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That sounds amazing. I aspire to get a setup like yours. I am on a Pixel with the stock OS and I can't stand the way Google is pushing AI into everything on my phone.

I haven't switched it to Graphene OS yet because I read that there are issues with NFC and a few other things. I assume this new phone won't have those problems so I think that will be my catalyst to do a big overhaul.

I've seen some pretty good React codebases and I've seen plenty of backend spaghetti code. In all cases it's not the tools, it's the programmers and usually it's layers and layers of people not taking the time to write clean code. Probably because their management doesn't value it or they don't have someone with the experience necessary to guide them towards clean code.

I disagree. With classes, everything was stateful (because, y'know, classes). People were doing all sorts of crazy thing with the lifecycle methods and it was always a pain to have to remember the "this scope" and bind your event handlers. I saw so many bugs written by people who lost track of what "this" was.

Both paradigms have foot guns but having used both I much prefer the hook version.

most great engineers will actively work with management to make sure they're not single points of failure!

Sure, but that is a load bearing "great" for sure. Not every company is staffed with great, selfless engineers.

I'm an engineer and I've worked at companies with engineers who actively resisted making themselves not a single point of failure because it gave them control and job security. I think it's not uncommon to have these types at companies and it really sucks when they have their management Stockholm syndromed because they make it hard for all the other "great" engineers to do their jobs.

This comment really nicely captures how I feel about this. There's something to be said about good faith and knowing what the spirit of the agreement is.

There are some comments here saying stuff like "these compliance forms are ridiculous and are often just bureaucratic nonsense" and you see comments advocating for playing dumb and answering in bad faith and there you go.

I see there being a bit of an attitude of "everyone is doing it" to justify also doing it just to compete because you're at a disadvantage if you don't. And that's not entirely wrong but it sucks and I personally will avoid competing in that way. Probably that means not much sales in my career. Or science, but that's another topic...

Yeah I came away feeling like this was clickbait. Based on the title I expected to read something about the app stores quietly injecting telemetry in your extension or something like that. Something outside of the developer's control or being done quietly by default as part of the standard packaging and delivery pipeline.

What the author described was very much not that. What they described was developers making a conscious decision to add untrusted code to their extension without properly verifying it or following security best practices.

A more accurate title would be something like "It's hard to trust browser extensions, developers are bombarded with offers of easy money and may negligently add malware/adware"

Bloody shame, OpsWorks was a great service in my experience. I built a few clusters with it before Kubernetes and terraform were a thing.

That said, I heard from folks at AWS that it was not well maintained and a bit of a mess behind the scenes. I can't say I'm surprised it's being shut down given where the technology landscape has shifted since the service was originally offered.

RIP OpsWorks.

Back when I was a junior developer, there was a smoke test in our pipeline that never passed. I recall asking, “Why is this test failing?” The Senior Developer I was pairing with answered, “Ohhh, that one, yeah it hardly ever passes.” From that moment on, every time I saw a CI failure, I wondered: “Is this a flaky test, or a genuine failure?”

This is a really key insight. It erodes trust in the entire test suite and will lead to false negatives. If I couldn't get the time budget to fix the test, I'd delete it. I think a flaky test is worse than nothing.

as evidenced by the literally free taxi service that is just being given out to many people in SF right now.

You realize that it's only free while they test and it's not going to be free forever, right? In fact, the protests are in response to a decision which allowed the companies to start charging for driver-less rides, so that is already changing.

Hard to say which way people will go overall. I personally am no longer a fan of driver-less cars. I used to be but now I see it as a doubling down of car-dependence. I could see a nasty rebound effect [1] through increased convenience and a lot of other negative consequences if cities adapt their infrastructure to cater to those vehicles. History repeating itself for "automobile progress." A possible second coming of demolishing our cities and neighborhoods to make way for cars. Yeah I know most if not all of the arguments for how the technology will just fix all the problems and make everything about cars better, I used to make those arguments myself. I don't believe them anymore.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

Looks like oil industry astroturfing [1] to me. The group that published this (GWPF) is basically an anthropogenic climate change denying lobby group that refuses to reveal its funding sources [2].

Yeah, color me skeptical about their publication that is essentially saying gas systems are better than electric heat pumps for the environment.

- [1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOi05zDO4yw)

- [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Warming_Policy_Foun...)

It's surprisingly difficult to separate salt from water to the point that it's drinkable. That difficulty translates to it being very costly and that cost is so prohibitive that most places will choose another option. Like even building massive pipelines to transport water across 1000's of kilometers is probably going to be a better option. It's pretty much always going to be more economical to use the water that the earth is naturally desalinating for us.

You're referring to [this](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3949367_The_evolved...)

Which was also really cool!

As with Thompson's FPGA exploiting some subtle physical properties of the device, Layzell found that evolved circuits could rely on external factors. For example, whilst trying to evolve an oscillator Bird and Layzell discovered that evolution was using part of the circuit for a radio antenna, and picking up emissions from the environment [18]. Layzell also found that evolved circuits were sensitive to whether or not a soldering iron was plugged in (not even switched on) in another part of the room[19]. ...

However, OP was actually referring to an experiment by Dr Adrian Thompson which was different but also sort of similar. The FPGA evolved by Thompson ended up depending on parts of the circuit that were disconnected from the main circuit but still affected its operation. It probably relied on electromagnetic properties, so was sort of a radio, but it did not rely on the clock of a nearby computer.

[damninteresting.com did a really interesting writeup about this](https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/)

Both were really cool, unexpected behaviors of evolved hardware systems.

I agree it's hopeful. Creating more renewable energy is part of the path forward. But this doesn't solve all of our problems. We still have many other resource and pollution problems that this doesn't solve. Our houses, cars and planes and all the infrastructure supporting these things require materials which are damaging our climate from their extraction and production. This won't go away even if energy was limitless.

Sounds grim, but I think we can still be optimistic because we have a solution that addresses pretty much all of that: cut back excessive consumption. I'm optimistic that we have so much more than we need that we could cut back to sustainable levels and still live really good lives compared to what humans have lived for most of history.

Humans are freaking incredible, miracles that boggles the mind to consider how we even exist. I'm not sure why we pretend otherwise.

This cuts both ways. We're super special at both creating and destroying. I don't see OP as hating on humans in general. They are concerned that we are using our super amazing talents the wrong way and want us to be even better.

Why would anyone buy from your competitors when they can get a more durable panel for the same cost from you?

Uhh, there are plenty of examples of this not happening already. Monopolies and oligopolies prevent this type of competition. Consumers don't always prefer quality and sustainability because we have holes in our system which prevent the true cost of things from being born by the consumer.

It's incredibly common.

This really resonated with me:

This kind of language is omnipresent in local politics. Where I am, one candidate wants “to restore … decision-making for all residents and businesses, not just the special few.” Another says, “It is essential that the citizens and that the neighborhood leaders have … a meaningful voice at the table.” A third wants to “help you preserve your neighborhood’s character.” One candidate’s campaign website forcefully rails against “behind-the-scenes special interests” opposed to the interests of “citizens.”

It's a bit distressing reading this and thinking of all the sleep debt I've had, especially in my late teens and early 20's when I had school and started a career. Especially my teenage years when I was still developing. I never thought it could be serious or permanent. Alas, all I can do is try to prioritize my sleep now. At least I have made significant improvements recently :)

I agree. I was unsure if the author meant db cursors which would be keeping transactions alive. That has obvious scaling issues. But reading the comments here has me convinced they are talking about application generated cursors. I think this is a pretty reasonable confusion and it would benefit from added clarity, like naming them differently.

The title of this article is clickbait. You didn't build a receipt printer, you bought and used one.

And I'm particularly disappointed because I've been looking to actually build a thermal printer and your clickbait title got my hopes up.

Here:

Unfortunately, unless we're all going back to a society in which people can only produce things that are physically scarce, like food, we need artificial scarcity

You said that unless we have artificial scarcity, we are all going back to a society where people only produce physically scarce things.

You're making a huge logical leap assuming that artificial scarcity is the only reason that we produce non-physical goods, and that's easily contradicted by the existence of FOSS. There are plenty of creators who create things for all sorts of reasons besides profit. And in many cases, there are people who want to create free things and can't because of things like patents and IP trolls preventing them from doing it.