thomascgalvin

I think this is true of most open source projects, and probably all of the bigs ones.

Software in general has a burnout problem. I am regularly stumbling around like a zombie by friday afternoon, and that's just for my actual, paid job. If you added maintenance of a large open-source project like Rust ... I don't see how I would manage it, at least without letting my health -- and probably my family -- suffer for it.

I know that some people are fortunate enough to be paid for their open-source work, but that doesn't mitigate the burnout from software engineering itself. Add to that baseline stress the fact that your customer is "the internet" and feedback is often coming from "whoever is currently angriest," and it seems wildly unsustainable.

> Based on analysis of US Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Janco, news that the IT industry added just 700 jobs following an estimated 262,242 jobs lost amid mass layoffs is shocking, but not surprising.

So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth.

> Currently, there are almost 100K unfilled jobs with over 101K unemployed IT Pros – a skills mismatch.

Staying current with skills is always part of an IT professional's job. Additionally, I suspect that a lot of these unfilled positions are either paying too low, or aren't real jobs.

> But there are plenty of people who do believe that AI either will or might kill all of humanity, and they take this idea very seriously. They don’t just think “AI could take our jobs” or “AI could accidentally cause a big disaster” or “AI will be bad for the environment/capitalism/copyright/etc”. They think that AI is advancing so fast that pretty soon we’re going to create a godlike artificial intelligence which will really, truly kill every single human on the planet in service of some inscrutable AI goal. These folks exist.

Yes, these people exist, but they are so few that this argument is essentially a strawman. "AI could take our jobs" is a valid concern, and it is something that our political structures are wholly incapable of dealing with.

Most "AI Doomers" aren't worried about Skynet, they're worried about 90% unemployment.

All weight loss is because of a calorie deficit; that isn't (or shouldn't be) controversial.

The interesting questions are why a diet produces a caloric deficit, and how difficult that deficit is to maintain.

The "don't eat anything and drink nothing but water" diet produces a caloric deficit through a very obvious mechanism, but it isn't something people can adhere to long-term.

Semaglutide produces a caloric deficit by turning off the mechanisms that make people want to eat, and appears to be sustainable long-term (assuming you can financially afford it).

With the potato diet, the question isn't exactly "why did they lose weight?" but more "why did participants reduce their calories?" Were they so sick of goddamned potatoes that they couldn't bare to shove another one down their throat? If so, that indicates that the diet is unsustainable. On the other hand, if people were enjoying the diet and reduced their calories because the potatoes left them feeling fuller, longer, that's a mark in the protocol' favor.

Weight loss studies aren't about finding ways to reduce calories, they're about finding ways to reduce calories that people will comply with. And based on how often diets fail, and how often people regain all (or more) of the weight lost once they stop dieting, I would argue that we actually haven't figured out the answer to this yet.

This can't be real ...

I smile a little bit every time someone links to Red Blob. This is just a wonderful, fascinating resource, the kind of thing the Internet was supposed to be for.

I also love that this isn't just theory; there's an entire implementation guide[1] to all of the concepts discussed here.

[1] https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/implementation.h...

> There's no need to treat the legislator like an idiot.

But the legislator is an idiot, and should be treated like one. They aren't identifying a problem and trying to solve it, they are engaging in performative legislation for the benefit of their donors. That should not be rewarded, on either side of the aisle.

The issue isn't that Unity wants to be paid.

The issue is that they are trying to retroactively change a license agreement, and doing so in a way that will bankrupt many of their current users.

Charging per install is absolutely insane, and will absolutely be the end of many publishers. Even successful games like Cult of the Lamb are being culled because of this.

I wish home solar was more ... trustworthy?

I've looked into having rooftop solar installed a number of times, and every time I've walked away with the feeling that I don't know enough to know what to watch out for, and that there was a high probability that any company I dealt with would be trying to take advantage of my ignorance.

My team switched from React to Svelte a couple of years ago. We were working on new app, not refactoring or rewriting an old one, so we had the opportunity to choose whatever tooling we wanted.

The whole team loved Svelte. It did the stuff React did, without a lot of the ceremony or boilerplate. It was easy for the junior devs to pick up, and powerful enough for the senior devs to what needed doing.

We weren't pushing it very hard; the app was basically data entry and data display, and I assume that if you got deep enough into corner cases, it would break down like any other framework. But for our purposes, Svelte felt like someone had taken the time to understand React's issues, and fixed them.

Headline writers are incapable of simply presenting facts anymore. Stocks don't go up or down a couple of percentage points, the "rocket" or "tumble." Judges don't issue rulings, they "excoriate" one side with a "blistering opinion." Movies don't underperform they're "huge, embarrassing bombs."

This is just one more area where social media and a click-based economy have made things demonstrably worse.

I think television has had a massive effect on the overall, "average" American accent. The stereotypical Boston accent can still be found in Massachusetts, but it isn't nearly as common as you might think.

Similarly, the thick Southern drawl is still a thing in some places, but when I travel it seems that a light twang is more common.

This might also be due to geographic mobility, but I think media is a more likely culprit.

AI is at least as helpful to me as StackOverflow, and significantly less hostile.

Neither provides a 100% working solution out of the box, but I'd rather argue with ChatGPT about a library it hallucinated than dal with the egomaniacs that exist solely to lock threads on StackOverflow.

I have also moved towards "dumb data objects", immutable if possible, and a library of functions that operate on them. Exactly what this looks like will obviously depend on the language, though.

In Java, I might have a Foo object and a FooController.

In Kotlin, I'd probably have a Foo object and a FooController file, but that file would contain functions, not a controller object. Of course, in the bytecode this would map to a FooControllerKt object.

Kotlin also offers extension functions, which are similar to how Go declares object methods. I use these for utility functions, as opposed to business logic. If I wanted a function to camel-case a string, for example, I'd use an extension function. If I wanted a function to determine if a string is a valid zip code, I'd use a method that takes in a string.

I despise websites that add useless interactivity like this. We already have scrollbars that work perfectly well.

That does make more sense, but I refuse to let go of the image of a duck with a vendetta tracking some poor bastard down, and the stalwart medical coding technician who is dutifully documenting it all.

There are separate charge codes for everything, and all of those codes need to be reflected in the pricing data.

There's a price to slap on a bandaid.

There's a price to give someone a Tylenol.

Hell, W61.61XA is the medical code for "Bitten by duck, initial encounter." Presumably, this means there's also a code for "Bitten by duck, again."

Medical billing is broken, and it's no surprise that the amount of data is overwhelming.

Some people will add things to their cart and then wait a few hours (or days) to see if they really want it. If they do, it's in their cart, and there's no reason to go find it again. If they don't, they just remove it.

I can see people who shop like this accidentally hitting "purchase" every now and then.

ArgoCD also requires you to type in the name before you delete something. I've found that this has the added benefit of pushing people towards shorter names.

I have seen instances where the wrong pod or whatever was deleted, because someone nuked "foo-api" instead of "foo-ui" or something, but it's significantly harder to footgun yourself this way.

I flew from Providence to Orlando last week. The airline's website said (paraphrasing) "we don't oversell flights; this ticket guarantees you a seat."

As we were boarding, the gate agent made an announcement (again paraphrasing) "this flight is fully booked, and if your ticket doesn't have a seat assignment, you cannot board."

One of those two statements was false.

Generally speaking, when writing code you should:

1. Make it work,

2. Make it right, and

3. Make it fast

In that order. I have to assume JetBrains is quite a ways away from any significant performance optimizations on this project.

No value to the shareholders.

People on Reddit vastly overestimate how closely Reddit's opinion lines up with that of the general public.

If the last US Presidential election was held on Reddit, Bernie Sanders would have won in a landslide. He obviously did not.

When Netflix announced it was cracking down on password sharing, Reddit declared that this would be the final nail in their coffin. Instead, subscriptions skyrocketed.

Reddit power users are angry at spez and claim that this will be the end of the site, but the average Reddit user has maybe heard about all of this, and mostly doesn't care.

My wife and I went out for mediocre fish fry last weekend. Dinner and drinks for two people was $125, and the default tip was 25%.

That is utterly insane.

I'm in the same boat. If a so-so experience is going to be that expensive, I'll just stay home.

Go# or bust!

For your inverse example, isn't that how Flutter renders?

> A drug that promotes weight loss, lessens the desire to smoke, drink, etc...sounds too good to be true?

It does sound too good to be true. However, it's possible that the drug is working on all of these through the same mechanism: by altering the brain's reward system.

If that's true, the drug doesn't make you not want to eat, it makes you not want stuff, in general. That could potentially suppress a wide array of addictive behaviors. I also wonder if that suppression might look a lot like clinical depression, though.

I knew a guy who flew from Boston to London every weekend, to see his wife. They were both being paid dumptrucks of cash, though.

A few years ago, I moved to Boston for a tech job. The cost of living was like 25% higher, but my salary almost doubled, so I came out for the better.

This job was on-site, so there was no choice but to live here. And by "here" I mean a 60- to 90- minute commute, both ways.

Now? My job is 100% remote, and any job I would consider would have to be 100% remote. Assuming this trend continues, I think we'll see an exodus from high cost of living areas to (slightly) smaller towns.

People are still going to want to live in places that have services, entertainment, and so on, so this isn't going to gut cities, but it will make living in the sticks more plausible.

From CBS News[1] :

> El Niño is a climate pattern that naturally occurs every two to seven years when ocean surface temperatures warm in the eastern Pacific.

From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)[2]:

> El Niño can affect our weather significantly. The warmer waters cause the Pacific jet stream to move south of its neutral position. With this shift, areas in the northern U.S. and Canada are dryer and warmer than usual. But in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Southeast, these periods are wetter than usual and have increased flooding.

> El Niño also has a strong effect on marine life off the Pacific coast. During normal conditions, upwelling brings water from the depths to the surface; this water is cold and nutrient rich. During El Niño, upwelling weakens or stops altogether. Without the nutrients from the deep, there are fewer phytoplankton off the coast. This affects fish that eat phytoplankton and, in turn, affects everything that eats fish. The warmer waters can also bring tropical species, like yellowtail and albacore tuna, into areas that are normally too cold.

As far as the Continental United States is concerned, this means the Northern half of the country will be warmer than usual, the Southern half of the country will be wetter than usual, and the Northeast in particular will be drier than usual.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/el-nino-returns-2023/

[2]https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ninonina.html