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xionon

258 karma · joined October 13, 2008

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xionon··on The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities
For most of human history, children and parents lived together or close by, and parents died earlier in the child's life. If your parents died and left you an heirloom dining room table, it was quite likely you just didn't have a table, and at most you lived a few blocks away, so acquiring it was easy.

I'm in my 40s. Both my parents are alive, and have a house full of stuff. I live in a different house, 3.5 hours away at highway speeds, full of different stuff. It doesn't really matter to me if my parent's dining room table is a nicely crafted table - I have a nice table, and I don't need two dining room tables. Getting it to my house is a tremendous hassle. Picking between them is a tremendous hassle. And then I still have all the other stuff - the hutch, the chairs, the couches, the beds - and only one sibling to split them with.

"Rampant, commoditization consumerism" didn't cause this, longevity, freedom of movement, and independent living caused this, and I wouldn't trade those away for an heirloom table.

xionon··on Roughly 80% of Grades Given at Harvard Are in the 'A' Range
It isn’t a zero sum game. It’s possible for all students to get As and for that to still be a meaningful measurement of skill.

Grades don’t show your ability relative to others, they show your mastery of a set of knowledge and skills. You mastering something doesn’t prevent your neighbor from also mastering it.

xionon··on Disney Lays Off Ike Perlmutter, Chairman of Marvel Entertainment
Perlmutter reportedly said audiences wouldn't notice a replacement actor because "black people look the same," and was a major blocker to woman-led superhero movies because he thought they couldn't sell.
xionon··on Apple kills plans to scan for CSAM in iCloud
The apartment analogy doesn't quite work, as the scanning only happened with photos that were going to be uploaded to iCloud.

It wasn't like constantly monitoring your private residence, more like setting up a breathalyzer checkpoint on the way to the freeway.

xionon··on Why did the F-14 Tomcat retire decades before its peers? (2021)
I have a vague childhood memory of looking through a large illustrated book about spaceships in our public library and being in awe. When I came back on another trip, it was gone. I never knew the name or author, but the memory surfaces every few years. It always made me a little sad, because I couldn’t remember enough to find it as an adult - just the vibes I got as a child.

I am now 99% sure it was Spacecraft 2000 - 2100 AD. Thank you so much for posting the name and helping me solve this mystery.

xionon··on Detroit Industry Murals
What’s vile here?

The art looks unique, detailed, and dynamic.

xionon··on Coinbase is reportedly selling geolocation data to ICE
They're saying neither; they're saying that politics is inextricable from life, and that work is part of life. You can't extract politics from work any more than you can extract personal life from work. People aren't robots.
xionon··on Thunderbird 102
I can confirm that in Thunderbird 102 on Windows 11, you can use View -> Font Size via the menu. It changes all UI font sizes I could find. I don't remember if this setting existed in the 9x releases.

The default is 12px. The max appears to be 30px.

Changing font size only appears to change the UI font, not the message fonts, but it does appear to change all UI sections I tested. I saw increased font in the 5 major UI sections and the Settings section.

When setting size to 30px, the the email panes looks mediocre, but usable. The icons do not increase in size, but the bounding boxes for text areas do, so things lay out approximately correct. It's clear this is not yet fully supported.

The Address Book looks like garbage, and clearly has a layout bug. In the list of contacts, the selectable boxes around different contacts do not scale appropriately, and the text from one sits over the text from its neighbors. It functions properly, and the individual contact view is usable, so this may not be a deal breaker until its fixed.

The other sections I use (calendar & tasks) look fine. I do not have any chat accounts set up, so I cannot test that section.

Overall, I would rate it as a usable first step, but hopefully they do not consider it finished. As a minimum, icons need to scale with font sizes, and the padding between elements at high font size needs to scale, or at least have some breakpoints.

xionon··on The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues
You think that China, famous for it's nationwide firewall, will provide open solutions?
xionon··on Rails adds support for Fiber-safe ActiveRecord ConnectionPools
> I ran Rails in production years back and swore it off then. We had constant memory leaks that seemingly came from Rails itself, and the only solution we had was "just restart the server."

This hasn't been a serious problem in a decade.

> We also had no typing then, so every bug was a runtime bug. Hopefully it's improved in the years since...

The ecosystem has been introducing gradual typing, but even at high scale, types were not remotely the most common type of problem I ever ran into, and certainly not "every" bug.

(ex-Braintree engineer, we processed billions of requests on Rails)

xionon··on Vim 9 will be dedicated to Sven Guckes
How do you celebrate one’s accomplishments while ignoring one’s behavior in the process of making those accomplishments?

Or rather, is it actually too nuanced to think the ends don’t justify the means?

xionon··on We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt
I don't understand your point here. In literally all these scenarios, you would still be billed, and it would be appropriate.
xionon··on Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k
> What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do?

A meager defense follows. I've worked both "midwest design shop" and FAANG-adjacent jobs, from junior to staff to manager.

The main thing is supply and demand. The supply of engineers willing to work at a FAANG, in a region that FAANG is willing & able to support, and are willing and able to go through the technical hazing process called a "hiring panel," is very much short of demand. On the other side, profits per employee are phenomenal at scale, so making hires at these rates still makes sense financially.

But to answer your real question: it's less about the complexity of the code on a day to day basis, and more about the complexity of the system you have to work within, both technical and political, and the expectations of scale. A microservice system has both network and political boundaries to work through, whether making changes or RPC calls.

Then, while a small scale system might see a one-in-a-million event once per year, a large system will see it many times per hour, or even per minute. Managing simple things like changes to a database becomes a multi-step process, involving tools and stakeholders, instead of just a quick 2 minutes of scheduled downtime. Engineers need to be capable of thinking through those sorts of things. Stuff gets real weird at scale.

As a result, of both the above, engineers frequently find themselves doing highly specialized work, which is even harder to hire for. The guy who knows scaling properties of Postgres inside and out hasn't written production web code in a decade; his skills are almost worthless outside of FAANG-scale problems. Amazon has folks working for years on all sorts of niche network optimizations, because microseconds matter to them, but good luck transferring those skills back to fullstack web dev.

Last, a not insignificant number of engineers at FAANG are doing fantastically easy work on the same pay scale. Someone has to manage the wordpress (or whatever) installation for the docs site, or some backend process written in Django just for six important people. They often still get an engineer title and pay scale. So, it frequently is harder, but certainly not always.

xionon··on Netflix’s Prices Are Rising Faster Than Cable
Ted Lasso is the best thing there, but far from the only thing. The catalog is pretty solid. I personally loved Mythic Quest and Schmigadoon. I have mixed feelings about Foundation as an adaptation, but I like it pretty well as a stand-alone thing.

Looking forward to trying out For All Mankind, See, Macbeth, and Invasion; the first two seem especially well liked by friends.

Bounced off Physical and Dickinson, but that had nothing to do with the quality of the shows; they're well made and have excellent acting.

The wide variety of stories and genres are lacking, but I think the quality of the average Apple TV+ show is quite a bit higher than the average Netflix show, on par with most of HBO.

xionon··on Seeding oceans with volcanic ash could be new tool to tackle climate change
Is this sarcasm? Population controls are a massive change to quality of life for most people.
xionon··on EU says Apple’s App Store breaks competition rules after Spotify complaint
> Notably, text editors from 30 years ago still work fantastically. Email clients from 30 years ago still mostly work great (unless using certain popular anti-consumer cloud email providers).

What text editors and mail clients are you using regularly that (a) you paid for and (b) have not been regularly updated for 30 years and (c) still work on modern systems with modern file types and file systems?

To be direct, I highly suspect that any 30 year old applications you're referencing receive regular updates, are tragically underfunded, and the developers would ultimately benefit from upgrade or subscription pricing.

Of course, everyone loves a free lunch, but someone had to pay for the sandwiches.

xionon··on Rails 6.1
For what it’s worth, the 2->3 update was by far the most consequential; they merged in Merb, rewrote how routes and controllers worked, and completely flipped expectations on how JS and views should work.

Rails 3->6 has had far fewer major user-facing architectural changes, and consisted mostly of new tools and APIs. A lot of stuff they added used to be handled by gems - password hashing, attachments, background jobs, caching, etc. all got rolled into the core framework.

Another comment mentioned https://guides.rubyonrails.org, which is good. I would focus on the new routing style, REST controllers, forms, and strong params; once you wrap your head around those, the rest will probably fall into place, or could be ignored completely.

xionon··on School of SRE: Curriculum for onboarding non-traditional hires and new grads
You still need SREs for using cloud services at large scale, and they can manage more cloud infrastructure per person than if it was colocated
xionon··on HomePod Mini
Unfortunately, the newest models do not have optical audio out, only HDMI.
xionon··on Words that don't translate into English
I don’t think that’s an accurate translation at all!

Skinning a cat is not a common thing. It’s not a normal food for English speakers, so the phrase carries some sense that what you’re doing is unusual.

It’s usually applied to a situation completely unrelated to skinning or otherwise preparing food, so it carries some sense of absurdity.

Most people using the phrase have never skinned anything, so there’s (usually!) a sense of ignorance on both sides.

Your translation brings none of that.

If I were to translate that idiom back to English and aim for accuracy, it would be something like, “what you’re doing is unusual, and neither of us have experience doing it, and the way you’re doing it is different than the ways I have heard of, but I suppose there’s more than one valid way to do it.” Which, I think, fits the spirit of the other examples - a very short expression that carries tons of unspoken cultural context with it, to the point that there isn’t a direct translation.

xionon··on IPv6 xmas display uses 75 Internet's worth of addresses
There are 2^128 available addresses in ipv6. Encoding phone numbers isn’t even remotely a problem.
xionon··on John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team
Along with iOS 12, Apple released a new app called Shortcuts. It is not preinstalled as far as I know. I think they got it via acquisition. There’s a bunch of new hooks that app makers can/must use to integrate with it, so not everything is supported.

It’s basically IFTTT for iOS, and you can assign phrases in Siri to it.

https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios

xionon··on Role-playing game theory
What you’re talking about is already happening with podcasts. A group of players get together, record their session, and publish. The bills are paid via advertising, donations, and sponsorships.

The two most promenant ones I’m aware of are The Adventure Zone and Critical Role. The first leans heavily on family, personality, and humor; the second leans heavily on structure, characterization, and voice acting (all the players are pro voice actors).

It definitely is a nascent art form, and the first 5-10 episodes of both are somewhat rough, but recent episodes have gotten quite professional.

Personally, my favorite is The Adventure Zone. The first arc, “Here There Be Gerblins,” is clearly pretty raw, but the series gets so much better by the end.

Related: https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/9/17549808/actual-play-critic...

xionon··on Men at Work Wonder If They Overstepped with Women, Too
> The metoo campaign IM basically allowed anything from actual abuse to catcalling be called sexual abuse. It expanded the definition of sexual abuse to basically align with only the most extreme feminists.

Are you implying that catcalling someone, in or out of the workplace, should not be considered sexual abuse?

xionon··on React JS Best Practices
In React / Javascript land, isomorphism means, "the same code is used to render on the server and in the browser"
xionon··on How Marvel Became the Envy and Scourge of Hollywood
Not only that, but they did it a second time with Captain America: Winter Soldier.
xionon··on Ex-Googlers Building Cloud Software That’s Almost Impossible to Take Down
That's not what this article is about at all. The technology described in this article is a distributed database.

Github project: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/

xionon··on 7 Reasons our app costs $99.99
I don't believe anyone is suggesting that you charge the full price of the camera for every photo, but rather that it's a factor in determining the correct price for a single photo.

Also, if someone wanted me to fly somewhere to do a project for them, I am absolutely going to charge them for the plane tickets. Travel is difficult and costly, there's not only the cost of the ticket itself but the opportunity cost of all the things you could be doing instead of dealing with flying somewhere.

xionon··on Show HN: Automated Rails development with Prelang
This looks pretty neat. Looking forward to you getting the disabled features ironed out.

Some notes:

* Project generation with most of the features and a couple models is taking a really long time. I'm sure it's a background job, and I could walk away if I wanted to, but it'd be nice to know that the system would email me to let me know when it was done

* Sometimes UI widgets flicker when switching between sections. I'm guessing a lot of those styles are being added with Javascript, not CSS? You might consider switching to a CSS framework that gives you a good look and feel, but doesn't have to call some JS function to apply styles.

* The auto-capitalization on model names, and auto-lowercasization (?) on field names, was a nice touch, and made me feel happy about the product.

* It would be really cool if users could write and submit plugins / hooks. I'd be interested in background jobs that weren't DelayedJob, and deployments that weren't Heroku, for instance.

* I'm guessing that "public repos only" is a temporary feature, because GitHub doesn't have a way to authorize an app to write only to certain private repos, correct? Because most of my work is on private repos, and I can't see my organization using something like this without the ability to create projects (even scaffolds) privately

* A feature for Vagrant would be nice :-)

I'll be watching this! We've currently got several people switching from ColdFusion to Rails; they're good programmers, but they don't know the ecosystem or the conventions. This gives them a really good starting place. Thanks for sharing.

Edit: Also, this is the first time I've seen app/views/elements/, and I'm kinda pissed I haven't thought of using a different directory for partial layouts before. Now I've got some app/views/layouts/ directories to clean up...

xionon··on JavaScript Modules
That, and it was a chance to reference an Achewood comic, instead of an XKCD one

http://achewood.com/index.php?date=07052007

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