aahortwwy

At the very least we would've had the build tooling and infrastructure to support containers from the get-go, rather than having to migrate from zips to containers.

Speculative, but had we used containers from the start we would likely have built "fatter" Lambdas running full web servers with an extant web framework (someone else in this thread mentioned Flask - we don't use anything like that, we have one Lambda per... function, and our functions just consume the raw Lambda event).

No, I'm not talking about "preference". People don't "prefer" to live paycheck-to-paycheck, with any meager savings they're able to accumulate being consumed by unplanned expenses until they're eventually forced to take on debt to make ends meet - which only exacerbates the problem by reducing their cash flow even further.

"Just move" or "just get a new job" is great advice for a highly mobile household where the workers have skills in high demand (e.g. young tech workers with no dependents).

For a great many people, "just move" is terrible advice. Moving is financially burdensome, socially disruptive, at times irresponsible, and at other times impossible. Not everyone has the option of just picking up and moving to a place that's more economically viable. They may not have the money to move. They may have obligations tying them to a particular geographical area. There might be legal barriers preventing them from moving.

"Just get a new job" is similarly terrible advice for most workers, for whom a job is not an easily disposable or replaceable thing. It's nice to work in software, where anyone with a reasonable network can organize half a dozen interviews next week with close to no effort. Most people aren't in software, though. A friend with a STEM PhD recently spent 18 months looking for a new job. Now think about people who have less desirable education or skills. "Just get a new job" is not advice that they can act on easily; certainly not quickly in response to rising fuel prices.

I was going to write a long thing here about autonomy and economic circumstances, but I can't really be bothered. In short: people really don't like having their entire lives disrupted, and we shouldn't be building a society that expects that of the average person.

Not all places do this; the place I currently work only rewards leaders for "impact" and people have the option of whether to take on leadership responsibilities.

Places that reward non-leaders for impact are doing so intentionally to encourage people to self-organize into teams that produce the most value for the business. The theory being that the people on the ground often have a clearer view of whether value is being created than the various layers of middle management do. If you work in a place like this it's actually part of your job to stay plugged in to the business side and determine whether you're working on something valuable or not.

If petrol were 10x the current price, you wouldn't commute that distance. You'd move or get a different job.

This doesn't happen in practice. Instead, people get stuck in poverty traps.

We've been using a serverless stack on AWS for a while (API Gateway, Lambda, S3, SQS, RDS) and it's been a good experience overall.

I can't recommend Serverless Framework. The abstractions are leaky and it's quite opinionated about architecture. We regularly need to step away from Serverless Framework to use various features offered by AWS. Meanwhile, it's led us to build an infrastructure that reflects our org chart in some really unpleasant ways. I wish we'd used AWS CDK from the start.

Lambda currently makes sense for us cost-wise, but we are approaching an inflection point where that will no longer be true (something like Fargate will probably be cheaper). Problem is, the cost of migrating from Lambda to Fargate will be non-trivial for us. I wish we'd used containers on Lambda from the start.

We struggle regularly with global state in the Lambda runtime. Some devs avoid it assiduously, which can result in costly inefficiencies which have bitten us badly a few times (think hitting API limits due to calls happening on each Lambda invocation rather than only when needed). Other devs make use of global state for efficiency benefits, which then bites us by causing difficult-to-reproduce bugs. I don't think there's a great solution to this in the Lambda runtime.

Overall I think the benefits of security, process isolation, scaling, cost, etc. have all made it worth it, but there are things I would do differently if I was setting up a project from scratch.

Also related: the effect of exposure to pro-ana communities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-ana#Effect

All the kids that I knew who did this have grown up to be completely normal adults.

Some kids did this and didn't grow up, because someone in their online community committed suicide and that prompted them to do the same.

This is a real problem. It's been a problem since the 90s, yes, but it's getting worse.

No one seems to know how to get interviews right.

Plenty of people do, but good interview processes are highly context-dependent and not trivially transferable.

And most companies just cargo-cult something associated with a name brand, then tweak it to something they're personally comfortable conducting.

I'll quote myself from an old comment:

Every time one of these interviewing posts bubbles up I skim it to see if the author mentions things like: company size, team composition, the nature of the work the team is doing, the nature of the industry the company exists in, the way hiring decisions are made, the desired properties of their hiring process, their offer rate, acceptance rate, turnover rate, the amount of time positions tend to stay open for, or really just anything that would offer some context on what, specifically, their interview process is optimized for or achieving.

Nine times out of ten that stuff is absent and the post is just a bunch of opinion and conjecture.

This post is more of the same.

It's not capitalism, it's managerialism.

Comments on Workplace, the company’s internal version of Facebook for employees, came flying in. “This is war-time, we need a war-time CEO,” one wrote. “Beast mode activated,” a second employee posted.

Others couldn’t believe what they’d just heard. “Did Mark just say there are a bunch of people at this company that don’t belong here[?]” a staffer asked. Another responded: “Who hired them?”

Two sorts of responses, emotionally opposed, but both coming from people V. Rao might categorize as "clueless" in The Gervais Principle.

Social media giant Facebook has seen its daily active users (DAUs) drop for the first time in its 18-year history.

Facebook's owner Meta Platforms says DAUs fell to 1.929bn in the three months to the end of December [2021], compared to 1.930bn in the previous quarter.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60238565

All dependencies should be injected (and possibly wrapped with custom interfaces, if they're libraries).

All globals should be configurable (most codebases I've seen have a ton of hidden globals).

All side effects should be isolated.

"Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

Value selling isn't an option for most employees. Try it in a typical salary negotiation and you'll get funny looks followed by a repeat of their standard offer.

If I don't think the change is worth it or the vulnerability is relevant, I can go to the Snyk site and mark a vulnerability to be ignored, or even tell it to ignore it for a month or whatever.

I am currently fighting with our security team because they refuse to allow developers to do this, and instead require my team to file tickets with their team, wait hours for that ticket to be picked up, explain why a thing is a false positive to a person who doesn't understand the codebase they're working on, and hope that person feels that the finding should be ignored.

I do not work at a large company.

This is greatly exacerbated by the fact that Snyk - like all package scanners - primarily flags false positives. When you start digging in to what it flags you'll find that a lot of the vulnerabilities aren't reasonably exploitable, or the impact is questionable, or you can't repro the issue. Those that do legitimately affect the underlying library often don't affect your usage of that library. I'd estimate our false positive rate is >90%. So when we get a finding our options are to go through that costly and disruptive process I mentioned above, or just upgrade the dependency (which carries associated risk of breaking shit in production).

These tools emphasize the quantity of findings they produce, and quietly ignore the quality. As soon as you have any divergence in motivations or incentives between the people running the scanner and the people being blocked by the scanner those low quality findings become incredibly costly.

Most people read these things because it feels good to read them, not because it provides any lasting benefit.

It makes sense that these productivity entertainment books include the simplest, least controversial ideas only. Anything else would reduce the size of their TAM.

Maybe you just downloaded a bunch of files into your cwd and now you're going to run a script to process them.

"Chemical imbalance" isn't actually taught as the root cause of depression.

The article contradicts this.

If you have a broken arm a cast can be helpful during the healing process, but a cast does not heal a broken arm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Properties_of_water#Triple_p...

You don't think so? I worry that it will be very effective, that it will be passively accepted by the public, and that we will see widespread injustice as a result.

That doesn't really matter.

The point Turnbull was making is something along these lines: https://xkcd.com/538/

No, they can't change the laws of mathematics to make all encryption have a government backdoor. They don't have to, though. They can just legislate to make use of non-backdoored encryption criminal. And if they want to make generating random streams of bytes a crime they can probably do that too.

It's not idiotic, it's authoritarian.

"Well, the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia." - Malcolm Turnbull, Former Australian Prime Minister.

This is their attitude.

They will legislate to achieve the outcome they want. If that means making it criminal to use encryption without backdoors, they will do that. If it means making it criminal to use P2P technology, they will do that.

They have and will use control over mainstream infrastructure (Internet traffic, software distribution channels, etc.). Use of non-mainstream infrastructure will be made increasingly difficult and used as an indicator of guilt.

The more sophisticated the technical workarounds required, the fewer people will be capable of using those workarounds, and even fewer people will be capable of building those workarounds. Fewer people are easier to control.

TrueCrypt, Lavabit, etc.

Minecraft, Terraria, Rust, ARK, Arma, Chivalry, Valheim, Factorio, most Valve games.

You're absolutely right.

Most organizations do a completely hopeless job of implementing compliance sensibly. Those responsible for compliance tend to choose a solution that's scalable for them with zero regard for the inefficiencies they're introducing elsewhere in the organization.

Solving compliance sensibly provides organizations with a substantial, long-term competitive advantage. Nobody working in compliance seems to care.

They are referring to software structure and decomposition.

This is a hard problem that spans architectures; you can have a poorly factored microservice architecture, just as you can have a poorly factored monolith.

These two posts from Shopify are good:

https://shopify.engineering/deconstructing-monolith-designin...

https://shopify.engineering/shopify-monolith

Nah, depositors should just use smart contracts to ensure they don't get screwed. /s

Scleral lenses are just contact lenses that sit on the sclera. They exist and are used for vision correction by people with certain eye conditions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scleral_lens

Mojo’s lenses do have a scleral design which makes sense, it’s one of the more comfortable hard contact designs (though quite invasive).

Discrete Mathematics with Applications by Epp. Chapters 5, 7, 10.

Fundamentals of Database Systems by Elmasri & Navathe. Part 2.

The union I was in most recently had dedicated time for discussing and voting on matters important to members, and scheduled negotiations between our chosen representatives and our employer.

I preferred that to being distracted at work.

If you don’t want that for yourself, then you can stick to sports and weather. That’s fine too!

If I had a private office and didn't have to block out background conversation with noise-cancelling headphones and loud music that would be fine, yeah.

Happy I can mainly work from home nowadays.