.

Road is all torn up and patched up. It has been a boondoggle of construction cones and heavy machinery for months now.

Hah! Yup! Heard that one before from Californians, Texans, New Yorkers, and Arizonans in my travels.

Ignorance can be the death of ya! Thank goodness most of them aren’t trying to drive up here!

This is somewhat true where I’m at in Canada. In the city, half the people have proper winter tires, the other half “wing it” with whatever they can afford/put-up-with.

Regularly see accidents all winter long from goofs sliding straight across multiple lanes of traffic or going off into the ditch. Only some of us are prepared.

We don’t salt, only drop sand grit and gravel sparingly. Our roads become ice rinks or snow piles for a decent portion of the winter.

Your comment about us being “better equipped” made me chuckle as I spent this morning watching my neighbours play slip-and-slide in the cul-de-sac cause they opted to not put their winter tires on.

As someone who grew up in the mountains, their behaviour is downright dangerous in my opinion.

I don’t disagree with your take. The concept of the semantics of “what is alive?” has been going on for a long while now.

Have you considered that this is a more formal version of a Bill Nye science explainer, but for adults?

The reason I say this is that while unintended (I think) your post has a, “of course they’re alive, we’ve known this forever” vibe, which can inadvertently come across as condescending.

I don’t mean to pick on you, we’re all guilty of such speak when we deem concepts to be obvious or well known.

Your post reminds me of the “1 in 10,000” XKCD comic:

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Again, I don’t disagree that your knowledge of history and science is correct. Am just curious why you wrote your explainer in the way you did.

I know this isn't likely... but a part of me is going, "and so the downfall of Adobe supremacy begins..." evil cackling

It would be hilarious watching them scramble to actually compete with an equal footing player for once.

(Yes, I know I'm probably delusional, but it would be funny to watch)

10k parallel users I agree, but 10k receiving all updates from the other 9999 and vice versa can become quite a complex problem to solve.

Especially within time (latency), monetary hosting cost, and accuracy constraints.

For example, an MMO town with 10,000 connected clients all viewing the same complex session state of all other users and entities in one town.

That’s a lot of room for error. Or am I missing something?

That scenario is complex to me and has remained complex to me despite my various times building it out for various products.

Yeah, I hear you. Which is why we assessed and designed our own platform for handling the above stated traffic (and much more) for multi-user real-time chat sessions.

The commenter seems to know a lot about Jazz, so I took the opportunity to ask further questions.

Yes, I have read and found similar articles to what you've posted!

It is an ongoing exploration for us to find the best way to store/consume reactive state data within our client sites/apps. So far, MobX has given us a lot of leeway since we can create the data store we want for our data.

Going forward, I foresee us switching to something closer to WatermelonDB or maybe even just SQLite with a thin wrapper in React to create observability. I'm not 100% sure where it's going to go, but I agree with you that flexible state management for large platforms evolves fast and the difficulty of creating fast look-ups rapidly approaches "reinventing the DB" client-side.

I've had to build similar on top of SQLite for various other mobile/desktop apps, the problem hasn't really changed, the only difference is we're now using React + JS instead of C++, C#, or Java.

All roads so far have led to SQLite though.

That sounds a lot more promising!

Which brings in even more questions. What is the performance of these multiplayer experiences? Can I have 1000+ users all connected to the same chat session? What about 10,000?

(these numbers might seem high, but they're what I'm expected to deliver in my day-job)

I'm more than a little worried about the following all being `Coming Soon`:

- Cursors & carets

- Two way sync to your DB

- Video presence & calls

    - both the Group and BinaryCoStreams

All of these are the key reasons I would be evaluating this framework to handle my data. All of these are not fully implemented yet.

It is these key topics of live reloading/updating data that make or break an app. In my opinion, if you haven't concretely solved these problems, you haven't really built a viable state framework for 2024.

I really like the patterns they've implemented though, looks a lot like the same framework I just built on top of MobX, websockets, and React for a recent project. They're headed in the right direction, but I'm not sure they realize how much more work they have to go before this is fully fleshed out.

As soon as the AM4 vs AM5 conversation started, I immediately thought "price". The cost of swapping a mobo to AM5 in a few years is minimal compared to bulk price savings you can get using "good enough" AM4 now.

Seeing AM4 boards and cpus easily 1/2 the price of AM5 gear in consumer sector. Imagine it's similar in the professional sector.

I draw it on a pad of paper instead. I don't analogize it to plates or envelopes on a shelf.

Simply saying, "there is memory in the computer, it's like this..." and draw rectangles of memory on a piece of paper.

Then I demonstrate the push and pop actions as they pertain to items in memory.

You're not wrong, you need a metaphor. Heck, even "items" in "memory" is a metaphor. It's all just digital circuitry, there are no real "items" or "memory", those are analogous, made up words.

But it helps. It helps because it's considered respectful to them in that particular scenario. Something about taking the time to grab that pad of paper, using the technical computer sounding words, etc. All of that demonstrates respect for their intelligence. That's what they want to see and it opens them up to wanting to listen to me explain it.

Ultimately, people want to be seen and respected for who they are and their preferences. Communicating is often more about that than getting the point across.

I have found a lot of people I know (who have excellent English, but aren't native English speakers) despise metaphors.

This is purely anecdotal, but I am married to a woman from Eastern Europe and I grew up in a schooling system that was primarily Cantonese and Mandarin speaking immigrants. All of these people had trouble speaking English in their formative years and became professionals with excellent English.

I will often use metaphors to describe things. For instance, when talking about a "stack" in computer programming, I go, "think of the plates in your dish cupboard". This works great with, say, my mother, who is an English speaker, she likes metaphor and simile. My friends and wife, they all go, "here you go again, stop using metaphors! Just tell me what's happening inside the computer. A computer is NOT a bunch of plates!"

This is a trivial example, but it actually happened! They did not want to discuss it with analogies or metaphorical connections!

This piqued my curiosity, I asked, "why don't you like metaphors?" and most of them responded, "it feels like you're talking down to me" or "I'm not a child you can use playthings to explain the world to, treat me like an adult or don't bother explaining it".

I asked them, "did any of my other behaviour make you feel like I thought you were a child?" and they responded, "no, not really, but once you started comparing things to other things, I got uncomfortable."

When we really got down to it, they all admitted the truth to me. Using the somewhat complex language of comparisons, metaphors, simile... it reminded them of how they used to not understand English very well. These comparisons would confuse them when they were younger. Other kids would make fun of them for not "getting it" quickly enough.

This remembered emotion made them hate my present-day metaphors and analogies. Explanations in what a native speaker would consider "clear and concise" were frustrating and uncomfortable for them.

Just a reminder to all of us, not everyone thinks in the way this article preaches. Some folks would prefer a more direct linguistic approach and find it more respectful, approachable, etc. As our populations become more diverse, it is more and more important to meet people where they are and where it best respects their lived experience.

This explains so much about modern media, news, and story-telling. It's easier to make up a plausible narrative that supports your story than simply admitting you don't know.

You can see how as the article develops, they go from being "uncertain what made GitHub succeed" to definitively being sure about why it succeeded. It doesn't surprise me that details were glossed over as the story rose to the ultimate crescendo of "GitHub dominates".

This is how a good tale is spun and the people lap it up. What's a good tale without a bit of embellishment? (said every bard since antiquity)

Fastmail has been solid for the last several years. I would recommend it.

Wow, I was not expecting that, but thank you so much!

A combination of Evernote and Google Drive.

He’s going to look into Obsidian for his next books.

He was using Evernote and then switched to Google Drive for collaborating with the editor.

I’ve in the past, suggested Obsidian. He is interested in trying it out.

My brother just finished writing a fantasy novel. By the time he was finished, he had created a searchable wiki with every idea, lore snippet, and references logged into his note taking app.

As easily as we would google an event in history, he could bring up the tagged items associated to a chapter, world event, or character in his book.

At the late stages, when he was modifying a lot with the help of his publisher/editor, this was worth its weight in gold.

Amazing level of discipline and wisdom choosing to set it up in that way for himself.

I would recommend similar to anyone considering writing a book.

His book was recently published and is sold in stores everywhere under the title “Gods-Forged”.