ufmace

No, it's 100% appropriate. Anyone can have opinions on anything, but frankly, most of them have little relevance to reality. Their use of the word "expert" is supposed to mean the person has knowledge or expertise that renders their opinion on a subject substantially more valid and relevant than any regular person. That clearly is not the case here. If I wanted to know what a random person on the street thought about a subject, I could go ask one myself. The purpose of news organizations was supposed to be to better-inform people by getting opinions from actual relevant experts in a subject.

These people don't seem to have much ability to discuss relevant subjects like what the actual reliability of lower-tier hosting providers is, the value-add to business and iteration speed of having a variety of extra services (SQS, DynamoDB, VPC, RDS, managed K8s, etc) available, etc.

I did say that those aspects of Ruby would start to be painful at that scale, not that it was totally unusable. Clearly it's usable, and there's certainly less scale-able things than Ruby on Rails out there serving big production traffic today. But I wouldn't recommend switching an app that big in some other language over to Ruby, and at least as many companies have moved off of Rails monoliths when they outgrew them, like AirBnB for example.

I mostly agree, though I actually wonder if the energy difference is as big as you say. Yeah the big LLM company datacenters consume tremendous amounts of power, but that's mostly for either training or serving ~millions of requests at once. I wonder what the actual net power consumption is for a single machine doing about as much work as a single ordinary person could do with just enough hardware to run the necessary models. Or what the average amount of energy for a single set of interactions is at one of the big shared datacenters - they reportedly have a lot of optimizations to fit more requests on the same hardware. I think it might be only one order of magnitude greater than a human brain. Maybe actually pretty close to equal if you compare total energy used against work being done, since the human brain needs to be kept alive all the time, but can only effectively do work for a limited part of the day.

Ruby by itself is still a pretty decent scripting language. I still think Rake is highly underrated as a command runner.

Rails is still a good web framework within its limits. If you want to build a small, modest complexity web app with like 1 or 2 developers and under maybe 6 months of active development, modest traffic needs, etc, it's a good way to get everything up and running fast with best-practices for everything.

The lack of types may start to pinch some once you get an order of magnitude more developer-months into the app than that. Lack of overall speed, threading issues, and memory usage may be an issue once you get a few orders of magnitude more traffic. But while you're within those limits, I think you'll get features out on it faster than any other language or framework.

As they say, a lot more startups have died due to not being able to iterate fast enough in the early stages than from their traffic capacity, hosting efficiency, and bug count once they get into serious growth.

It's a cool and interesting type of attack, but I really don't care for the breathless clickbait headlines that are sourced to a few security researchers demonstrating an attack in a lab, that has already been patched against and has never been seen in the wild.

Mise seems pretty cool, but the thing that makes me reluctant to get on board now (current asdf user) is that it seems to want to manage too much. Especially with regard to using PATH munging.

I've had substantial frustration with multiple tools all trying to redo my PATH for me, usually to make themselves the first thing. It's to the point where I decided to give up and hard-code my PATH in my .zprofile and get rid of all of the various tools' init scripts so that I at least can clearly see and control which things are in which order and not having a bunch of scripts trying to rewrite it all the time all with slightly different algorithms.

Maybe it would work if mise could manage all "tools" (various programming languages) as well as "tools" (actual CLI applications written in one of the languages and usually installed with that languages manager, like `cargo install`, `go install`, `uv tool install`, etc), though then it seems like it might be a pain to switch over to.

Well, a regular SIM mostly just works, except for when it doesn't.

I haven't had any APN issues with regular SIMs in a while actually, but it used to be a common problem that would only sometimes auto-configure correctly. I've definitely had to google carrier APN settings and fiddle with them for a while to get text, MMS, and internet access working properly.

I also recently had an issue where I moved my US MVNO provider SIM to a new phone and it mostly worked, except for RCS. When I called them, they claimed my phone model wasn't compatible with their network, despite me already using it on their network for months. Apparently in their opinion SIMs should never actually be moved to a different phone. They offered to sell me a new phone, but I switched to a new carrier instead.

Yeah but on the bright side, Google's total lack of customer service means nobody will ever be able to talk a minimum wage clerk in the middle of nowhere into transferring your phone number to somebody else without your permission.

The "abolish the police" movement did not manage to actually abolish the police, but it did drastically decrease enforcement and prosecution of crimes perceived as minor or petty, like shoplifting. Police are not eager to try to enforce the law against it when they risk getting crucified if any encounter goes wrong and the suspect is likely to be released immediately due to bail reform and get their charges dropped.

Yes, I suppose it is a deep cultural difference.

My opinion on unions is mixed, I suppose. They may be necessary in some times, places, and industries to compel reasonable treatment of workers. If such things are necessary, they're probably better than government intervention due to being much closer to the actual workplace. Historically, they have been responsible for establishing some good practices as standard in the American workforce. But they also have their bad sides. They tend to encourage an excessively antagonistic relationship between workers and management, cause pay and promotions to depend only on seniority rather than skill and work ethic, make it impractical to terminate workers who are ridiculously lazy or toxic, force everyone to take the same benefits whether they want them or not, enforce ridiculous rules about who can do what when, and other such things. They probably deserve at least some of the blame for the fall from grace of American automobile manufacturing due to things like being unwilling to accept greater factory automation even if it may lead to fewer workers needed, thus making the whole company less competitive.

I suppose in my ideal economy, I'd expect around 10-30% unionization, with the rest of the workers treated reasonably well due to a combination of market forces and threat of unionization. That's decently close to what we have in the US right now.

I do find advocates of it in the US to be ridiculous at times. Like, okay maybe unions are necessary and beneficial sometimes, but I think software engineering is about the least in need of unionization of any career in the modern world. But still some people seem to be obsessed with the idea of it.

Anti-monopoly regulation seems to be a mixed bag to me too, particularly in today's economy. Only 20-25 years ago, Microsoft was the big bad monster company, enough so that the US Government did start to look at using monopoly regulation against them a little bit. But the internet world and Google took the wind out of their sails better and faster than the Government could, and I think the tech world is better for it. FANG occupy similar economic space now, and I think it's likely that changing technology and market forces will again do a better job of knocking them back down a peg than the Government would.

Europe certainly doesn't lack smart and ambitious people, but I think those attitudes of who is allowed to be "on top" in society and what a good company looks like holds them back. That's a legitimate tradeoff that the people of Europe are free to make of course, but I disagree that it's the ideal way to organize a society.

You're welcome to disagree, I don't mind some competition.

> Just proof hire them for 6 months to a year.

As is common with most quickly tossed out "tiny fixes" to Socialist policies of excessive regulation, this makes the whole thing more complex and doesn't really solve the full problem for either workers or companies the way true free markets do. The only real "just" is just stop meddling with what everyone else does, let workers quit and companies fire whenever they want to.

> Your argument doesn't hold for someone that has worked for 10 years. If they were a bad hire; it's on you at that point.

Yes it does. It's not necessarily only that they're a bad hire. They could have the wrong skills or temperament or something for where the company needs to go, or the company could need to shut down a whole department or something. I don't know, the world has infinite complexity and possibility. I'm not smart enough to come up with everything anyone could ever want to do, and frankly, neither are you or anyone else.

> Easier planning life and reduce work anxiety for employees.

That sounds like a personal problem. I don't care to reshape national policy to cater to someone's alleged anxiety.

> It encourage companies to invest and train their existing employees since they're hard to get rid off.

Eh maybe, but many companies still do that now because good people are still hard to find. That's the better and more reliable way to do all of these things.

> It makes employees less scared to speak up or discuss problems.

Plenty already do that, I don't think it's much of a point. It's not really proven any more than the counter-statement that it makes employees more willing to slack off.

> It makes companies more cautious about reckless hiring if they're not sure about their economics.

That's exactly my point. I think it's good to let them "recklessly" hire if they think they can afford it. Some will get things right and grow huge, other will fail and those workers will be able to find new jobs more easily.

> Allows older workers to remain productive for longer, reducing the burden on the pension or unemployment system from people 55+ having a hard time finding new work for few years before retirement.

"Allow" how? They can already do that fine. Many companies value the experience of older workers just fine without the Government forcing them to do things. And I'd rather they have a comfortable retirement already set up from a robust investment market, possibly with a 401k or something like that. I don't want them to be dependent on either one company or the Government.

And intentionally saving this for last along with the end:

> If they're is such a massive difference we would see alot less globally competetive European companies.

> Finally, i must ask what the societal purpose of jobs and companies are. From a pure "numbers go up", there is a cost to worker protection. But id argue the society as a whole benefit much more from it than having a multinational IT company on the stock market. There is a balance to these things ofourse, but dismissing it outright is not fair.

"much less competitive European companies" is exactly what I do see, and you are also arguing that that's a good thing. Europe seems to have very little in the way of invention or growth pretty much since WWII. They haven't invented much new, and most of what they have invented has been eclipsed by more aggressive and nimble American companies. The European economy is still mostly dominated by the same large companies mostly doing the same things they've always done, sometimes adopting new technology long after American companies led the way.

I'm not dismissing anything outright. I've carefully observed the results of both styles of economy and I prefer freer markets. I like helping lead the way towards creating awesome things thanks to everyone's free will. It's not always perfect, but the market usually fixes things faster and better than half-baked Government policies.

We would probably have much higher unemployment and slower-moving industries, and might no longer be the economic powerhouse of the world.

When it's simple and easy to fire people, companies are a lot more willing to take a chance on hiring somebody they aren't 100% sure will be a good employee, and willing to hire a lot and grow fast knowing in both cases they can fire easily if needed.

I find it sad that so many people never think about the second and third-order consequences of what sounds like feel-good policies. They often end up being a net-negative for the people they were intended to help.

It sings its own praises... how exactly? Maybe by a bunch of happy users talking about how they like it and it's a better solution to the problem that the thread or article is about without being explicitly paid? Which is exactly what's happening here and some people are complaining about it?

It works fine, except for when it doesn't.

Source: My macbook has drained its battery flat while closed in my bag dozens of times. Then it just stopped doing that on an OS update. I still have no idea why.

On the one hand, it's nice to see Ruby and the Ruby tooling system getting some love.

On the other, I'm not sure if this is really needed. Most of this stuff already works fine in Ruby with Bundler. Did you know that Bundler already has a really nice syntax for inline requirements for single-file scripts?[0] Seems like a lot of people forgot. Installing Ruby hasn't generally been much of a hassle either AFAIK. Bundler also doesn't seem to have the Python venv problem - it works fine for keeping a bunch of gem versions around in the same Ruby install and only activating the specified ones. I think Gemfile and Gemfile.lock is what Python always wished they had. I guess more speed never hurt, but it never felt like bundler was painfully slow for me, even on huge codebases. So is there really a big win here?

Though I guess plenty of Python gurus probably feel the same way about the uv craze when their existing tooling works well enough for them.

[0] https://bundler.io/guides/bundler_in_a_single_file_ruby_scri...

I think the main difference for NYC is that quite a few streets and intersections routinely have 10x to 100x the pedestrian traffic of the busiest such intersections in pretty much any other American city.

That's not to say that I don't think it'll be able to handle it, just that it'll be a new challenge. I wonder if their current program of apparently trying to positively track every single moving object in range will survive that, or whether they'll need to figure out some algorithm to prioritize objects that are more likely to be of concern to it. And there probably are more than a few places where pedestrians are numerous and densely crowded enough that you can't positively track all of them, even with a bunch of LIDAR sensors.

> Where does this idea come from?

Anti-gun propaganda.

Anti-gunners first started practicing lawfare against companies involved in the gun industry by suing them for crimes committed using products the companies were involved with, even though this is a ridiculous idea never applied to any other type of product. They do it because, even when the lawsuits are thrown out eventually, they are still very expensive to defend and most companies in the industry don't have particularly deep pockets.

Gun-rights advocates got laws passed in a number of jurisdictions clarifying that gun manufacturers are only liable for genuine flaws in their products. This has largely squelched these types of nuisance lawsuits.

Anti-gun activists don't like that, so they frequently spread false information that such laws prevent manufacturers from being liable for genuine flaws in their products. Despite such false claims, no law ever passed or proposed actually does this, and no law in this area has ever been repealed due to actually blocking liability for genuine flaws.

I agree. There's also the point of hardware dependance.

From all we've seen, the practical ability of AI/LLMs seems to be strongly dependent on how much hardware you throw at it. Seems pretty reasonable to me - I'm skeptical that there's that much out there in gains from more clever code, algorithms, etc on the same amount of physical hardware. Maybe you can get 10% or 50% better or so, but I don't think you're going to get runaway exponential improvement on a static collection of hardware.

Maybe they could design better hardware themselves? Maybe, but then the process of improvement is still gated behind how fast we can physically build next-generation hardware, perfect the tools and techniques needed to make it, deploy with power and cooling and datalinks and all of that other tedious physical stuff.

Well I see it's flagged for now, and I was one of the flaggers.

IMO, at least by the time I saw it, there were more than enough red flags raised to say that having it on HN before more evidence is available is only flamebait.

At least when they were blasting floppy disks with their software everywhere, it was actually useful. Anyone even remotely interested in computer stuff could easily accumulate dozens of them without even trying. Just format 'em and they'd work fine for making copies of all the things that needed 5-10 disks to install.

One of the nice things about it is that, being strictly a paid service, they don't need to take over the whole world to be successful and continue operating indefinitely.

It seems like it's difficult to really separate them these days.

You can always come up with something horrific enough that it seems reasonable, even necessary, for platforms to block it, like actual terrorism or child porn.

But then, there's always an activist group out there who really wants to ban something that most people feel is only mildly distasteful but not worth a platform-level ban and will abuse processes to do it.

And there's enough people for each of those cases who have incentive to obscure exactly which category things are actually in. More than enough for it to be hard for any platform to sort it out for sure.

So do we eventually end up with either an actual Government takeover, or everything banned that's more edgy than Mr. Rogers Neighborhood?

Not sure if meant seriously or sarcastically. But it seems like a pretty reasonable option to me. Yeah, commercial air travel is super cheap and fast these days, especially for very far destinations. But it has its headaches and downsides too, and plenty of people choose to drive for various reasons even if it's slower and more expensive.

If you have the skills and equipment, it might well be worth the $900-$1700 or whatever. You're also potentially taking 3 other people, and luggage, and avoiding the costs and headaches of big commercial airports and airlines, plus TSA etc.

Wouldn't they just land, refuel, and take off again a few times if they wanted to fly cross-country, similar to what they'd do in a car?

Yeah I get what you mean. I think I'd be a lot more weirded out than delighted if a restaurant I was going to stalked my social media (such as it exists at all), attempted to deduce things I would like from it, and presented me those things at a meal.

Okay, that's fair.

I currently do most of my browsing with Chrome and UBO Lite, and have yet to find a site that it doesn't work with. I do keep a copy of Firefox with full UBO and NoScript open on my desktop computer, just on general principles I guess.

Well, except for the other thread here where somebody pointed out Twitch, which doesn't block ads on either in stock form, which I did just check myself. Though I had already stopped using Twitch anyways, more because all of the other dark patterns it has are rather annoying.

By all means, browse with whatever setup you please. I just wish people would take it easy a little on the assertions that UBO Lite is inadequate.

It's the most real example anyone's provided so far.

I tested it on both regular Chrome with UBO Lite and Firefix with stock full UBO, and both show ads on Twitch. I haven't looked into how to actually block them, but I'll take your word that that's the only way to do it in both cases.

It seems to me, both cases require some extra action to block ads. Full requires you to dig up a userscript and how to load it into UBO, while Lite requires you to find and install a whole extra extensions. Doesn't seem like that huge of a difference to me. I suppose some may disagree, but it's not at all hitting my bar for declarations others have made like that Lite is inadequate or Google is terrible for disabling Manifest V2.

Thanks for providing a specific example! That does make more sense.

So I suppose Lite is indeed at least somewhat worse at blocking tracking. It's a legitimate concern. I admit that I don't have a ton of awareness of just how much tracking we're all subject to on the public mainstream web. Unfortunately, I fear it may be a losing battle.

What concerns me more is that there are dozens of medium to huge tech companies working full-time to track the hell out of us. That's not exactly great. uBO Lite blocks some of their stuff. I suppose uBO Full blocks more of it. But how do I know what either of them isn't blocking? It's got to be more than a full-time job to keep track of all the ways and means by which we're being tracked. Can a few determined independent individuals really effectively stop them? I tried using Firefox with NoScript for a while, but it's just too much work to fiddle with it on nearly every random site until that site works well enough to be usable.

I tend to think that, if one is truly concerned about ads and tracking, it's better to focus on staying on smaller, independent sites that do not do that at all. At least, more effective than being an individual in the middle of a full-time war between ad companies and individuals trying to block ads, trying to go to these big sites but not see the ads or be tracked.

Maybe the Brave solution is the better one - keep actual extensions to a more limited API, but more thoroughly integrate blocking of ads and tracking into the browser core. I know some people have other beefs with them, but there aren't any perfect solutions in this world.

It's also worth keeping in mind, in my opinion, that upwards of 95% of the world isn't using any ad blockers at all. Have you seen a "mainstream media" news website without any adblocking at all? Good god there's a ton of ads! How can anyone handle that! I guess we're already in a minority for trying to block ads at all, and it's an even smaller sub-minority that really cares about creating complex rules to actually block all tracking.

What is the adtech that's leaking through? I regularly use Youtube with uBO Lite, and it does infact consistently prevent me from seeing ads. I've yet to see a single one.

There does seem to be a war going on between Youtube and adblockers where sometimes Youtube will show me a screen saying that adblockers are prohibited instead of playing the video. But usually a full-page reload which I guess refreshes uBO's rules (either the original Full or the new Lite) fixes it. I'm pretty sure this also happened under the original full uBO, so I don't think it's specific to any new limitations of Lite.

Well the people posting that link seem to believe it's a clear and direct response to the question of why uBO Lite is insufficient when I or others say it works fine for us.

> Not being able to block remote fonts is a vague technicality?

I suppose not, but I never noticed whether it was or was not being blocked. I'm not really sure why that's so important. It certainly doesn't seem to justify the "oh no google is totally super evil for killing manifest v2" vibe that goes on.

> Webpages break on adblocking not infrequently...

Maybe, I guess. But exactly which websites are broken on uBO Lite that were not on "full"? Can anybody give me even a single example? I've been using Lite for I think like a year or something and haven't noticed any.

I can see being a little mad if, say, https://mytotallyimportantwebsite.com was really broken on Lite and that was your favorite website. I just can't get all hot and bothered though at the idea that maybe some website that I've never seen and nobody can name is broken on Lite.

> Consider that you're not paying for someone to produce marketing material; it's a free thing.

I get that I'm not entitled to somebody's work to create a simple and clear explanation. But the argument I'm making is that uBO Lite is perfectly fine actually, which I don't think requires any evidence. It's the other side of the argument - that uBO Lite is insufficient - that needs to provide evidence to convince me. You're more than welcome to make that argument if you care to.

I'm telling you and others that posting links of technical details is not going to convince me that Lite is not good enough, that I need to be super mad at Google and switch browsers etc. If you try to tell me to do work to "educate myself", I'll say no thanks and keep on browsing just fine with uBO Lite. In my opinion, it's somebody who cares enough to make the case that I should change who should gather sufficient evidence to convince me. It's sure funny that they're all indignant and demanding as long as it's someone else they think should do work to change, but they suddenly get all quiet when asked to actually gather and present evidence to make a case to an audience that's skeptical instead of fawning.

Or more simply, if somebody wants to be a smug link-dropper, how about a link to even one single website that's broken on Lite, which I have yet to see anybody anywhere provide.