Surfactant7

Thanks. I scanned right past the most important part for the article to get get right, mainly because it was buried in a paragraph, and wrapped in parenthesis no less:

... But unfortunately they’re not so great at installing dependencies written in other languages (we call these external dependencies). ...

I'm sure it's a fine project. However, the article itself is not great at explaining the value proposition.

Riff is a tool that we built to help developers write software without having to wrangle dependencies or complicated configuration. It’s built to enable you to clone a project and get to work in seconds. ...

The title specifically mentions Rust projects. The main competition there is Cargo, which does exactly what the quote above claims. It's not at all clear what Riff offers over Cargo.

Allen described his work as a consultant when he goes into a new organisation:

- First he observes

- Then he would try to identify the biggest problem

- Then he would try change it (i.e. run an experiment)

- Then if that works, run another experiment

- If it doesn’t work, go back

It's probably no accident, but this is pretty close to the scientific method.

Unlike Rust, however, Alumina is not memory-safe and it requires manual memory management.

From what I gather, it might be more accurate to say that Alumina has no ownership model. Rust requires manual memory management, but offers the ownership model as a compile-time tool for doing so.

It would actually be pretty interesting to see some experimentation around alternative ownership models.

The biggest problem the anti-Agile crowd has is that:

1. They have no replacement methodology.

2. Even if they did, it has no name.

I get that lots of people dislike Agile and what it has come to mean in certain quarters. But I have yet to see a cogent, actionable response. Criticism is well and good, but changing a bad situation requires a better idea.

But "leave me, the beleaguered, over-meetinged, over-instrumented developer, the hell alone" is not a methodology, and it's not something any sane business is going to sign up for.

Many of the comments here against Agile really attack process itself. Not particular processes, but the notion that there is a process that is followed, the same way every time. And extra scorn is heaped on process attached to metrics.

Casablanca is widely remembered as one of the greatest films of all time, coming in at #2 on the AFI’s top 100 list and similarly regarded by many other critics. You can quibble with its exact rank, but it’s at least undeniable how iconic Casablanca remains. Even now, more than 70 years after its 1942 release, few movies have ever produced as many enduring quotes.

The link to the AFI top 100 appears to have moved here:

https://www.afi.com/afis-100-years-100-movies/

The top movie is Citizen Kane, released one year prior to Casablanca (1941). The most recent movie on the list, released in 1994, was Fargo.

When New York Pride festivities kicked off on 24 June, I was aware that monkeypox was an emerging issue – especially for gay men – but I was also under the impression that the number of cases in the city was relatively small. What I didn’t understand was how absolutely dismal testing capacity was: at that point, the city only had capacity to process ten tests a day.

I had sex with several guys over the weekend. Then a week later, on 1 July, I started feeling very fatigued. I had a high fever with chills and muscle aches, and my lymph nodes were so swollen they were protruding two inches out of my throat.

The connection between the Pride event and the spread of monkeypox seems like something that public health officials may want to consider. Entire industries were shut down for extended periods of time in an attempt to stop the spread of COVID. There's ample precedent now.

Google is still an advertising tech company. As such it's highly levered to two things:

1. The fluctuations in stock prices. Like many tech companies, Google uses its shares in place of currency. This work great when prices are going up.

2. Business spending on advertising. Despite ambitions in other areas, the company still just mostly sells ads. One of the first things companies cut back on when they start hurting is advertising.

When the stock market declines because the business cycle turns, Google gets a double whammy. In many ways, it's the canary's canary in the coal mine. Doubly levered to the business cycle.

There is such a taboo around pay cuts, that then the inevitable downturn happens, the only option is to first stop hiring and then start laying off.

I expect GOOG to be the epicenter of tech worker pain for this leg of the cycle.

During these booms, tech leaders take on a mythological quality. To even suggest that they could begin a protracted decline seems absurd. But it has happened time and again. Maybe it's this time or the next cycle that does it, but there's no version of the future where GOOG retains its dominating position.

It's not just the Saudis doing crazy stuff like this. From the Wikipedia article On Neom, I found this:

Belmont is a proposed planned city in the Phoenix metropolitan area of Arizona, United States. The development, a partnership between billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and local real estate investors, will be a "smart city" designed around emerging technologies.[1] It will be located in the West Valley area, along Interstate 10 near Tonopah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont,_Arizona

That's some of the driest, hottest land anywhere in the US and an extremely fragile ecosystem. The ongoing Colorado River crisis just makes this more of a head-scratcher. Maybe not at the same scale, but definitely a similar sense of leading with technology rather than the problem.

There's a simple way around that. Nothing to install. Nothing to update.

Just go to SO and use its search bar. It's actually quite good.

I mean, you know that's where you'll want to find the answer anyway - not some random corporate webpage or ad-infested splog. Why not cut out the middle man?

Only if that fails do I bother with Google.

Old Man and the Sea. Was forced to read it in high school and promptly forgot it. Read it again and it's amazing. A short but big story about wants vs. needs with a surprising but inevitable ending.

Before that, The Great Gatsby. Same thing - forced to read earlier, then decided to read again. I missed so much about it the first time around.

It's kind of sad how education can tarnish classics in this way.

To re-iterate another commenter, Code by Prezold is surprisingly good (based on first few dozen pages). I had low expectations based on what seemed like hype, but so far it's holding up. It reminds me of the way that James Burke in his series Connections wove what seemed to be entirely disconnected technological threads together.