jarcane

In the past 5 years there’s been 1 rust job in my region of Denmark. It listed rust as a “nice to have”. I think it fares better in the Copenhagen region, but not by much.

This is pretty much what killed me on it, and I think the leadership and community really don't understand that commodity development is important to language growth.

I like Rust and it opens up some interesting domains I don't get to play with much, but it's a considerable effort to learn it when I know there are zero real opportunities to use it professionally. I keep hearing hype about how this or that big giant company is using it, but none of them are hiring for it: it seems quite a few are just shifting internal C/C++ teams to Rust. The rare public openings are either a) demand extremely senior C/C++ level dev experience, or b) vague crypto/blockchain startups that reek of fly-by-night scams.

Far from the hope of "democratizing" systems programming, it seems like the industry has instead closed ranks around it and used it as a further gatekeeping tool to keep out entry or even journeyman level experience, and certainly anyone not already bathed in the old C languages.

I thought Rust was supposed to free us from C?

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Yes, that certainly was surprising.

Real-time collaboration produces better software.

Why does every commercial editor seem to desperately believe we all want this?

Why would I, as an actual developer, want "pair programming but now there's lag"?

I didn't even like the pairing fad in the first place, I found it awkward, anxiety-inducing, and slow. Adding an additional software dependency just seems worse.

I don't buy TVs anymore, I buy monitors.

There's no reason to own a television with a shitty computer built-in, when I can just buy a screen and plug it into my actually good computer.

Right now I have a 27" ThinkVision display and a pair of studio monitors, with both laptop and Switch connected to it. Media comes over the computer (who even buys cable in 2021 anyway?), audio patches into the display over USB-C/HDMI and out to the speakers.

I'm moving soon and I'll probably spring for a 30+" 4K for the living room at some point, and look into a receiver and theatre speakers but honestly I don't see the point.

You do pay a bit more for the display-per-inch, but the reason those "4K smart TVs" are so cheap is all the adware money, so they're only "cheap" in the way that Facebook is "free".

I've started using it as my main browser both in daily use and dev.

In the past I had trouble with client projects or dev tools only working in chrome, but I decided that the only way things get freer is to make myself fix those pain points when I come across them.

I think you’re rather over exaggerating. For a few emergency boot disk or very low spec, like LOAF or uLinux, sure. But even late 90s, for anything actually practical, 50mb would’ve been quite the achievement. DragonLinux was my go to “lightweight” and it was around 200mb. 50mb in the early 00s only got you the net install for Debian, and Knoppix was a whole CD.

But this is 2021. You need to do some serious pruning just to get GCC in under 1gb. 50 mb is a fucking miracle.

Well, when 4chan started it was basically just a porn board. The idea of actually hanging around was akin to being someone who’s really dedicated to their pornhub comments.

It took a few years of those few dedicated weirdos bouncing off each other (and their Japanese equivalent boards) to fully metastasise into the face of modern neofascism.

My father-in-law was a Finn, born and raised, and had to pay for everything out of pocket because he owned his own home business fabricating HVAC ductwork, and of course got no sick leave if he did get injured and couldn't work.

It's possible to buy private insurance of course, a common solution for tech freelancers here is to make your own business and then hire yourself as an employee, so at least you can get an occupational health care plan.

But private health insurance here is a joke anyway, they don't cover a ton of things because they assume they can just refer you to the public care for any of the complicated stuff. Mine wouldn't even cover a CPAP machine, I had to get on a public waiting list and borrow one from the state, and it took months.

Yeah, I used "retail sector" quite carefully there. The breadth of the conglomerates here is vast. It's sort of surreal to me, even by American standards, that this level of market capture is even allowed.

Finland is historically not especially concerned with monopoly issues in any case. Nearly the entire retail sector is controlled by only two companies.

You don't even get paid more. The apps have been circulating this myth in the press, but it's based on obfuscating of the numbers at best, and outright lies at worst.

There's a reason most of their couriers are immigrants: anyone else can get paid more stocking a supermarket or driving a cab.

Correct. The labor board has issued its opinion that they should be considered employees but it hasn't yet been enforced by the courts.

Instead, all Wolt couriers in Finland have been "independent contractors" and had to have their own business name or do other paperwork, that because of how Finnish law works for small business owners, means they get cut off from any public health insurance, unemployment insurance, etc.

Courier work doesn't pay nearly enough to afford private insurance here, and since they aren't unionized (because after all they're not "workers" but business owners), they can't join a union unemployment benefit either.

There has been an ongoing attempt at unionization but it has been difficult to push through; the apps are fighting against it tooth and nail because they already run at a loss and underpay the drivers as it is. Wolt deliberately obfuscates how much couriers are making an hour in the driver app, runs propaganda articles on the customer app, and both it and Foodora have continued to fight against employee or union recognition in the courts.

It's become apparent for a while they are running scared, and running out of money. Quality of service has massively degraded over the last two years, as they've stripped support staff to the bone, manipulated delivery fees and ranges to nickle-and-dime customers, massive order delays and fudged estimates, started manipulating algorithms to push certain restaurants and promotions, rushed couriers causing constant order failures, which then mean more cost in customer refunds. It's god bad enough I stopped using it completely, because I just could no longer trust that I'd even get what I ordered, or that it wouldn't be left a sodden mess leaking all over my entryway.

It's an app that was probably going to implode if they didn't get a buyout and soon, so this move is incredibly predictable. My only surprise is just how greedy they went with the bogus valuation here.

I know some of those people with 6+ hi-res monitors and a huge part of the appeal has to do with how much screen space you get out of that many screens, and I see nothing of this tech that gets anywhere close to what any of their setups can do, for the simple reason that VR headsets just don't have the resolution.

Have you ever tried to browse the web on a headset? I have. Even with the highest resolution available it was still a dismal, squinty experience, and actually trying to so much as type a URL was an exercise in frustration.

I have to ask: Who the hell is any of this for?

Simula, Facebook's virtual office meetings, all of this virtual office stuff ... ISTR we loudly declared the death of skeumorphism and yet here we are. "Put this dumb thing on your head just to have an office call" is such a bizarre over-correction to something, and I can't figure what it is. Are some people just really not coping with the shift to remote-first work life?

Who would actually want to do this? What benefit does this provide me over just ... having an extra monitor? Is this just throwing cash after a fad?

Not to mention that going with a third-party host is still relying on someone else's computer being trusted with your data. It's like saying we don't need physical drives anymore because Dropbox and Google Drive exist. And yet that's basically the environment we've constructed for the web.

Beyond the barrier of technical knowledge, there's also a barrier of access: many people simply do not have internet access that allows true static hosting. Even setting aside the historical issue of IPv4 address limitations, there's things like ISP port blocking, packet filtering and snooping, rate-limiting of upload, etc., that exist specifically to prop up rent-seeking hosting companies and "business plans" that charge ten times the money for the same exact advertised service just with the blocks turned off.

My theoretical app basically can't exist anymore without a lot of awkward hacks. Windows actually still has web hosting features built-in, but I can't use them outside the local network because my ISP blocks the port for HTTP (as well as a ton of other protocols), and dynamic IP means I can't link it to a domain anyway without third-party tools like DynDNS. Instead I'd have to rely on tunneling services like localhost.run, or peer-to-peer protocols that piggy-back in clever ways on existing open ports, or else pony up for a business account and pay more money for, often, less bandwidth than I have now.

Start a site on Neocities, share photos on Pixelfed, or write your thoughts on Write.as — to name a few.

This would be a more convincing pitch if it didn't end with "now just use different centralized services that nobody uses".

We need protocols, not platform capitalism. We need easy self-hosting, not reliance on third-party middle men and rent-seekers.

I should be able to click an app on my computer and have my own web page running in seconds, that anyone can find and follow.

The fact we don't is how platforms like Facebook are able to dominate, and the even worse fact is this was deliberate.

Yes, physical storage is so much more secure.

That's why I bury all my gold in the backyard.

Technically, this includes the people who gave them the Bitcoin.

Bitcoin != USD.

In fact I seem to recall being told that was rather the point.

I worked at a job once where this was deliberate.

Certain voices in the team were terrified of "siloing", and so it was a matter of policy that everyone had to jump tasks and teams every two weeks, unless they had a solid case for a longer term task.

The result was that no one knew what the hell they were doing, because no one had time to learn anything before they were shuffling chairs again.

We were only saved from this madness when a major data center failure took out the app and all process theatre was temporarily suspended during crisis mode. Once we got back online, it was quickly realized that we'd all been wildly more productive and not just because of the crisis, but because we could actually function organically without the artificial strictures.

Are you Facebook?

Natural Language Processing is literally a major wing of AI development and data science, but even that isn't really necessary. Matching text on ad-based keywords has been going on since fucking About.com.

I've begun to recognize "unnecessary GraphQL" as a code smell, and one usually indicative of wider architectural problems in a project.

I have yet to be wrong in immediately steeling myself for the worst the second I see the word.

I have at this point lost count of the number of times I or someone else I know on Discord has described getting Youtube recs or ads directly referencing shit they'd just talked about.

I started getting blasted with YT recs for weeks for a channel I had never heard of, never watched, had no real common connections with ... until someone referenced them in a conversation on Discord.

Now, you can shit on that as anecdotal or "intuition" or whatever, but come on. This is HN. No one here is ignorant about the level of data sharing that goes on in the adtech space, and everyone claims they don't until Gmail's selling you ads based on your emails.

It's not like someone's just argued that the president is a space alien. We're talking about suggesting a for-profit internet company is doing something that literally damn near all the for-profit internet companies do and have done now for decades. The bigger question is to how anyone could be so credulous as to assume they are not.

unfortunately, as I discovered with a recent fresh Manjaro install, VSCodium cannot access the standard MS extension repo, which makes it next to worthless as a production tool because no one is uploading anything to their own repo. I can't work without my tools, and I can't be arsed to manually install and build and update every extension and its dependencies that I rely on.

Yup. And there's exceptions galore too. You can just claim that free roaming will cause "financial hardship" and still get away with charging roaming fees anyway. Nearly every provider in Finland immediately applied the exemption and kept charging roaming fees anyway.

Goddamn 2021 and we're still pretending electrons cost more based on distance.

In Spain, a Foundation is a very strong legal entity scrutinized by the Ministry of Justice.

And US corporations are also "legal entities scrutinized by" the DOJ and the SEC.

Look how well that works. The fact that people can sue you if they have enough money does not really make this any more trustworthy than anything else.

It feels an awful lot like you are throwing around terms like a smokescreen and hoping people don't understand Spanish law well enough to confront you about it.

Yes, and it was a shit thing when Ubuntu did it too.

Literally drove the creator of Kubuntu out of the project on trumped up bullshit when he wouldn't play along (and also kept asking questions about the 120k of donations that went missing ...)

It's not entirely just because of the NYT article, but the article was the big PR victory for a massive and almost entirely fabricated campaign against Pornhub run by a religious wingnut masquerading as a human rights activist.

Kristof's piece wasn't the first I'd heard of the "Traffickinghub" campaign but it seemed to be the first time a lot of people around me did.

What wasn't widely known at the time was that basically all their "data" was either exaggerated or outright fabrication, with near-zero sources, and backed by religious fundamentalists. That didn't start coming out until the damage had already been done.

"Won't somebody think of the children?!" works every fucking time though.

Yes. Fundamentally, the problem is cultural, not mathematical. A modern language like Racket with proper recursion optimizations will compile and optimize a recursive solution that is as fast or nearly (and even sometimes faster) than a mutable imperative one.

The problem is that the idea of recursion as slow or resource hungry has become a kind of circular just-so story among imperative programmers and compiler developers who don't want to write recursion optimizations (or don't even know how).

The argument goes that recursion is slow, so don't use recursion, and if you raise the idea of optimizing recursion, the compiler dev dismisses it, because why would you write recursion support, recursion is slow.

Now it's fair to say in an earlier era, this was somewhat justifiable, but the logic has been passed down far longer than it's actually been true of the technology available. I remember reading "recursion bad" in C books in the 90s, and it's still so pervasive that even though TCO has been in the JS standard since ES6 years ago, most browsers still can't be bothered to support it.

Blizzard have sued cheat makers outside Asia before.