Importantly, webrings are not known to allow their users to live unnaturally long lives, and webring-wraiths have never been observed hunting them.
2,258 karma · joined March 8, 2013
Having it be a ring has the nice side effect that anyone closing a ring on your site (or adding your site to it) gets an idea of how everyone in the ring met.
It's more of a fuzzy social thing than a "let's represent social relationships in the most semantically accurate way possible" thing, and for people, I think that knowing how everyone met eachother is a nice thing. You can plan gettogethers off of that. It also keeps people socially accountable; if someone in the group turns out to be a dick, they can just be skipped in the webring.
Working with them, the scope can be brought down, sometimes, though this obviously depends a lot on externalities like who the customer is and how much flex they're comfortable adding to the timeline, since that often becomes a factor.
Part of becoming a more mature developer involves being able to navigate these situations with PMs better, and dealing with the frustrations that can often bring (in my experience). I'm still working my way up this side of the job. Historically this stuff has been managed up really thoroughly by my immediate manager (a factor of both the manager's working style, the work being done, and the broader company structure), but my current company structure means that I have to get better at this stuff a lot more actively.
I brought the 10-12kLOC PR up as an example supporting my point of view. I don't encourage the behaviour. Most of my PRs these days fall under the 1500LoC mark, tops -- maybe a bit more if it's a tricky component that needs a ton of tests.
Is there no way to make this changeset smaller?
At work, I've usually written large patches. I used to be worse at it. I was mentored out of it, and while I still like my patches to be complete, I balance that with the available bandwidth of the team and what the team can reasonably actually process.
For perspective, my "large patches" were PRs on the order of 10-12kLOC for relatively big features. I consider those to be on the upper end of what is reasonably reviewable by a small, non-dedicated team, and towards the upper limit of the kind of PR where I can speak for nearly every line of code, what it does, and why it's there.
On the other hand, now, LLMs are part of the equation, and they can (and often do) write code in insane volumes. They arguably tend towards extreme verbosity, without even talking about docs/markdown files. While LLMs are part of the workflow, my company, and those my friends work at, have all instituted policies of the developer attaching their name to the code ultimately being responsible for the output (which IMO is a lazy strategy, but I can't think of a much better one under the circumstances).
I cannot, personally, fathom how you can stand behind a single changeset spanning 2000 files and a quarter-million lines of diff. Do you consider this sustainable?
At this point the code bases are very quickly getting away from us in the open source community and even in proprietary code bases, and these are important code bases. Often very complex, often legacy. Who ultimately still owns these? Who's really going to be accountable if things go wrong?
On the one hand, this solves the problem of smart glasses being too stealthy to tell when you're being filmed/broadcast in public by someone wearing them; where Meta's glasses look like Wayfarers, these look a lot more distinctive.
On the other hand, the reason these won't be too stealthy is because they look like those standard-issue glasses the US army was know to give out (upon looking it up: S9 glasses), and those have a reputation.
On the third, mutant, hand, I don't have a fashion sense and I really don't care about smart glasses as a technology, so maybe I'm the wrong person to judge this thing on is merits.
To the extent you can really call pointing their behaviour out as victimizing them, I would consider bad PR to be a fair tradeoff.
For what possible reasons? Are people going to be doing these things recreationally? Cause otherwise you're talking about scanning the entire world's population, including the very young, the very old, the mobility-impaired, and those without easy access to US-based facilities (i.e.... people who are part of the small fraction of the global population who do not live in the US), twice over, every 18 months.
What possible use could there be for doing this?
I recognize that the presser says the scanners will be deployed "around the world," but let's be real, this will probably be 80% US.
On migrant workers, much of the US economy is underpinned by the assumption that cheap manual labor is abundant, with the implicit assumption that this tier of labour isn’t going to try and clamour for workers rights (which is a whole other story, but whatever). It’s (part of) the reason the US continues to have globally extremely cheap gas even as the prices hit highs within a domestic frame of reference.
And restarting mining rather than trying to adapt the mining workforce better to a changing landscape is just going to make it hurt worse when the US has to catch up with the rest of the developed world on that front.
As a close outside observer, it feels more like one side of the US electorate is motivated by sore and a misplaced sense of being owed retribution more than anything else.
It's also a very thinly veiled metaphor for the ceaseless pursuit of industrialization in every aspect of life chipping away at the humanity and metaphorical magic of the human experience, and the perils of embarking on that endeavour to the exclusion of everything else.
Personally, I find some humour in this situation.
Fund managers and the like do, which covers a lot of passive investors, which is good until a company joins one of the major indices at which points funds may be obligated to buy in.
It's a deeply distressing moment, and I see it as a time to renew calls for consumer-protecting regulations and antitrust laws with more teeth in the markets where this kind of behaviour's currently flourishing.
The point of a company going public is not to just distribute possible profits among speculators, but to give the public a meaningful voice in company direction, in particular by offering escape hatches like being able to eject a CEO who's lost their mind and is no longer acting in the fiduciary best interest of the shareholders, which will so obviously happen here.
Who is this product for? How the hell did "data centres in space" make it into the prospectus at all?
More to the point, why is Morningstar being so generous with their interpretation of that line of business? It's plainly insane, and you don't need an advanced degree in physics to understand why.
You, the IC, the developer prompting the code extruder, are ultimately responsible for its outputted code and its behaviour.
You may feel pressured to push out thousands of lines of code a day. You may see those thousands of lines refactored several times over the lifespan of a merge request. You may be asked to do this continue this in the long term with all the mental fatigue that entails.
When it's too much for you to sustainably deal with and you turn to using LLMs to review the code, that will still, presumably, fall on you at the end of the day.
The output is your responsibility.
Some of it is in pursuit of productization feedback. Some of it isn’t.
The general audience here is (or at least, used to be) tech enthusiasts, and you can usually assume that crowd will enjoy cool shit in tech.
Personally I’ve had to occasionally hand write x86 assembly for work on a handful of occasions to ensure certain runtime guarantees were met that the programming language i was using couldn’t provide directly. I’ve used it a ton in hobby projects because it’s just kinda cool, and i want to have a better understanding of that world.
I'd be doing the same kind of thing if I had more free time.
Some people call this "high-level," too.
I will say, though, that 2 million lines of code is much less code than it sounds like at first glance, especially for a company in a highly-regulated space like finance, plus a few years of progress.
Blending into rush hour foot traffic is easy, and I never feel like I stand out enough to attract attention... though in the back of my head, I know that most commercial and government properties have some form of video surveillance, probably backed by some kind of (hopefully coarse) AI subject tagging.
It's also important to consider that while many places have some legal framework along the lines of "no reasonable expectation of privacy in public spaces," there's a social-psychological gap between that and the presumption of being constantly recorded, be it by other private individuals or governments.
Because of this, my view on this technology is that it's a net negative in society, and generally unhealthy.
With purl, the web gets just a little less punk. Which is nothing new, unfortunately. I miss the times when people would put in stupid amounts of effort to stick to their principles in hobby tech.
There are more syntax features, more and more complex semantics, and while rustc and clippy do a great job of explaining like 90% of errors, the remaining 10% suuuuuck.
There’s also some choices imposed by the build system (like cargo allowing multiple versions of the same dep in a workspace) and by the macro system (axum has some unintuitive extractor ordering needs that you won’t find unless you know to look for them), and those things and the hurdles they present become intuitive after a time but just while getting started? Oof
> but only spotty adoption
The amount of times I've had to translate an AMP link that I found online before sending it onwards to friends in the hopes of reducing the tracking impact has been huge over the years. Now there are extensions that'll do it, but that hasn't always been the case, and these aren't foolproof either.
I do hope this MCP push fizzles, but I worry that Google could just double down and just expose users to less of the web (indirectly) by still only showing results from MCP-enabled pages. It'd be like burning the Library of Alexandria, but at this point I wouldn't put the tech giants above that.