337 karma · joined December 1, 2017
Just taking this axiom into considetation : "Either the atheistic view of reality is correct or the "religious" one" - what if we live on a world where its true for some people and not true for others - lest say that some are selected by some random beings and they have "moral obligation" imposed and others were not so lucky and are left to themselves without any judgment waiting.
I did not know that this kind of arrangement is possible (I used to go only to normal gyms which were overcrowded most of the times). My wife found it near us and we decided to check it, made a reservation, and now, after a year I cannot imagine going back.
Unfortunately it does come with hefty price tag - about 4-5 times bigger than normal gym subscription.
This is why I do not work for faceless corporation. I deliberately sticked with small lifestyle business that values maintenance as much as new sales (as a matter of fact just this week I was refactoring my own, original piece of code, that its first version is dated by versions control as written 15 years ago and during this whole time there were clients that were paying support fees for it)
It depends on the incentives I suppose - if commission and bonuses for sales people comes only from new sales, then sure, maintenance is irrelevant and will be ignored.
>> Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features.
No, that's not true at all. If sales people are properly incentivised to sell support contracts (their base salary being a percent of maintenance fee for example) then it will be sold like crazy. I have seen this happen at my company - at one point we did not need new sales to be profitable - just raking support contracts fees was enough to keep up costs and then some.
Hmm this looks more like na attempt at building better merger by getting rid of unstructured text and replacing it with some kind of structured/hierarchical data.
I think that this can be useful but I don't see how this helps to solve general problem of visualizing diffs between workflow versions (and making it readable and mergeable for mere mortals)
The real unsolved problem is lack of visual comparators that could show what really changed between versions. If you try to do diff those text serialization formats (those being yaml, json or, in old days, xml) you have to do a lot of mental gimnastic to map those onto visual changes that are meaningful. And most potential users of your low code tools are not capable enough to use it this way.
If you take into considetation that visual comparators of workflows is extremely hard problem to solve (probably only bunch of people in the whole world is cable enough to do this in a way that anybody sane would use) then you easily see why all visual dev tools of last 30 years went bankrupt. And if you did any sensible research you would know there were hundreds attempts at it with some spending hundreds of millions of dollars (Rational and later IBM being main ofenders here)
It gives me chance to get off computer (so only physical boardgames - no BGA) and meet new people (so no solo games). And since I like collecting stuff it also plays nicely into this quirk of mine (my collection just passed 140 mark).
The world of modern boardgames is really fascinating and totally different than I remember from childhood - playing boardgames in early 90s in Poland was geeks territory (up there with math and computers) and nowadays its almost badge of honor and all the coolest people will happily play boardgames (just to be clear I do not claim people playing games in 90s were geeks, it was just the prevailing opinion of my peers)
It is really hard to answer this question because it seems that they were an emergent property of dozens of hobbies that I had (I tend to be seriali hobbyist). Seems like trying to explain how I did learn to ride a bike - I can name few basic skills that are required, but showing which exact part of learning bike riding made it stick is no easy task for me (I remember it as trial and error process and this was the same with my children - they just practiced riding bike and the skills developed thanks to them sticking to the practice). It all looks like a kind of tacit knowledge that can only be developed by pure practice (melodic memory through remembering and playing songs, aesthetics through creating your own compositions, logic through solving problems)
My own story is rather simple - I used to play guitar, a bit of keyboard, sing using karaoke, listening to songs paying full attention and than playing guessing games aking to local tv game called "What melody is this?". At first I was awful at this. But then something changed; I started to notice that I can recall melodic and rhythmic structure of some songs - and this was totally new ability to me (I remember that as a kid I was made fun of by my peers that I could not recognize any songs and my singing voice was wildly out of tune).
One caveat though - It's not like I am any good at music - I estimate that getting to level where others would tell "wow you are good" will take at least another 10 years (and it is not that important because I prefer the journey part, not the destination). But still I know I was a lot worse before forcing myself to learn. And probably if I would get a teacher that would motivate me and give feedback I would get here a lot faster, but as I said - it's the journey, and I really like to learn everything myself.
The message here is that I do not think that most people are unable to learn this kind of skills (those being music, logic or even simple aesthetics). The problem is that most do not have the drive, will or simply the time to stick with practice to overcome their own limitations.
And basing my intuition on example of one (me) both visual and tone imagination and memory can be developed from almost zero.
I used to think that I am tone deaf and have no memory for melodies. Bu t after I forces myself to spend a lot of time singing, playing guitar and listening to music it occured that I just lacked some basic skills that combined suddenly creates magical ability of recalling melodies in my head and even repeating them. The same was with drawing and public speaking and general movement coordination (strength training can do wonders in this department).
This made me believe that some of problems of education system comes from general inability to convince students to spend more (dozen times more) on practicing basic skills (being this writing, small/big motoric skills, logical thinking oraz even some seemingly unimportant stuff like voice emission)
Only tentatively :)
Thorin is from Hobbit and was long gone when plot of LOTR started.
But be advised that there are downsides to this - this time around I won't be able to stop myself from buying Frodos/Bilbos "Sting" when attending Fantasy Covent here in Warsaw (and its comming this weekend)
No, that's not possible - in the end all important decisions are still made by humans ( I'm still waiting for chatGPT 7 executive edition ) with their emotions and feelings being their decision center.
And while this is true, if someone isn't monstrously inept in social settings, the most important thing he can do is being out there to leave positive marks on other folks perception of himself/herself.
You can think that good work speak for itself, but the truth is that without leaving and breathing advocate it will be lost in translations.
You call decade a substantial longevity?
Is this some kind of a joke?
Is your ability to assess being held hostage by js ecosystem expererience?
But seriously - I expect a bit more from platform that could potentially waste my life and my venture. I am still happily supporting some Java (and JSF) code that I have written for clients 15 years ago (don't you just love that sweet support fees that you get mostly for being alive and breathing ?). Meanwhile my friend that build whole company around product written in silverlight almost went bankrupt. Now after few years working in AI (going into it a bit too soon) he is trying to create same product in ... yes you guessed it, Blazor.
Maybe some people do not learn from their mistakes :)?
If between you and your client four people are playing deaf phone (client's project manager, our project manager, team leader and some random product guy just to get even numer), then actually this is not what you are doing.
I would argue that the thing that happens at this stage is more akin to manually transpiling business logic into code.
In this kind od organization programmers become computer whisperers. And this is why there is a slight chance that GPT-6 or 7 will take their job.
It has a really great coop mode where you can help other player exactly as much as he needs.
This phenomenon might be seen almost everywhere, but I find it that using cellural automata (Game of Life anybody?) and abstract board games with limited rules is the easiest way to show people that they are actually really not that far from children if it comes to imagining consequences of few rules interacting with each other on scale greater than 10-20 moves ahead.
Go board game is my favourite example - few almost self explaining rules and if you show this to someone that did not play it before and he will be lost for days or weeks at a time (if it comes to predicting consequences of two players laying stones according to those few simple rules).
And then, after they learn anything about this game, change one rule (allow for two moves in a turn for example) and see how they are lost again...
It's almost like in the quote from Feynman (this is more a paraphrase because I do not remember correct phrasing, only the general idea) - "People do not understand what it really takes to know anything".
Just from the top of my head I remember two scenes from two different movies - the one from Hangover II where Phil gets shot and gets treatment in Bangkok hospital ("10 dollars - how is this even possibile") and from some other comedy where one of main villans, literal rocket scientist, complains that he had no other choice because he have four children with braces and how he could possibly afford that.
And I'm guessing first step here will be getting rid of scooter? :)
Only half joking here - health and two wheelers, especially ones with engine, does not combine greatly.
I know personally three people that had serious life changing accidents driving motorbikes, I was a witness to two serious crashes (guess who get out of them without a scratch - the one on bike or the one in car).
Even I had serious bike accident that damaged my health quite greatly. It may be just me getting older - but I seriously am afraid of using any kind of two wheeler in any traffic.
Now, that they have gotten older and do not require so much attention I finally manage to attend local group meetups regularlly. And I also find teaching both children news games quite enjoying for both parties (me and them :)).
This also enabled getting back to board games collecting - it was quite pointless without playing them. My collection went past 100 titles quite quickly and is still getting stronger every month.
I could probably find a few not so great capitalistic systems results (even American flavoured ones) that had tendencies dangerously close to those you describe (ever heard about company stores ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store).
I think most people here on HN does not see this because they tend to do software related work, but this is happening faster that you may think.
When I last time spoke with middle level manager of building company that specializes in constructing factories in Central Europe he said that change over last 20 years is almost magical - factory built at the start of millenium required hundreds people to operate. Projects finished two decades laters can easily operate with 20 people or less.
And this is East/Central Europe - probably least automated part of developed world.
If you look at Japan you can see things such as fully automated ps 4/5 production lines ( https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/PlayStation-s-sec... )