rcktmrtn

> “it is blasphemy to delete a test”,

was ever a thing. i still don't.

I experienced this when working at a giant company where all the teams were required to report their "code coverage" metrics to middle management.

We had the flaky test problem too, but I think another angle of is being shackled to test tech-debt. The "coverage goals" in practice encouraged writing a lot of low quality tests with questionable and complex fixtures (using regular expressions to yoink C++ functions/variables out of their modules and place them into test fixtures).

Fiddling with tests slowed down a lot of things, but there was a general agreement that the whole projected needed to be re-architected (it was split up over a zillion different little "libraries" that pretended to be independent, but were actually highly interdependent) and while I was there I always felt like we needed to cut the Gordian knot and accept that it might decrease the sacred code coverage.

Not sure if I was right or what ever happened with that project but it sure was a learning experience.

This is less historical record than medieval propaganda piece

I think you could make a good case that the title is a little sensationalistic, but you could pick at US civics class in exactly the same way (and not just in recent history). The branches of government we learn about fail to include (or at least emphasize) the fundamental role of regulatory capture, lobbyists, and opaque/undemocratic three-letter agencies in real-world governance. Not to mention the fact that even the founding of the country was based on high ideals that were highly caveat-ed ("all men are created equal" unless those men are property).

Regardless of the extent to which ideals are lived out in practice, to many people it's notable that those ideals are there at all. In my experience as a US citizens, most people educated here seem shocked to learn that there can be any ideals behind monarchy besides divine right of kings/"I am the state" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89tat,_c%27est_moi

The funny part about the young author example, how older authors are not exciting to discover? Yeah the richest and most successful author of all time was discovered when she was 32. J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit at age 45. Little House on the Prairie? Published when Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65.

Agreed. I felt like this article was grasping for something good, but remark that "45-year-olds aren’t discovered, they’re uncovered, like toxic waste, or a political scandal" is ass-backwards.

Tolkien and Wilder and both great examples of writers who produced landmark works basically as a byproduct of leading full and interesting lives -- not by orbiting the publishing world and champing at the bit to churn out some flashy yet forgettable novel at a record young age. When this happens, the only embarrassment is for the establishment "publishing world" which pretends to represent "literary greatness," not for the author who is "uncovered." Personally, I suspect that "uncovered" authors will endure at a higher rate than the "discovered" ones.

Also I have to add that I rolled my eyes at the "evidence" of Emily Dickenson killed herself. So did Hemmingway, who was first published at 26. What's your point?

Despite all this, the core insight that "suddenly you’re old, and find yourself in a permanent state of imperfection, which you must reckon with" I believe is very true. Even those who succeed in one area of life (being published) have to grapple with it. What options did they leave on the table in order to have that success? What options have been lost due to fame and success (only a fool would believe there are none)?

Becoming a particular (and necessarily, imperfect) person instead of a potential person is a kind of horrifying first taste of death. I think that the healthy way to deal with it is to make peace with the fact that our ability to change ourselves is limited and our ability to change the past is even less. The serenity prayer and AA-adjacent ideas do this.

As a last note, I thought the movie "The Weatherman" did a really good job exploring this.

I also started noticing this headline pattern ("something A as something B") all over the place a while ago and now automatically break it down as:

* Something A (probably) happened

* Something B (probably) happened

* The author/publisher are slimy weasels and I'm not going to give their stupid article any more time

Closest thing I've heard:

https://github.com/g-truc/glm?tab=License-1-ov-file#readme

Good review: I hadn't heard the Christian Science take on The Secret Garden before and am surprised the wikipedia article doesn't mention it, but it's pretty obvious now. The title imagery really makes me think of:

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

I think this is actually hitting much closer to the intention of Levitical law than people realize. Data and debt are very strongly connected, and I think probably always have been.

Compared to resistive heat, sure, but a heat pump powered by fossil fuels isn't much better than a gas furnace. My point is that we need to stop burning fossil fuels for electricity so that heat pumps make sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance

Technically, heat pumps can absolutely achieve greater than 100% efficiency (considering their input electricity as a starting point).

It's also true though that there are also lot of caveats about their effectiveness based on temperature differential, maximum output compared to a furnace, efficiency with which the upstream electricity is generated, etc.

I recently heard a priest say that all bad theology comes out of Germany. I'm pretty sure it was a joke, but sometimes I wonder...

The insult-people-for-being-car-skeptics trope is starting to show its age [1].

It's true that old fogey skeptics who have vested interest in the old ways are disposed towards motivated reasoning, but they're also the ones most able call out the motivated reasoning by the few who make disproportionate profit most from pushing new technologies.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n94-_yE4IeU

The term thieved is too strong here.

Probably why technical term is loanword :)

... it's not like the word gets used up in the original language [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn't_Steal_a_Car

Does every stable relationship involve sexual aspects?

Not generally. But creating a child necessarily involves creating a stable biological relationship primarily with two other people.

Most people across history think the biological circumstances that bring us into the world are spiritually important and making the triangle between mother-father-child healthy is good for children.

For better or worse, people care their genetic material. We can either choose to create a society that makes the best of this, or we can try to suppress it and convince people that it doesn't matter.

And yes I know that surrogacy exists. But that's a side argument that opens up a lot more questions and I don't think it really changes the fundamentals.

This is called out as concretely happening in the "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" documentary.

Welfare policies made things worse by denying benefits to families with adult males in residence. Fathers and husbands had to leave — or hide in the closet when social workers came to check. (quoted from a review [1])

[1] https://www.npr.org/2012/01/19/145343942/in-st-louis-an-urba...

technical leadership is hired by managers who's background is in the unrelated field of automobiles.

... On top of that, I think there is a bit of a generational gap between firmware engineers. I have worked with several firmware engineers who were artists at optimizing single threaded superloops and miracle workers at squeezing in yet another feature and become tech leads, only to find they have an infinite blank canvas. Some don't actually have the wisdom to not use the new freedom to paint themselves into a corner. A lot of the old projects are trivial now, but dealing with bureaucratic application-level protocols in firmware without getting requires a set of skills and tricks that don't often translate well from what Cloud/App developers are doing.

In the video of the incident linked elsewhere there is a caption that basically says that an automated system is what notified the controller there was an issue and probably why she was able to correct it at the last second.

What's going on in control towers that's causing this? Did hiring standards for ATCs drop all of a sudden, or something like that?

There was a fairly major change recently [1]. Before 2014, the FAA used to be biased towards recruits that had been already trained in a program on someone else's dime (military or university). Perhaps their on-the-job training isn't quite good enough to compensate for that change yet.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_traffic_controller#2014_ch...

Definitely going to reference this fact next time I run into a bug due to an accumulated round off error.

I'll wait to get out the pitchfork til they actually say "sugar-free" on the side.

Do I understand it correctly? Monday was the previous Sunday in Christian societies?

Not sure exactly, but I think Sunday was always Sunday. It's Saturday that changed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Monday

Not really though. FTA:

... These are all ways to avoid bullshitting - but unfortunately there’s one simple way to avoid bullshit - by being critical. It’s far easier to retreat to the critical, negative position and say why things won’t or can’t work. Except… this is a mistake.

I think this article does an admirable job contexualizing itself in the very real world of "bullshit" work performance, but simultaneous not being satisfied with giving into cynicism.

The bullshit jobs critique is very good and probably does seep into material talked about here, but on an individual level it's a beautiful and worthwhile activity to unravel the parts of the "bullshit" that are actually meaningful. Signaling and performance might be hyperreal and pornographied in the current world, but they still have a valid and healthy version worth considering. The idea that "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely Players" is a beautiful part of the human condition that long predates modern capitalism.

It's refreshing to read something that acknowledges the need to "meet people where they are" in terms of how you interact, but doesn't give into the narrative that this means you're condemned to a life of bullshit. It's good to have a larger understanding of the world's ills too, but I think people who spend their whole work day just thinking about how their jobs are irredeemable bullshit are fools.

I work more in the firmware space, so my experience with feature toggles is always with half-baked tooling and limited ability to change deployed products. We do use continuous development within the organization, so there is still a lot of applicability, but it's always interesting to see the way similar problems get addressed in a higher-level and more online environment.

That said, I'm surprised this article doesn't mention the two words that always come to my mind when I see toggles: combinatorial explosion. Several times I've worked on projects that went way too toggle-happy and decided that new functionality should be split into indefinite life "features". Just in case the company someday wants to sell a model without that feature. Of course, when an old toggle finally gets turned off a year later, you realize that it crashes the system because several other features kind of half depend on them.

Looks very slick! I used QR codes and a sloppy script to back up a SSH key recently, and was dreading the possibly of needing to use said backups. I 100% will be looking into this.

Also, 100% that KeePassXC needs a better paper backup option. It's a great application, but I had a terrible time with how it formatting my notes/comments last time I printed from it. My one thing is that I want my backup to be something much closer to plain text that I could recover info from without KeePass. No encryption and no KeePass database structure.

Surely there is a market for such a device. 1% of a billion is a big number.

* Are manufacturers a cartel and won't allow breaking the duopoly? (Doesn't seem plausible, Samsung toyed with Tizen)

I don't think it's a simple duopoly, but an application of Conway's law across the whole globalized tech industry [1]. Keep in mind that originally Android was the open source option, and it's been gradually become less and less amenable to that.

In my mind, I think of the "progress" of the consumer electronics industry (especially in the last 20 years) as undergoing constant and aggressive "distillation" process, converting people away from the FOSS side of the spectrum which offers freedom and control towards the locked down centralization side which offers dependence, convenience, and safety. The 1% market is basically the left over Azeotrope that can't quite be gotten rid of.

The experiments to harness that 1% market are the exception that proves the rule. Locked down centralized solutions are optimal for the tech market as it exists today. Samsung thought they could squeeze some money out of the 1% by being the "master" of Tizen, but realized that the game theory works out such that they would be better off as a servant of Android.

On top of all that, I think as the smartphone capture gets deeper and deeper, being in 1% is not even necessarily a 1-to-1 for FOSS values anymore. I used to fantasize about having a cool handheld Linux computer I could control freely. Now I'm more obsessed than ever about avoiding globalized tech, but I just don't care about smartphones anymore. I carry around an iPhone as the mark of the beast, but at least (I tell myself) I don't let it into my soul.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Without certain chemicals, you can't have certain thoughts.

Well put and true -- just like machines let us do certain things we couldn't do without them (either extending or repairing our body/mind), the same for chemicals. But I don't agree that this obviously follows:

Chemistry is what's running the show.

It all depends on what you define as the show. I would prefer to think of the show as something that takes place outside of my head and, even assuming it is reducible to chemistry/physics, it's part of a system way to complex for us to understand with mechanical models and necessitates some sort of framework where each individual is an end unto themselves.

Drugs can go a long way to recreate the sensations similar to sympathy and possibly even jumpstart it, but they can't actually create the intellectual side of the link that creates real living relationship in the real world. Having the tools to decouple the feelings from the meat of the relationship could be a powerful tool in the right hands, but applied by misguided people it will make things worse.

... to put it another way, it seems like the elite and the most poor are both using more drugs. But instead of solidarity it seems there's even more of a disconnect.

But don't feel bad for farmers. To inherit $10 million+ in land because your family's had it 100 years is a blessing most people don't get in life.

... I still think this is pretty sad. I married into family involved with farming and seeing this dilemma is not heartening. One of my in-laws is currently in farming proto-retirement (renting out land now and not actively farming), and I can vividly see how selling out is basically not an option for him. If you spend a lifetime cultivating practices of living modestly and working towards the ideal of the small family farm, a big pile of money:

1) does not interest you very much, since you've built your life around hobbies like going to the bar and socializing with a dwindling crowd of other people who have your lifestyle. Nouveau rich family farmers seldom seem to do much better with a windfall than lottery winners.

2) further, selling out really is the antithesis to what you spent your life doing. Basically you're saying that your lifestyle has outlived it's usefulness in the spirit of "Death of a Salesman" is worth more dead than alive.

I'm probably being overly harsh sounding because I'm not an expert and I've been exposed to the idealist perspective in person quite a bit. But I do have pity for those who have been put in a hard place when they are suddenly surrounded by "game of thrones" and skepticism that massive consolidation will work out well in the long run.

edit: and yeah, I get that adapting is also an option but by definition it's an option for increasingly few.

Of course it's worth mentioning that he's also depicted prominently in "A Man for all Seasons" of which "Wolf Hall" was created as a foil.

Yes, I've reread is the first 2/3rds of "Understanding Media" several times and never finished it, but would still highly recommend it. There is also some excellent old interview footage of him when he was a pop culture figure which is originally what fascinated me. For me it would have been hard to read his writing without having seen those interviews first -- he has a very distinct style of writing/talking and is interesting as an integrated person within recent history and not just a collection of ideas. On that note, I'd also recommend Videodrome.

edit: There are also more polemic anti-tech presentations of his ideas, especially by Neil Postman or Nicholas Carr which are good in their own way. But to me the fascinating thing about McLuhan himself is his dedication to presenting his views in a such a matter-of-fact way that most of his early followers were probably very antithetical to his personal beliefs.

More than interfaces. To quote McLuhan: "Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth."

The AI thing has been jarring but it's nothing new. All part of the same process.

How much of the previous disruptions came with actual improvements to the user experience? Or at least something novel?

There was a major "conscious shift" of society to get everyone on the social media boat with a lot of promise and it changed everything. Now we're all on the boat and our lives have not gotten magically better. The new hope is split up two different ways

1. New technologies really do have something magic that will let us have our cake and eat it too -- the benefits of a centralized medium without centralized control

2. "new" technologies are really just a sneaky way of fragmenting the larger system and moving back to something smaller and simpler.

My theory is, on the whole, that we're afraid to admit that we're sick of the big centralized networks and need to dress up that fact by pretending that the real feature of new networks is actually something technical.

edit: See also Bitcoin

Last chance to evacuate Reddit before it is recycled.

had Kaczynski chosen peaceful decades-later contemporary Internet discourse as his means of promoting his ideas, he'd simply be tarred and feathered as an "alt-right" nutjob, just like everyone else with views that contradict the present Western civilization status quo.

So what? Anyone with an ounce of spirituality knows that living your life to be admired in your lifetime is not the real goal. Ivan Illich spent his life being as lefty and now he's trendy on the right (making similar critiques, btw). Truth is beautiful when it's spoken for its own sake -- insecurity makes it ugly. It can't be forced into the world by terror.

Kaczynski killed because he was unbalanced and insecure, not because he held (partial) truth. Better thinkers on the issue were dime-a-dozen, even in his day (E.M. Forester, Samuel Butler, McLuhan). And it wasn't his terrorism but sophomoricly intellectual "incel" rage and religious fundamentalist movements that are finally waking people up.

edit: ... and this isn't to say that truth never justifies any form of violence, just that there is absolutely nothing to learn from Kaczynski's brand -- which was ignoble and totally futile to his intended ends.

As a social conservative, I disagree with this. Opportunity and will to make use of opportunity are two separate things and usually originate separately. But this will is NOT innate.

I'd go further and say that the reason any aristocracy has ever survived for more than a generation is because at the core of all its elaborate culture is a machine built to aggressively indoctrinate its next generation to be extremely moderate and conscious of its use of privileges.

There is a progressive ideological strain that banks its legitimacy on the belief that poverty can be one day eliminated, while traditional varieties of aristocrats believe that concentrated privileged is an inherent part of nature that needs to be managed. A "pure" progressive ideology would rise or fall with its apparent success -- it's also possible to imagine also an impure progressive ideology is a barbershop pole of which the real aristocrats are the ones working to maintain the illusion, stringing everyone else along.

That's how I see it anyway, not that I know what's really going on.