xlii

If you can I'd recommend getting piano teacher and live lessons. I got one and improvement in posture was a biggest gain I got. That and some cultural push (e.g. there's no wrong music, only the music someone doesn't like, or put piano next to window to learn to not watch on own hands).

Believe it or not but I tried to use Helix when my Emacs build was completely broken.

It couldn't handle the Git repo of Emacs' size. Every keystroke took 3 seconds to process.

I found it somewhat funny. But otherwise Helix is still a great editor worth recommending.

There is no "the rest". All the payment processors or aggregators ultimately talk to Visa or MasterCard. Even if there are alternative payment methods that include direct transfer etc. they still might get kicked off if they don't follow their rules.

First glance: in-app purchases. Unfold list - tip, tip and tip (different amounts).

Only anonymous usage and diagnostics gathered.

Not only concept but execution made me smile. Kudos to you!

Having experience with many IMO it's all about value added. There might be concurrency, message passing (Janet) od global scope isolation (Fennel). Personally I had difficulty getting into Fennel, but no problems incorporating Janet into my flow even though the author is the same. I'm not a fan of hygienic macros though.

I would add Clojure to the modern Lisps, too, which I find the most feature rich (even though had much more blast writing Janet).

PHP I worked on from v4 for couple of years. My main gripe was that it was full of idiosyncrasies, implicit knowledge, heavily inconsistent and heavy on the boilerplate. After moving to Django I felt I could finally think about logic, and not checking if this one dude didn't use non MB prefixed function on string (which - for unaware - could end up splitting utf8 char into two).

As for Python3 there was this thing that at some point Python was supposed to move from 2 to 3. This change was to bring plenty of incompatible changes, and in a way that migration was outright impossible in normal sized projects. Then community split into two parts, some said "F-- it" and held on to Python2 and some said "F-- it" and moved to other technologies. In the end Python2 was sustained for many years (originally sunset period was short) but those who moved out didn't consider it "stable tech" anymore.

It wasn't a horror story but a simple fact that it was layer of complexity that wasn't really helpful at all.

When code volume was small, nobody noticed, and hey "it looks nice". Some time after though, when volume increased it started to get really burdensome. I used this as a part of Rails pipeline, so it was like: write some coffeescript, compile, run - something failed - usual process.

However the code was already mangled, often source code mapping didn't want to work. When source code was found it wasn't uncommon that it caused by operator precedence or code not transpiled in a way it was intended and requiring debugging transpilation process.

At some point I suggested to migrate away from CoffeeScript toward (almost plain) JavaScript and most developers happily agreed to that. We were able to migrate big chunk automatically, rest took only few weeks to clean up. Velocity increased and people were happy they don't have to deal with it anymore.

Ultimatelly it is the truth with most of the transpilers - sooner or later you get into idiosyncracies that - if technology is not popular enough - you're left alone to solve.

Maybe it is (mine is for sure) but that's a "bitten by the dog once" case.

You got bitten and everyone around you assures you won't get bitten again, but the pain was real and you still have a scar from the event. Why bother or invest risking another bite if there are other places to be which had never bitten before.

Over my career I hated technology 3 times. First was PHP, second was Python during Python 2/3 fiasco and third was CoffeeScript.

Edit: till this day one of my favorite meme is titled "PHP: Training wheels without a bike"

An usual tangent from TFA. NewScientist looks like worth subscribing for and I haven’t heard anything about it. Any opinions about it?

TIL!

I always joked that there’s nothing to fear about travel over plane. Nothing will fall, nothing will crash. The true horror is spending X hours without movement and a 2 day back pain afterwards.

Seems that I rarely experience anxiety but I do experience dread more often.

What you’re describing is my own self-developed strategy to deal with various stuff. Need to research dread topic more.

I read, wanted to reply but would only echo what you wrote. 100% agree.

Just a note that my 10% experience is based on general population of people who were working remotely for at least 6 months (and being a contractor I’ve switched orgs more often than average engineer)

I agree.

Rarely companies want to hire communication expert to help shape good practices even though they’re spending hundreds of thousands if not millions on stuff like Datadog etc.

I have this theory that mailing lists with rich search (slash Google Groups slash Newsgroups) are the best communication tools.

Hadn’t had opportunity to try it out though, as it was shunned „old tech”.

I can’t disclose details but I’ve been doing mentoring, screening and interviewing + screening for years and saw remote communities grow from 10s to 1000s.

What you’re saying is true especially in the honeymoon phase, but the running joke is that you don’t really live remote life unless solitude made you name a pigeon. I’ve seen careers of many of my peers and usually 5 years in people starts to seek on-site.

There’s another point to take into consideration though. In Europe commute is usually less than hour and for many morning routine is an opening to watch movies/read books/listen to music or podcasts. Some travel with friends so that’s a social occasion too. Given accounts of my US colleagues where it’s usually lone drive back and forth experience is different.

Yet remote means omitting or social events and being outsider in the most-social environment (especially for men). Even hybrid with one day is much better than completely remote.

What I found over the years is that no one can say what differentiates remote-able to non-remote. Quiet back-seat engineer can get depressed after year of remote and that guy who is always heart of the party can thrive in remote. It’s just… it wears people down quickly and problems are usually creeping. Back pains coming from tension. Working hours slowly inflating to compensate for extra 10 minutes spent on lunch, this one time when you are bored at 8pm because you are bored in front of computer so why not help someone.

Maybe I’m biased but I find situation that some people are remote and some aren’t to be a healthy one. This preserves local jobs while also making an opening for those who want to do remote work for any reason whatsoever. And this honeymoon period is good to check out if you’re fit for remote or not (and gives enough churn to provide opportunity to try).

I have approx. 15 years of experience working remotely for various companies all across the globe and was always an advocate of thesis that remote work is difficult and most people aren’t cut for it and (to horror of many proponents) and on average are less efficient than on-site hires.

There are many reasons: It’s difficult to understand _intention_ when deprived of non-verbal communication and working in a choppy network call. Even if one can gloss over communication needs etc. there’s burnout looming around the corner and natural, healthy laziness getting into the way. Sometimes even internal politics might be blocking knowledge/access/contribution for more or less peculiar reasons.

It’s not like it’s impossible to hire remote engineer, yet my (completely unmetered) estimates out of experience is that approx. 10% of engineers willing to work remotely can sustain health (physical and mental) and be efficient outside of 1-2 years of honeymoon period.

There was some tumbling around COVID but IMO both stationary jobs and remote ones are doing well on mid-high quality positions.

In case anyone else didn’t know: SCIF stands for "sensitive compartmented information facility" (I assume ;))

The thing with security is that usually people treat it like a joke or very very seriously. I think that was the latter.

For myself it’s a very good secondary auth in alternative. E.g. I register with a vendor, create strong password in password vault and then create a passkey.

Passkey is convenient for log in (and also - quick) but worst case scenario I still have passwords. I wouldn’t trade in passwords completely but I prefer passkeys to OTPs.

Aye.

I made shameful mistake of submitting private key (development one so harmless) only because it wasn’t gitignored and prehook script crashed without deleting it). More of a political/audit problem than a real one.

I guess I’m old enough to remember Murphy Laws and the one saying "safety system upon failure will bring protected system down first".

Probably worth mentioning that force is a ref-related activity not a snapshot related activity. Garbage collection might remove unreferenced commits.

This should be done through history rewrites but as other commenters mention - GitHub has its own rights (and GitHub != git).

I’d recommend looking at simpler alternatives. IMO Jujutsu is mature enough for daily usages, and Fossil is a neat alternative if one wants to drop GitHub completely (albeit not very easy to use).

Whoa, awesome! Thanks for the link.

Lately I’ve been dabbling with different Prolog implementations and Constraint Handling Rules which led me to CLIPS [0] (in Public Domain, but developed at NASA - sounds neat doesn’t it?)

It’s not very easy to get into, but it’s very fast on rule resolution and being pure C is easy to integrate. I’m trying to get smart code parsing using logic language and this seems promising. I’m also a Lisp nerd so that works for me :)

[0]: https://www.clipsrules.net/

When it comes to Go editors (IMO Go is perfect language for such editors) I also need to mention https://anvil-editor.net

It's ACME inspired, open source (although I don't think it's published on GitHub, one needs to download), and it's actually quite nice to work with due to its composability).

Takes some time to use, but it's really fun to use for stuff like ad-hoc documentation, completion etc. Oh, and it also has REST API for interaction with external tools so you can Go (pun intended) crazy on it.

Um, so you have it so that if I hire (let’s say) bridge engineer for 100$ but he doesn’t get any materials and produces only paper model which I sell for 1$ does it mean I’m going to be taxed based on 101$ ?

IMO this is the best definition.

Especially since even in semantics we call highly successful companies „unicorns”. Because it’s rare. Usually software is worthless, whatever quality.

I failed my own software company twice. If such politic would be in effect I couldn’t even try once.

I do, I rarely use USB-C on Apple devices (well outside of Mac). Wireless is great and I have nice looking night clock and moving files/other stuff over airdrop works good enough for me not plugging anything in. Recently I had to charge over the phone which required removal of pocket lint beforehand.

I have multiple ones. They accumulate dust easily and get damaged much more often. You won’t see that if 99% of the time is in clean environment. As of today I have 3 iPhones that won’t charge on the wire. Those are physical damages so it’s not like anything covers it (and Apple Care is not available in Poland). Same happens with the cables. I’m replacing USB-C display cable (that’s lightning I suppose) every year now because they get loose and start to disconnect if you sneeze in the vicinity.

I despise USB-C with all my heart. Amount of cable trash has tripled over the years.

FYI - I still remember, but got sidetracked.

I see this twofold: what happens if net outcome is negative. Who would pay for it?

The same argument could be made for children, but a counterpoint could be made that given family history outcome is more stable than with unknown immigrant.

On the other hand, there is VERY interesting idea: personal immigration responsibility. Just as „mail bride” look for immigrants you’d be willing to sponsor in exchange for retirement.

Probably there are 5 million problems but would put personal stake for sponsor. Limit to 2 per person and people would do a lot of research as their retirement would depend on it. The country might also gain because I’d expect that people would look for high-value individuals that would maximize their chance for well being.

Finally, this could be used to revive drying out regions: bind this to a country/state/administrative region and that could help shaping it in the future.

Ok, so maybe instead of friendship let’s call it platonic love.

I get your point, but we are herd animals. Today distance is bigger than ever so we are more often lonely. Some believe in gods, religions but I rather believe in people and make it a hill I’ll die on.

It could be. Spam is translation for any kind of minced meat, there’s no implication about way of opening, shaper or brand. The one that was given out was (from scribble) without tab and cylindrical in shape.

And since you decided to query I’ll share another (more local) joke. In Poland you can buy spam called „Konserwa Turystyczna” (which translates to tourist can roughly). And the running joke about it is that you can (psst) buy one while NOT being a tourist. Nobody checks that!

As for the 3rd. Nobody said it was worse, that’s the point. I like the joke because it highlights it. The goal wasn’t to do it perfectly. It was to survive. Engineer succeeded in a way that solved the given problem.

And in IT we have a saying that premature optimization is a root of all evil. Doesn’t that sound aligning? :)

From the „Camel Book”, one of my favorite programming books (not because it was enlightening, but because it was entertaining); on the Perl philosophy:

“If you’re running out of memory, you can buy more. But if you’re running out of time, you’re screwed.”