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Can you cite this in some way? Given he's shown the competence to write and typeset an impressive series of books, I find this claim pretty hard to believe.

shows a moderator of /r/rails rewriting history, implying Dave not going to RailsConf 2022 was his fault, along with airing bizarre grievances like "We inserted snark at DHH in a Rails release candidate."

Yeah, I've unfortunately been watching this in real time over the years, and the bad faith from these guys is just on another level. First, they were fairly overt about what they'd done because they were proud of it. Later, they mischaracterized it through rewriting history. And these days, they just don't talk about it at all (notably, there isn't a word about it in the article linked above).

Here's another example: the original Reddit thread from 2022 talking about DHH being uninvited, where the same person abused his moderator powers by actually just outright banning anyone who dared to talk about why it actually happened:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/t5u3fe/dhh_is_cancel...

Amanda Perino is insanely great. Money is actually being spent on Marketing and Tutorial as well as documentation. More value output per dollar, which in turns means more sponsor willing to invest.

Agreed, they're doing great. Just an example of great operational aptitude in even the fine details that most people wouldn't even notice:

At Rails World, sponsor booths were mixed right in with the lunch area, and lunch was meant to be eaten on the go, so as to prevent siloing at sit down tables. The net effect was a ton of foot traffic through the expo floor, making sponsors really feel like they got good value for their money. (This was also good for attendees, because it means you meet a lot more people.)

Contrast to RailsConf again, where the sponsorship area was off in a distant corner of the venue, or at best in a transitionary area that people would walk through for 15 seconds on their way to lunch. People in the booths could go entire days talking to just a handful of people, making the value proposition extremely dubious.

This is a small detail that most conference organizers wouldn't even think of, but Rails World nailed it 2/2 years so far.

I don't know as much about the docs/tutorials/marketing investments, but I have confidence that the money is being spent well.

The plan with Rails World is that it'll alternate between continents. Rails World 2023 was in Amsterdam, 2024 was in Toronto, and 2025 will be back in Amsterdam.

Japan has RubyKaigi and some other great conferences already. Europe still has a few, but nowhere near as many as the old days. Lots of great European developers who are still into Rails though, so the alternation feels like a good compromise.

Rough timeline of events:

* Thinking they held all the cards, RailsConf uninvited DHH from the conference in 2022. They would never admit this, but the reasons were extremely petty, and all due to Ruby Central's (organizer of RailsConf and RubyConf) hyperpartisan nature. For example, DHH dared to suggest the audacious policy of "no politics at work" during a year where extreme politicization ran rampant. This may sound like an exaggeration, and I wish it were, but it's not.

* In 2023, the first Rails World was held in Amsterdam, organized by a new entity called the Rails Foundation (created by DHH and a number of other pioneers). It was a vastly better conference. By this time, RailsConf had all but eliminated their technical track in favor of "soft" subject matter. Amenities like coffee were only available during a tight ~30 minute window in the morning. The food was awful. And this despite tickets not being cheap. At Rails World by contrast, the talks were world class, the company/community excellent, and the snacks/food/amenities plentiful and top tier.

* Rails World was a smash success while RailsConf 2023 was unambiguously, not. One sold out in <10 minutes, the other was sparsely attended at best. Sponsors started moving.

* The same pattern repeated in 2024, except worse. While Rails World 2023 has been a pilot even with relatively few attendees, far more tickets were allowed for 2024, and even with the additional capacity, it still sold out in minutes. Not only was DHH keynoting, but all talks and the event itself were of the highest possible quality bar.

Meanwhile, Ruby Central was making some very poor financial decisions. For example, they reportedly gave up a ~half million dollar deposit on a Texas venue for 2023 so they could move the conference to San Diego. Once again, for political reasons (in their world view, Texas = evil, despite some the organizers themselves choosing to live there).

With the trend lines moving in all the wrong directions, there was no way that RailsConf was going to survive much longer anyway, so they decided to call it quits for 2025.

Obviously, RubyCentral had made their 2022 decision to uninvite DHH banking on him not deciding to start his own conference, but he did, and it turned out that he held all the cards, not them. There was a lot of unnecessary strife involved in the whole process, but in the end, the Rails community has landed in a much better place.

It's hard to tell given the private stock and all, but the article mentions that there's reason to believe the company hasn't taken quite as much of a haircut as comparable ones that are already on the public markets:

In March, Fidelity, required to publicly update the value of its holdings, marked down Stripe by 20%. Most unicorns—startups valued at $1 billion or more—are trading on the secondary markets at 20% to 40% discounts to their last official venture capital rounds. But Stripe’s shares remain hard for new investors to obtain and in high demand, with recent transactions implying a valuation of as much as $165 billion, per New York–based EquityZen, a marketplace for pre-IPO shares.

Well spotted. Based on this wording:

each person known by us to be the beneficial owner of more than 5% of the outstanding shares of our Class A or Class B common stock; and

It seems that Dmitriy owns less than 5%.

As usual though, the wording in here is unnecessarily opaque and overcomplicated — it's possible there's some other technicality that allows him to be omitted from the list.

Yeah. My comments are from before Alvaro started commenting in this thread, and I've since changed my position based on reading his responses.

He also seems to be interested in leveraging the trademarks to force governance changes on the core team and PGCAC.

This is it. The strategy was to acquire the trademarks and then use them as leverage to force the dissolution of Postgres Core and its associated organizations, to be replaced with a new power structure which includes him as a key member.

The very last part is me editorializing somewhat (although it's not very much of a stretch), but he's been quite explicit about the rest of it.

Just to play devil's advocate — OOC, what do you think the end game for Álvaro would be under this scenario?

Under the most cynical interpretation, I guess he'd convert Ongres from a Postgres consultancy to a trademark troll and sue other companies who try to use "Postgres"? Maybe, but that's a pretty serious professional change, and seems a little unlikely, especially given that's a considerable chance that he loses the trademark again if it does end up in court.

For my money, the most likely explanation is that it was a land grab move for prestige purposes that went too far. (And one which may backfire as Google ties this press release to his name.)

It's worth noting that (from the article) the offender in this case isn't some gigantic organization like Amazon — it's basically one guy, and one who considers himself to be a member in good standing whose part of the Postgres community.

I'd hazard a guess that by taking this public, the Postgres team is trying to create some pressure on him through public opinion in the hope that he sees reason and it doesn't have to become a long and arduous legal battle which benefits no one.

And it really shouldn't have to. It's not clear what Álvaro's actual motives are in trying to usurp the Postgres trademark — it could be some cynical profiteering thing, but hopefully it was just some momentary hubris that can still be walked back and resolved amicably.

Exactly this. The city's budget was $6.4B in 2010, and $12.6B for 2021-2022, which is down from $13.7B for 2020-2021 (only because of Corona). That's a _doubling_ in a decade, and speaking somewhat subjectively as someone who's been here the entire time, all public services and the state of the streets have continued getting worse. Even if you don't buy that, it's absolutely certain that nothing has gotten better.

It's not clear how SF can escape the situation, but there are a few things that are absolutely certain, and one of them is that more money is not going to fix the problem. We need a different approach.

Pretty much this. Regardless of how you feel about Uber/Lyft drivers' ability to access benefits, if the bill that does it has this many exemptions, you should oppose it on that basis alone.

The long exemption list is a naked method of making sure that AB5 only targets its intended victims — Uber and Lyft, without actually having to mention them by name. If this law is generally a good idea, then why should it have required any exemptions at all?

The ethical version of AB5 would have been to have California (and the broader US) move have a single payer healthcare system, paid for by taxes, as it already is for a huge portion (but not all) of the population. That way, everyone gets access to health care, and everyone pays for it.

But that's hard to do, so California's cynical lawmakers "solve" the problem by passing the buck in a much simpler way: pass regulation to target their scapegoats du jour (as an assemblyperson, I get _my_ healthcare from the state, but it's _those guys_ who are bad! yeah!) with laser precision through special carveouts. Thus AB5 is born.

Was the COO fired? It sounds like she was, reading this article.

Knowing nothing about the internals at Dropbox, it does sound like it (on the surface at least). Having worked at a couple major tech companies now, executives never get fired. They "step down", or go on sabbatical ... and never come back. The usual hallmark of the action is that the email about it isn't sent by the leaving executive themselves, it's sent by their boss.

Normal employees don't tend to have these options, but executives are so high profile that it seems to be an informalized practice for both company and executive to save face. It's hard to worry about them too much though because their exit package is likely more than than most of us could make given ten years.

Out of curiosity, is there something lower cost/better that employees who have recently quit or been laid off should look into?

Well, it feels weird to defend Instagram, but here we go. The important lines from the article are these ones:

Instagram confirmed to Newsbeat that Kevin's handle had been changed in line with its policy.

It allows it to make changes to an account if it's been inactive for a certain amount of time.

I tried going to the guy's new Instagram [1], but couldn't see any posts there at all. I visited his Twitter [2] instead, and except for a few posts he made from the exciting run in the last 24 hours, he hadn't tweeted since 2013.

I don't think they did a bad thing here — it's their platform, and they have some incentive to encourage a more lively and current community. Although it seems minor, one facet of this might be to help big users reclaim better names from the huge pool of defunct ones out there, especially given that Instagram has gotten so big that finding anything that's not a conflict is difficult.

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[1] https://www.instagram.com/_sussexroyal_/

[2] https://twitter.com/Sussexroyal/

This article nails it:

Open offices clearly suck. So why are you (most likely) still working in one? Behind all the fluff, there is a simple explanation: they save insane amounts of money.

In the beginning, there was a lot of talk about open offices producing more collaborative environments, and I'm willing to give this charitable credence and believe that some people might really have thought that at the time. It was an emerging idea and the complete ramifications were not really understood.

These days though, I don't think anyone ingenuous would defend that idea anymore — it's all about money, and this is doubly so in dense tech hot spots like San Francisco where real estate commands a huge premium.

My large company is entirely open office, and has even been known to downsize standard desk size in order to get more of them into the same area. It's annoying, and there's no question that it creates a large productivity tax (desks are packed tightly enough that even a small group of people having a conversation at normal voice levels three rows over is pretty disrupting), but it mostly works, and giving everyone their own office in our central location would be pretty much financially infeasible. You learn to start working around it as best you can with sound insulating headphones, working from home where possible, or even reserving the occasional meeting room when you can.

I find some comedy in the fact that my parent's generation used to complain non-stop about being ousted form their offices and into cubicle farms. These days, my generation would kill for cubicles. Even a couple drawers to store a few personal items are a fantasy at this point.

The Oscar-winning director presents a sympathetic portrait of the Silicon Valley CEO who fooled the world into believing she had built a better blood test

I really don't know how to feel how to feel about that one. The final jury is out until we get to see the new series of course, but I hope he didn't portray her as too sympathetic.

I recently finished Carreyrou’s book and found it legitimately disturbing. Holmes and Balwani didn't just lie and cover up bad results, but actively crucified any of their employees who dared question what they were doing in a way that's hard to interpret as anything except sinister malice.

This might be best exemplified by Tyler Shultz, who ended up spending $400k in legal fees defending himself from Holmes and her lawyers [1]. Carreyrou was harassed by their legal team to suppress the stories that eventually led to Theranos' exposure, and you can't help but think throughout the book that the only way he could've done what he did was having the counter-legal team of the WSJ available, and deep pockets to fund it. Throughout the reveal process, anyone who was thought to be possibly leaking information was threatened with recriminatory lawsuits, and in America's shining light of a legal system any kind of company-on-individual action is a recipe for misery and bankruptcy.

Holmes is one of the least sympathetic people I can imagine, and it'd be unfortunate (and a disservice to any of the people whose life she either destroyed [2] or tried to destroy) if Gibney improperly represented that through some kind of misguided artistic notion, especially given that there's a non-zero chance that something as high profile as an HBO documentary could indirectly influence the results of the upcoming criminal trial.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/the-personal-bloodba...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gibbons_(biochemist)#Death

This might be a silly questions, but it's not addressed by the article, I don't know the answer, and I suspect I'm not the only one: Is the microcode update likely to help reverse performance degradations that resulted from kernel-level remediations?

Interesting.

I've recently gone through a bit of a reorganization of my inbox and filters, and as a slight alternative, I found that generally speaking, most providers are pretty good about keeping the "from" address that they send communication from relatively stable. My filters basically look like lists of the form `from:(custserv@clippercard.com OR receipts@messaging.squareup.com OR Sony@email.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com)` and I apply a label like `orders`.

I have most of it still coming to my inbox so that I can vet each one quickly before archiving, but from there they have an appropriate label applied, and it's easy for me to go back and find them again. Some very common emails, like when I get an email from Square as I buy a coffee, I add "skip my inbox" and have it archive automatically.

It may be a little more manual in that occasionally I have to go in and add a new email address to a filter, but so far I've found the required maintenance to be very minimal (order of minutes every few months) and it saves me from having to maintain a `+` address or script.

Mostly came in here to say: well said sir, on both comments.

- Someone who is completely disconnected from reality

I totally agree that on this one, but have found that this group can come in quite a few more shapes and sizes than your original comment suggests. Not everyone is as out-to-lunch as your parent: I know a healthy number of people down here who are just fundamentally optimistic about things, and will tend to think positively at all times (and probably right up until the moment that the guillotine falls).

I have one friend who just put down roots with a house and recently had a child. He insists that the price tag on his place (well over $1M+) is perfectly reasonable, even though it's right at the fringes of the city and would be considered a worn-out hovel by the standards of almost any other North American city. The house's previous owners bought in a few decades ago and paid ~$50k for it.

In a few years he'll be putting his child through the city's public schooling system, which is broadly considered to be a nightmare by any standard, but he insists that SF's schools are great at the municipality is doing an excellent job. He harbors no resentment for major failings in public policy like Prop 13, despite the fact that he's probably paying on the order of 10-20x as much property tax as the vast majority of all his neighbors.

Despite a myriad of failings on the part of policy planners in everything from traffic to cleanliness to crime, he has a way of not seeing any of it. I envy him because it's a bit of a survival adaptation: he's happier on average than anyone in the area who thinks about any of this stuff regularly.

Suggesting getting a roommate would just be not that big of a deal to him because you're still in the city and still having the fun, even if there maybe should be a greater existential concern about workers making six figures being put in this situation.

...and for many of those I'd need to read the manual to find out what they even do (Fn? Lv?) and I struggle to find any reason I'd need to twiddle with, say, the image compression (QUAL) so urgently that it needs a dedicated shortcut button.

Right! Physical buttons and dials are great, but after a certain point adding new ones isn't an improvement to the interface anymore. Too many of them makes the interface overly complex and more prone to accidental adjustment. `QUAL` is a perfect example of something that belongs in a menu.

Yeah, I'd definitely concede that some people are making pretty frequent use of this stuff, but I meant to suggest that if you really started looking around, you might be in the minority. Optimizing for the majority of buyers would probably involve removing a few things that most people are probably never going to use.

But then again, this all goes to personal preference, and most users will buy a camera that they like to use, with or without many controls. I haven't seen anyone with a 5D saying "I'm not happy with total control of my camera", but I heard more people say "Damn, I wish you could change this value much faster and not go to the touchscreen"

There might be a few other options for design around this type of thing. I really like Leica's approach here for example: keep the settings that are really often needed on the body, relegate the less-frequently used features to menus, but then provide accessible custom profiles that are totally user-configurable and which can be switched between easily. After doing a few test shoots with a Leica Q, it feels like a nearly perfect compromise to me.

That's because you're not using the EVF, which you should be. The single most useful feature combination I find on the x100 series cameras is the EVF combined with the exposure compensation dial.

That's a fairly strange assumption to make. A performant EVF is one of Fuji's greatest innovations, and also one of its most conspicuous. Of course I'm using it.

Unfortunately, sometimes you're shooting from the hip (literally or figuratively), and not verifying every setting before you do. Sometimes, the EVF is almost unusable because you're out in bright sunlight. The existence of an EVF doesn't compensate for poor body design.

Great article.

I was hoping that the author would add something about the UIs of these cameras. The bodies of modern DSLRs are jampacked with every kind of knob, control, button, dial, and dongle that you can possibly think of.

To a large extent, that's kind of the whole point — these cameras are for professionals and professionals ostensibly need to be able to adjust every aspect of their picture. But in practice, 95% of users aren't using 95% of these adjusters 95% of the time. Most people are changing their aperture, exposure compensation, and a small handful of other things, and yet, dozens of other readily-available and features are still bolted onto the camera that get used roughly never.

There are other downsides besides complexity too. Fuji's mirrorless X100 series is a popular camera with consumers and for years it's shipped with an exposure compensation dial right at the top edge of its body. For just as many years the thing's been loose enough and with little enough inset from the outside that whenever you throw it in a bag or something, there's a pretty reasonable chance that it'll come out cranked all the one way or the other. Sometimes you don't notice, and there goes your shot.

The possible fixes are pretty easy — either move it in so it's less prone to accidental adjustment, or take the units off the thing so that it could optionally be reset every time you turn the camera on, but Fuji will probably never fix the problem – the way things are is the way things are, and they should stay that way.

It would be insanely great if instead of just cargo culting what they themselves have done in the past and what everyone else is doing, camera manufacturers started to think about optimizing these designs for the benefit of the user a little bit. Unfortunately, they never seem to.

This will sound trite, but I'm completely serious. The number one thing I want to see in the next MacBook Pro is the abandonment of the Touch Bar. Make it a row on the keyboard again.

I didn't think that the Touch Bar was useful when I first saw it, and now, six months later, I haven't found one more reason that I'd want ever want it. I don't want haptic feedback or any other kind of improvement. Apple made a mistake and should own up to it. Just throw it out.

Aside from that, I'd love to see a little better battery life and would have no problem whatsoever trading away a few more millimeters of thinness if I could get it. The MBP is thinner than I need already.

Well of course - it's easier to build something like this into a clean-slate language isn't it? It's harder to build it into an existing language and VM spec with an incomprehensibly large volume of existing code to be compatible with. It's bizarre to say it's not impressive because someone else with zero constraints to work with also managed it.

I hope my original comment was relatively clear on this, but sure, it's a big accomplishment and will be a quantum leap for the ecosystem. However, given that languages elsewhere have had better systems for quite some time now, it's not like they're advancing the state of the art in dependency management.

But again, it wasn't an easy thing to do (a very hard thing even) and everyone involved deserves major felicitation.

I don't follow Java too closely and the world "module" is so hopelessly generic that I had a hard time understanding what the article was talking about. It links to this document [1] though, which is a long read, but does an excellent job of describing of describing all the ins and outs of the module system.

(tl;dr Packages can now declare themselves as modules instead of simple namespaces, and they get to choose exactly what they export and what other modules they require. Projects can now resolve their types from within modules with a module path instead of on a per-type basis from the class path. It's a huge step forward for Java modularity and dependency management.)

I have a hard time being too impressed because more modern languages are doing this out of the gates and with far fewer hacks and more out-of-the-box tooling (e.g. Rust), but acknowledge just how monumental of an effort it was to design the new system and then build it into Java's core in a way that's mostly backwards-compatible. Java's going to be around for a long time, and this is a big long-term gain for the ecosystem.

I'd really love to see languages like Ruby tackle this next. It's sorely needed.

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[1] http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsaw/spec/sotms/

While sidewalks appear to be a totally unmanageable burden on the budget, somehow it has room for far more expensive roads and other costly auto-related infrastructure.

I don't think it's too much to ask for a little equality here. Not everyone paying taxes drives.

Possibly, but by moving flags up to the constants you also run the risk of obfuscating things further. A little bit of repetition when it comes to compiler flags (especially in Go where there are relatively few) is a good trade for the added clarity it conveys.

Invoking a particular binary is valid, but even there, you only need one constant, not one for every subcommand.

Nice article!

In my opinion, this level of abstraction may be going a little far:

    GOCMD=go
    GOBUILD=$(GOCMD) build
    GOCLEAN=$(GOCMD) clean
    GOTEST=$(GOCMD) test
    GOGET=$(GOCMD) get

By just invoking them directly in the targets you'll come out with something more readable and no less maintainable:

    build: 
            go build -o $(BINARY_NAME) -v