brianmcc

I don't think anyone's saying unions can do that? They can protect workers and provide some balance in the power dynamics, but there absolutely are limits.

No it's more because things have gotten worse. When people's parents could get an X-bedroomed house on a single parent's income, which they grew up in and developed their sense of aspiration and normality, but they cannot do so with joint really high incomes, there's a very tangible sense of progress having not just stalled but gone backwards.

Plus the Scottish Govt have removed the peak/off-peak ticket split, everything is now priced at off-peak - i.e. cheaper - rates.

Doesn't necessarily impact season ticket holders but it's been a pretty good move for the most part, and a well received change.

"Lots of the team knows Postgres really well, nobody knows Kafka at all yet" is also an underrated factor in making choices. "Kafka was the ideal technical choice but we screwed up the implementation through well-intentioned inexperience" being an all too plausible outcome.

The technologically inept get QR codes tattooed on their foreheads.

Perl CGI FTW! :-D

Sure I mean it's not a crime or anything, just highlighting you're highly unlikely to get anything like the perspective, wisdom, insight, that - for example - an 80 year old might share.

You could ask a 5 year old for opinions, they're not going to be very well informed.

Interesting choice of words in the original article and headline here - to "seal one's fate" feels quite pessimistic and doom-laden. Why not something like "secure its future"?

Sure, just that stories about "paying down tech debt" are an implicit admission of flaws and shortcuts and "doing it again because it wasn't done right initially".

Which is all true but the concept of making deliberate trade offs for speed and expedience invariably gets lost.

Stories about ongoing improvement - tech enhancement - just get seen as more positive. Plus that term covers both remediating original shortcut choices as well as new engineering improvements arising.

As something of an AI skeptic the thing that bothers me most is the wholesale gullibility and credulity of leaders. Incredible claims IMO require incredible levels of evidence, not just "tech bros with vested interests tell us this, it must be so!".

A level of general experimentation by companies and other organizations is clearly warranted, and it should be marked accordingly. This just isn't happening in a lot of places: "become 10x more productive or bye-bye" is just totally ludicrous stance to take.

So it's good to see some reports coming out where some attempt at actual measurement and assessment of efficacy has been made.

Ironically, screen sharing on zoom whilst all colocated can be less bad than sitting round a gigantic TV type screen for calls where screen content is needed :-|

A total tangent but it's amazing how more palatable "tech enhancement" is in planning, management chats, etc., than anything involving the term "tech debt"

Sadly yes - "When America sneezes, the World catches cold"

I mean maybe if you hear it a lot, there's a reason for that?

Frameworks may not bring magical perfection but they bring a lot of objective benefit to the table.

Then they half press the shutter button and achieve only a brief moment of auto focus :-D

> The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us

This is why my Canon 80D sits and gathers dust. Too many family moments fluffed, vs my Android's basically 100% hit rate. Yes this is largely a skill issue on my part, which is sad, but modern phone photos are more than adequate these days.

Wife: good day at the office dear?

Me: yep argued with some strangers on HN about how daft/wise UK's paracetamol laws are, highly fulfilling!

:-)

You can buy two packs of 16 each, enough for 4 days usage at 2 per dose, 4 times per day, after which point if you still need them you maybe have a bigger problem. Or can just restock. What's "fantastically stupid" about it?

Ah that distinct phase of the Gartner Hype Cycle where CEOs claim massive amounts of use of Technology X regardless of whatever the underlying reality is

It could but you need a body of evidence for it, plus credible pathways to explain it. So far the greater weight seems to be behind "use it or lose it".

Treat it as the common good and societal investment it actually is, and fund it from central taxation like plenty of other countries do. Problem solved!

This is a really good point.

It rather reminds me of a recent Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad) interview where he lamented what seems to be an emerging excess focus on villains, not "good guys" - and making them way too glamorous:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/vince-gilligan-...

If our fiction is only ever showing us dystopias and villains - it's not hard to see how that could be problematic for the wider collective psyche...

Or more, if Canadians travel to Europe instead of the US

FWIW I do think you're right that we should treat a new entrant to the (mainstream) market with at the very least some "optimistic skepticism".

Personally I'd like to see some stronger competition in the market and wish them well, but I'd also like to see how the dust settles and some build-up of evidence for reliability etc when properly assessed against other makers.

OK but US really is in a world of its own these for a lot of things. In the UK it's very common to get 0% interest installments.

Which is not to have a go at the US, but to just make the point that buying domestic appliances is not a simple "bad credit" case. Unlike chicken wings.

Sorry no but domestic white goods such as TVs, fridges, laundry appliances, etc are the perfect use case for small credit plans where doing without or "saving up" is a poor alternative, and sensible non-extortionate credit options have been around for literally decades for this reason.

Agree re chicken wings but there are plenty of reasonable and responsible credit options for spreading payments for a relatively unusual purchase - at least, not a daily or weekly necessity - like a TV

Way to start a Friday argument :-D

FWIW - no it's not an absolute waste of time. But, it's arguably more dogmatic than is realistic for most teams.

And I would say it's certainly not required for an elegant readable and high quality codebase. But it has ideas which are worth absorbing.

+1

I think "code is carefully designed AND has a bunch of decent tests" places a codebase ahead of many tbh, even now, regardless of how it's produced

> ... TDD is unlikely to help you solve problems that are beyond incremental changes.

Thank you for expressing this niggling problem with TDD. Personally I just cannot use it for "new stuff", I need to explore and create direct with "real" code for anything non-obvious.