moksly

The ability to speak to anyone doesn’t necessarily mean that you never feel lonely at parties. Good conversation is a two way street after all, and if you can’t find someone to challenge or interest you, then you can talk to people all night and not really get anything out of it. I think we all know that feeling, even those who aren’t as “gifted” socially as others.

I don’t think the solution is what the author does though. I mean, If you really can’t find someone interesting to engage with at any party or social event… I mean it’s a cliche to say this, but maybe it’s you?

Probably because it’s where a lot of us ended up when we got old and stopped wanting to fiddle with settings. I’m sure Linux will one day catch up to where Mac products are and simply work out of the box without hassle, and maybe they are already there.

But I switched from Linux to osX after 10-15 years because I got tired of having to ever really deal with the OS.

I view it as more of a conceptual thing than a size issue. The 74kb is a symptom of the issue, which is that bad things can’t be deprecated because of backward compatibility.

If there is solution that removes the necessity of a 74kb package then I think we should embrace it.

I’m still fairly new to TypeScript but it’s quickly replacing Python as my daily driver for most things that aren’t back-end APIs, and Date is certainly one of those things I would love to see changed.

I view it as more of a conceptual thing than a size issue. The 74kb is a symptom of the issue, which is that bad things can’t be deprecated because of backward compatibility.

If there is solution that removes the necessity of a 74kb package then I think we should embrace it.

I’m still fairly new to TypeScript but it’s quickly replacing Python as my daily driver for most things that aren’t back-end APIs.

I don’t think fact checkers are an enemy of free speech. The entire foundation of science is build upon the process of being able to fact check each other’s findings.

There has also never really been a period in western civilisation where the news media wasn’t heavily controlled and fact checked by powerful editors.

The real issue isn’t fact checkers, it’s that Facebook isn’t held accountable.

If we want a functioning democracy, we need to stop giving major corporations a pass because the manipulation that happens on their platforms is created and run by users. That’s not how we treated News Papers and it’s not how we should treat Social Networks. If Facebook has really been a knowing participant in genocides, then Mark Zuckerberg belongs in the Haag as far as I am concerned.

It’s very hard to answer for you because it’s likely about personal growth and realisation more than anything else. But I can tell you what I did, or rather what happened to me.

I started as a developer, because I was good, I gradually became the lead enterprise architect (I’ve never hated anything more than TOGAF by the way), and eventually “fell” into management. While doing this I rode locally fame ladder in Danish public sector digitalisation which means I’ve had a massive impact on our overall national strategy for IT architecture but like 5 people know who I am. I’m not sure I ever actually liked that work, but it was thrilling to be part of something “important”, so I felt like I liked it. Eventually I had my first child, and 9 months later I had a depression caused by stress so severe I spent a night in a psychward. Long story short I was diagnosed with ADHD at almost 40, and told that I needed to figure out how I wanted to live my life.

Turns out I like problem solving and that I hate project management. So I quit the public sector and found a job in a company where I could be a programmer again, I made sure to find a company where I wouldn’t have to deal with a whole lot of the Atlassian sort bureaucracies surrounding programming and it’s frankly been a bliss.

I’ve gone from not thinking I could ever work more than 30 hours a week until my children left our house to back to full time.

So chances are you probably already know what kind of work you like, but it’s just really hard to figure it out. One thing that I thought I would miss was feeling “important” but the truth is that I was never actually “important”. If it hadn’t been me someone else would’ve done it.

(For reference I’m Danish, having a break down here gets you 6 months sick leave with pay and costs you basically nothing out of your own pocket. This made things easier to say the least.)

Our solution was to buy them iPads. From 4-5 visits a year to none.

I’ve never used a chromebook, but I imagine it would work as well.

They didn’t though. Nobody forced them to leave without a reasonable deal, or a reasonable bureaucracy set up to handle it.

They did that all by themselves.

I think they could have gone for a deal similar to the other non-EU but still kind of EU countries like Norway if they wanted. Because of pragmatism, but that’s not what the Brexiteers wanted.

English is not my first language so maybe fabrication is the wrong word? I didn’t mean fabrication as in it didn’t exist, but that it wouldn’t have existed without the US.

This is the sort of distorting of history the article speaks about. Vietnam was invaded by the French in the 1800 and turned into a colony. That colony was lost, and then semi-regained over the course of WW2 and the years following.

When the French lost and withdrew, America invaded and was subsequently beaten.

This is not a defence of China or Russia, look at how they are invading Tibet and the Ukraine, but the Vietnamese people weren’t invaded by China or the USSR, they were invaded by the US. South-Vietnam was an American fabrication during its invasion following the post French-Indonesian-war, because the Vietnamese people had a government in Hanoi, the US simply didn’t like it.

It’s sort of the same, but what I don’t get is how things like that rainbow cat and other famous internet pictures are NFTs. I mean, if the picture was around for twenty years before it became a NFT, then how is the NFT the “original”.

Going that line of thought, what happens if two people make the same picture into a NFT?

We never had an issue with the delta variant. Omnicron is only now becoming an issue, so it’s the normal version that’s been the biggest issue so far.

I guess our government was too slow to roll out the 3rd shot since so many are affected.

The reason why we’re having lockdowns now is because the situation is that so many people are sick that we need to make sure there is enough people to staff things like power plants.

I don’t know about the light symptoms bit. I can’t remember the last time I felt this shitty, but I’m obviously not close to being hospitalised either. I’m probably fit for work by American standards, but I’ve been home sick since the 20th by Danish standards. This is very anecdotal of course, but I sure as shit don’t feel well.

it would be surprising to me if hospitalization or deaths aren’t noticeably lower

Here on vaccinated Denmark this is the truth. But we’re actually approaching last years levels regardless because of just how many people are getting covid this year. It’s more manageable thanks to the very high vaccination status, but we seem to have been too slow with the 3rd hit for a major part of the population. I have two shots myself, and my family is all in covid isolation all tested positive and “looking forward” to spend Christmas with ourselves and not our families. It’s not too bad for any of us, it’s not pleasant either, but the biggest thing for me is how much we’re having to shut down despite the high vaccination percentage.

You can’t go to a movie or actual theatre. Bars close at 22:00. Most major Christmas parties (this is a big thing here) have been cancelled. But the biggest impact is on culture business like the theatres, concert houses, Christmas markets, museums and so on. If covid is going to be a recurrent thing every winter, then I think that we’re going to see some drastic changes to those aspects of society.

I’m not sure what the issue with hiring them back is. We spend around 5% of a full time employee for their services, we can hire them back another 19 times this year, 39 times by next year and so on.

Nothing they build us would last forever, but then, we operate 300 IT systems, only a few major systems have a life cycle of more than 5 years. 5 years ago everything we ran was on prem but on VMs on rented hardware, 10 years ago it was physically on prem some on physical servers, now it’s in azure, who knows where it’ll be in another 5 years.

I fail to see what a full time staffed devops department would give us except for added continuous cost that is so much higher than its alternatives that it’s just ridiculous.

I mean, I understand full well that system operators are worried in the current climate, but most of ours simply developed into broader roles that aren’t becoming obsolete.

I’m curious as to what you’re maintaining. Once we set our pipeline up with a consultant agency and build step-by-step guides on how to launch a docker container through it, the maintenance of the pipeline has required no human hands.

This is in an enterprise sized organisation with 10.000 employees.

We still have a sys ops team to handle security, network and all those other things, but deploying software? That’s really easy for our developers.

We use Azure DevOps, we deploy to Azure apps with a dev, testing, staging (5% traffic) and prod (95% traffic) slots. It takes maybe 5 minutes to go through the to-do-list when a new application or function or whatever is created and we have a very fascist naming convention. This isn’t an azure commercial, we’re only in azure because we’re the public sector and already so in bed with Microsoft that it’s the cheapest solution. I’m sure you could do the same in any other cloud.

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 not to rant on Rust, but betting on it having a brighter future than any of the other languages that came and went during the past two decades is probably a risky bet. Of course we’re lucky enough to be in a line of work where you can probably work with Rust for the next 50 years if you want to, but to “hype” it as the future language is just too silly and too vague for the front page of HN in my opinion.

I mean, Ruby was future, then Go was the future, now Rust is the future (add any other hyped languages you want, and here we are programming in JavaScript, Python, C++, JAVA, COBOL, PHP, C# and other “boring” languages that are probably older than some of the people who read HN, and that just isn’t likely to change much is it?

You have to look at it from a bigger perspective. From your and my perspective changing jobs is a big deal, it only happens a few time in our lives and it has a massive impact. The management perspective is quite different, you’ll get to not only hire but also interview hundreds of not thousands in your career.

If you’re a good manager you’ll want to keep your employees for 5-7 years. This is because you want to help your employees develop their talents and grow their career, and when you do that, they’ll eventually outgrow the role you hired them to do and how far it was possibly to extend it to accommodate their growth. By that point, you kind of want your employees to move on. Maybe to a new position within your own organisation or to a different place. It’s not because you don’t like them or don’t want them to stay, but it’s because good employees tend to outgrow you. A select few people can stay in the same functions their entire lives and never lose enjoyment or motivation, but most of us aren’t like that and you have to keep that in mind when it comes to “pay me more, or I’m leaving” negotiating.

More than that though, you have to see how relying too much on individual employees is actually what is the management mistake in these type of situations. The issue isn’t “why couldn’t you keep x”, it’s “why did you let x become irreplaceable” because any good manager should know better.

Maybe the public sector in Denmark is different than other places, maybe not. I don’t think that it is. What typically happens when you have IT systems that rely too much on an employee is that they leave you and then you end up paying them a lot more money to consult for 6 months until someone else has redesigned the systems to no longer be too dependent on a single person and your former employee finally gets to really move on.

Well not exactly. You have to look at it from an organisational perspective, and not from an employee perspective.

If you have systems (and that is any function, also cutting onions in the kitchen) that relies so heavily on one employee that you can not continue to operate them without that person then you have a serious issue.

Because you don’t retain employees, and your goal isn’t to keep them forever either. Even if they are happy and stay for 40 years they will eventually retire and then the system tend to break down anyway, and that’s with planned departure. What if your vital employee gets run over by a truck on the way to work?

So from an organisational perspective, it’s not an entire IT system vs one employee. It’s removing a flawed and dangerous system from your organisation.

Some people will argue that employees who design such systems aren’t worth keeping to begin with. I would agree, if the world was perfect, but it’s not.

I’m not sure why this is getting so much negative attention. I’ve been both in and around high level management in the Danish public sector for decades and I’ve never matched or sparred with another manager who would these sort of things.

No one, and I do mean no one, is irreplaceable. Maybe you’ll have to throw away an entire IT system because you’ve lost the know how to keep the business case for the system a net positive, but that means a lot less to an organisation (especially enterprise) that we tend to fool ourselves into believing myself included.

Are they breaking into healthcare in Europe?

Those glasses have been used in elderly care here in Denmark for quite a while. Nurses who treat wounds use a set of glasses to document the process so they don’t have to switch in and out of gloves a million times.

I wouldn’t too much about the big American advertisement companies getting a lead on it, considering how little they are trusted outside the US in anything related to enterprise.

Those glasses I mentioned are actually Google glass if I recall correctly, but with some completely different software because naturally you can’t use Google software to document patient data in the EU.

I think it comes from the magic being dispelled. They are just ordinary people and they’re almost never well equipped to fill their functions in any meaningful way because of the complexity of the decisions they make.

There is a part of it about friendship, but it’s more because the world stops being black and white at those levels. Two politicians who come from the opposite sides will have more in common with each other than they will with any of the people who vote for them so it’s only natural that they remain faintly friendly with each other. They have to work together after all, as most things come down to compromises.

Being realist or cynical would help you recognize the situation as it truly stands without looking at it through tainted glasses.

I couldn’t disagree more. To me that is the lie that cynics fool themselves into believing is true.

I have no issue with the Socratic methodology, but the point of it is not to break the systems apart for the sake of finding flaws. It is to break them apart so that they can be reassembled better.

It’s that last part the modern cult of cynics forget too often in my experience. You’re not useful if all you can do is predict the doom and then say “I told you so” when you are proven right. Predicting where things will go wrong is easy, optimists do it as well, what sets them appear is that they try to move past their mistakes and learn for them.

To me no one is either an optimist or a cynic, labelling yourself as being only one is just too limiting, but in my anecdotal experience the people most likely to “make themselves” into just one category are the self-proclaimed realists.

Maybe my experience and opinions are wrong, but I have never come across such an individual who benefitted from their world view. At least no in the privileged world of Scandinavian software.

That is a really sad outlook to me. After decades in Enterprise IT, many in the public sector of Scandinavia you’d probably expect me to be a cynic, and if you go through my post history you’ll see very recent examples of what looks like it, but I’m actually always rather optimistic.

The healthy survival strategy in a world of shit isn’t to give up, it’s to fight on and hope for the best. It’s to come to the conclusion, that even though the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the fact that there are good intentions mean that the people actually wanted to succeed.

So while I’m very pessimistic, I’m also experienced enough to know that everyone is working for a better world.

In all my decades of working close to the political leadership and the top level decision makers, I can’t remember once meeting someone who wasn’t working for what they believed to be a better tomorrow. Maybe that’s a uniquely Danish trait, but I doubt it. What that good is, isn’t always what you or I would consider good, but my point is that even very evil decision makers are working for what they think is right.

The moment you become a cynic is the moment you lose your connection and with it, your ability to impact things. Because a manager who has the wrong view of your corporate culture, isn’t going to change unless you inspire them to be better and that applies to everyone.

Of course it’s hard to be optimistic as well. 98% or something like it of public IT system implementations fail to some extend, and if you expect them to succeed then I imagine it’ll be quite soul crushing. The key, to me at least, is to not let your pessimism turn into cynicism, because you don’t want to be the constant no-sayer either, you want to make your points and reservations clear, but then roll with the decision that gets made.

Did open source ever serve working people?

Where the GNU project always fell short in my opinion was that it thought there was a difference between free to use and free as in beer.

There was an abundance of people who predicted where the internet would head once big corporations got into it. There is an entire genre of cyberpunk authors who did after all, and I guess Stallman gets credit for trying to stop it, but it always comes down to money.

It’s very easy to fool yourself into thinking differently, but the harsh truth is that everything you do for money is being weighed and evaluated by someone in the management chain whom, at the very least, considers if you’re worth your cost, every three months.

I just don’t see how OSS is supposed to have changed in that regard. Maybe it was more ideological when it was mainly paid for by academia, but someone still paid for it, and considering how much OSS has improved in the wake of corporate capitalism taking over, academia don’t appear to have paid enough.

That’s easy for me to say of course, I have no solutions, but I still think we’re better off now than ever.

I think I’m too senior to believe in non-shit software.

I work in non tech enterprise. You’d think that things like the ransomware scandals, GDPR, the increased risk-awareness would have improved the business processes or management awareness or all the things are “corporate digital maturity” but the pressure to get things done fast with minimal resources has frankly never been higher.

In that environment we’re always going to have shit-software. If anything I agree with you, which is why I said that I thought that the current status quo was the best ever.

I didn’t say in-house code was good, but it does keep you from being exploited by things like what recently happened with NPM.

Companies genuinely don’t care about the software they use, as long as it works and isn’t hacked. This is especially true in non-tech enterprise. At my former place they still had hundreds of ASP Webforms with custom in-house ASP libraries that were utter shit, but they worked.

What I’m postulating is that this is the alternative to the current status que.

I’d personally love for NPM to review their packages, or for a big player like Microsoft to step in and make a more limited platform with reviews, but I just don’t think anyone is going to be willing to pay for it.

I didn’t say in-house code was good, but it does keep you from being exploited by things like what recently happened with NPM.

Companies genuinely don’t care about the software they use, as long as it works and isn’t hacked. This is especially true in non-tech enterprise.

At my former place they still had hundreds of ASP Webforms with custom in-house ASP libraries that were utter shit, but they worked.

The alternative to what we have now is not going to be a healthy OSS community. The alternative is going to be big companies insourcing more of their libraries.

The only reason why OSS has seen the up-pick it has is because major companies profit from it. Microsoft didn’t embrace open source because it had a change or morals, it embraced open source because it started making so much more money from enterprise orgs switching to Azure compared to selling us licenses for on-prem alternatives. Facebook and Google don’t share their massive front end-libraries and extensive tools because they are nice, they do so because it helps them dictate web-development and being able to on-board new hires who are already familiar with their tech.

If anything, I think it’s more likely that we are going to see a big player pick up a NPM alternative and make sharing packages much harder. I think the fact that no one has done this, should tell you all about how little the enterprise industry worries about the status que.

I don’t think it’s necessarily healthy, and I sympathise with OSS maintainers who don’t get paid for their work, but I don’t think it’s a massive issue either. The OSS world is still better than it ever was, and your tech stack isn’t actually in danger if you review that code you use.

The advice sort of extends to any profession doesn’t it? Sometimes you can get good advice from strangers on social media, most times you probably shouldn’t risk anything on it though.

It’s sort of like Google programming isn’t it? I’m sure you’ll get it to work, but you hopefully wouldn’t do it if you were building medical software that could end up killing people. That’s when you pay the experts.