zulgan

this is our take on it: https://eng.rekki.com/unit-testing-at-rekki/t.txt

TLDR:

    * test your core, make sure your core is strong
    * don't test your http api
    * don't mock
    * don't test writing and reading from the database
    * don't complicate your code to make it testable
    * ... unless you deem fit

reading those bills makes me feel quite hopeless, considering Gell-Mann Amnesia[1]:

  Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open
  the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s
  case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see
  the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or
  the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the
  story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet
  streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

  In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple
  errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international
  affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more
  accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the
  page, and forget what you know.

It is horrible to think the same thing probably exists in politics, and I cant even imagine what goes through in fields I don't understand.

[1]https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

Does this happen in the east as well?

I feel this is common in the west, because people externalize internal conflicts, and they have to project their "righteousness" and "judgement" to justify their existence, as there is nothing left in ourselves besides atoms.

it was huge mistake for us, it was chosen for the wrong reason, to solve a non-problem, complicated everything without adding any value.

* cant find people for it and if you do they come because of the tech not because of the real world problems we are trying to solve.

* the no types thing makes people write tests that test for typos and make refactoring incredibly difficult because you have to fix gazillion pattern matching tests

* the tooling is just horrible, cant jump, because of pattern matching that makes it much more annoying

* phoenix was complete misfit for us as well, so i ended up hating it for no reason

so because of no-tooling and on-refactoring, accidental complexity only grows, and we ended up with much more fragile system with infinite failure domain.

i wrote briefly about why it was chosen at https://eng.rekki.com/kitchen/kitchen.txt and why we moved to go.

that being said, i am sad that this was my first real world experience with elixir, in a project where it was not a good fit, so now i am totally biased against it. when i tried it briefly for few hobby projects it seemed like a quite cool language.

-b

i guess ads are down

this makes me reflect that almost everything online functions only because of ads, which is quite sad

either ads, or selling PII to companies that do ads

i have been using debian since potato, and i have seen some damage :D

haha i understand what you mean, but debian's https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian page is not an accident :)

i made my comment more as a joke, shit happens everywhere, and as i said maybe not to this extend.

Chill with the js hate, this happens everywhere.

Maybe not to this extend, but if X (where X is whatever you are thinking about) had similar amount of people using it (especially junior people) this would happen there as well.

for now i just blocked it on the pi-hole, wildcard blocking:

  googlevideo.com
  ytimg.com
  youtube.com
  youtube-ui.l.google.com
  ytimg.l.google.com
  ytstatic.l.google.com
  googleapis.com

and it works fine

I spend considerable amount of time doing that, but the content creators are so extremely aggressive, they make new channels with new clickbaits with same garbage, just to get the children's clicks. and they are so many!

especially now during covid19 lockdown, the garbage produced is intense. and of course our screen time is higher than ever.

I don't think this is true, the first human right is the right to die, and secondly the right to live. So you can only live a life that allows you to die.

For example, if my mother is in a hospital dying from corona, and the system forbids me to see her (despite me taking precautions that I deem fit), I must revolt.

This of course sounds like nonsense, and I am also conflicted, but this is my intuition.

death will follow either way, like 2008

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/25/financial-crisis... https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f5239 https://www.forbes.com/sites/melaniehaiken/2014/06/12/more-t...

damned if we do, damned if we don't

hmm i am not sure that is the case, (though i only watched the netflix series, and read the manifesto, so i am not very familiar with his life), but i thought it is more a gesture of helplessness.

There is a saying in my country, that is hard to translate in English, but it goes something like: powerlessness births violence.

a bit off topic, but if you enjoy questioning the value of technology and the impact on our society, check out Neil Postman's "The Surrender of Culture to Technology"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlrv7DIHllE

do not judge people's relationship with death.

some are rational, some petrify and can not move, some try to face it, some turn inside, some turn outside.

some old people are going out on purpose, if they petrify they will not be able to live anyway.

anyway, it is not easy for anyone when the mass is moving in such volatile way, not to mention individual responsibility towards the group is stressed to extremes (as you can see people fighting over toilet paper for example)

i am also staying as isolated as i can, but from time to time i force myself and my family to go out in the forest, to see that the world is not burning yet.

rebel.

I don't think it is possible to compare hours worked 100 years ago and now.

Now, especially for developers and office workers, work is almost indistinguishable from life.

For example there is barely any time while I am awake that I am not thinking about work. (sometimes even my dreams are about work related tech topics)

Not to mention that modern management techniques are deeply psychological, and sophisticated propaganda.

TBH I dont think more work is being done, I just think the corporation organism consumes as much as it can.

I had a co-worker who was super chill during outages; especially at night, we were 10-15 people on the call fixing issues related to his work almost monthly.

those outages costed millions of euros, and he never picked up his phone at night, once I asked him why he never picks up, he told me:

"I used to be a general surgeon, when someone calls me people die. Relax, nobody is dying during our outages."

now I think I am taking myself(and my work) too seriously.

I think that the point of school is in no way education. The point is to mold individuals in order to fit within 2 standard deviations of the norm, and it does all it can to do so (tests, medication, etc etc).

If you are in the upper percentiles, you are used to bring the lower percentiles up, if you are in the lower you are used to bring balance.

Now we are almost at the point of making not going to school illegal. (you can argue if mandatory is the same as illegal)

-b

It is already too late for Google to fall. Even if it falls something worse will take its place.

What are our options? Government? How will it be even remotely close? Data will be needed, How will the government get data? They will probably make it mandatory in schools of course. Why not? its for the good of the children.

Interesting times indeed.

“The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional , personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself by the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.”

― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

it is metaphorical. (to the people arguing how expensive it is to travel)

very nicely written, but i disagree with it because i believe that we have to look more inward than outward in order to be able to die (not sure how to express that correctly, but i hope you know what i mean).

congratz!

maybe for the generation which grows up with scratch, new concepts and ideas are needed. not sure if darklang will make it, but exploration in the space will surely help.

writing this from while using emacs as a window manager(exwm), made me realize how impossible it is for me to evaluate change.

best of luck.

My biking commute is about 80 minutes per day, 1984 is about 10 hours audiobook, so for me it is just using those 80 minutes.

I guess this is cultural as well, I(anecdotally) absolutely feel shame when I am about to leave a company, or even negotiate.

  "It's only on the brink of destruction that people find the will to change."
  -- The Day the Earth Stood Still

It is the same with deep technical debt, change only comes after major outage and enormous loss.

> What went wrong there?

nothing out of the ordinary, probably some team had to increase some company wide KPI of engagement, and likely every team has their own spin on it.

it was ab tested and provided statistically significant increase on video engagement, which was likely defined as "people interacting with the player", in the end you see a chart with engagement growing due to experiment x,y,z.. and everybody is happy and convinced they are doing the right thing.

thank you!

this was exactly my thought when I made https://scrambled-eggs.xyz/ , now I pay for gmail, google calendar, photos and etc way more than money

Not paying for content (small games, blogs, vlogs, journalism, code, etc..) in the last 20 years, is now one of my biggest regrets. I remember back then I even had a small addon that was constantly showing me ads and I was getting money for doing nothing, I thought it was nothing.

Now we have to suffer fake content, incredibly well researched click-baits, short term conversion optimized (good trailer, bad content) media and of course tracking to incredible extend. Every single machine learning algorithm trying to push us to more extreme world views so we stay on the platform to consume more contend and see more ads.

Every time my young daughter is watching youtube, I can see how what it is recommending and how easy it is to manipulate her. Few weeks ago it hit me, that I sold her mind, because I did not pay, and now everything is beyond repair.

PS: I just finished listening a great reading of 1984 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8) and am in very dark place. /

even more funny that in many cases they are stopped only by the law, and also in most cases they can only do some form of advertisement; if they could sell your soul for statistically significant conversion uplift, many people wont even think twice.