foo @ foo @withachanceof.com

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I use a mix of shell commands, terminal file manager, and GUI file manager depending on the task at hand.

The terminal file managers are quicker to navigate to a particular file/directory since it doesn't require typing commands but I can still navigate with a few key strokes as opposed to using a GUI.

ActivityPub protocol so that anyone can run their own instance, but can also be blocked if anything heinous happens.

The overlap between the users who will run their own instance and the users you want for a dating app is the empty set.

(Speaking as someone that runs a personal Lemmy instance here)

I'll be honest with you: I have better things to do with my time than debunk the same old re-hashed covid vaccine bullshit. It's been almost three years since the vaccines were given to billions of people. If the clinical trials did truly miss awful side effects or there was something else wrong with them we'd know by now. It's all bullshit and always has been. I'm done wasting my time debunking something that obviously has no credibility.

There's no mass conspiracy about any of this stuff. If you want to get to the root of it just follow the money. Who profits from you and other people clicking on and reading these outlandish articles that promise to shed light on some massive conspiracy that the whole world is otherwise missing? The people that run the websites. They collect their ad revenue by peddling bullshit. If you're not paying for something, you are the product, not the customer.

Also assuming you're not just a troll with this comment...

You're posting links to this website "vigilantnews.com". Have you looked into who is behind it? According to their about section, it's made up two people. One simply called "The Vigilant Fox" and another named Dallas Ludlum. (https://vigilantnews.com/about)

The latter, Dallas, runs a blog dressed up as a newspaper with clearly a hard right take on politics here: https://conservativecompass.substack.com. He's also quite active on Quora for giving job seeking and career advice: https://www.quora.com/profile/Dallas-Ludlum.

More interestingly, from a reverse image search, this person's headshot also shows up on an eastern European photographer's website here: https://sebastianszulfer.com/en/services/headshots-portraits/. Yet Dallas claims to be on the east coast of the US on his Twitter account. Traveling to Europe just for a photo is quite the trek.

At best, the sources you're listing are simply one or maybe two person's opinions dressed up as a newspaper in order to generate pageviews and thus ad revenue. At worst, between the anonymous "Vigilant Fox" persona and the fake headshot profile photos, it's likely this is part of a larger fake information dissemination campaign.

Is that "challenging the narrative" enough for you?

Considering the amount of flat out incorrect or wildly off-base code GPT has generated on surprisingly simple tasks over the past nearly year now, no, I'm not too worried about my job. I find it handy for time to time in replacing stuff I previously used a search engine for which makes it a productivity booster for me, but for anything novel or not straightforward (aka, anything outside of its training set, which is what I'd ideally want to use it for), it's less than useful or actively harmful in trying to lead me down the wrong path. Overall, it still requires a human with significant knowledge in the field to know how to use the information these tools generate and how to put the pieces together to do something useful. I don't see how that could change until there is an actual reasoning artificial intelligence brain developed which is a BIG ask, if it's even possible in our lifetimes, or ever.

...or maybe we'll all be out of a job in 10 years. Humans are quite bad at predicting the future and I am indeed human.

And for what it's worth, no I did not RTFA. I've spent enough time reading articles prophesizing the doom of software engineering due to generative AI and don't feel like wasting more time on the topic.

This should be multiple choices because different platforms are used for different topics. For example:

• Reporting a bug in an open source project: Whatever their bug tracker is where others can find the issue and chime in with more info/a fix.
• Asking for help in setting something up: A support forum of some type. Depending on size and activity level of project this would take different forms.
• Reporting a security issue: Something confidential with the developers so they have a chance to fix it before its publicly known.

Point being, there's no single platform for all projects or even all use cases within a single project.

You know, you're never going to change that map if you tell everyone living in one of those red states that their home is part of "dumbfuckistan."

if they say they don’t care what pronouns I use for them

I'm taking it at face value then and using whatever I think is appropriate. There's no point in wasting time playing games with this.

I'm sure it is, but when you throw in property taxes, insurance, HOA dues, PMI, and the big one: maintenance costs (which will vary dramatically on a case-by-case basis), comparing mortgages to rent becomes an apples-to-oranges comparison. For me personally, I spent $50k in the first six months of owning my home on maintenance & repairs alone. That could have paid for 2+ years of rent. Not to mention the ~$30k or so you'll pay to sell it if you're only going to be there for a few years.

Keep in mind too that the mortgage interest deduction is now capped at the first $750k. For people in HCOL areas, that's starting to become a fairly low limit.

But yeah, I'm with you on the sense of stability is worth something too and that's hard to put a dollar figure on. Most people want that stability, but there's also people that want flexibility or may move around a lot such that buying a home every other year doesn't make sense. My overall point is that it's not always cheaper to buy and that renters can and do come out ahead, especially when they're also investing excess funds appropriately.

For sure, I'm not trying to say that buying a house is a bad idea by any means, just that for some people you can rent and still come out ahead of a homeowner. It seems like people always compare a mortgage payment to their rent and think "wow, owning is so cheap compared to my rent!" and then forget about all the other costs associated with owning that can easily result in monthly costs double that mortgage rate. For example, I pay much more for my house now than I did when I was renting. Yes, it's building equity but if I took the difference in costs and invested it in index funds over the long term could easily be equal to or exceed money earned from property appreciation. Plus, index funds are far more liquid than real estate is and I never have the mow the lawn of my portfolio. But on the other hand the stability and sense of ownership in a home is worth something as well which is harder to put a dollar figure on. If that's worth something (as it is to me) then buying is likely worth the premium.

Buying is not always cheaper than renting. You're on the hook for closing costs, ongoing maintenance, property taxes, insurance, HOA dues, PMI, etc. Then if you're only living somewhere for a few years you have to pay real estate agent fees to sell. Depending on length of ownership it can very easily be cheaper to rent. Plus you can't just up and leave like you can at the end of a lease. Renting is far more flexible and that's attractive for some people.

There's also something to be said for paying more to live in a house rather than an apartment for the reasons you listed, but the same math above applies to renting vs. buying a single family home, or some other standalone housing.

Junior dev: "I fucked up bad, I'm so fired"

Senior dev: " I have 3 production outages named after me lol"

Source: https://twitter.com/CarlaNotarobot/status/1481458190722207747

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1325905

Do you have anything of substance to add here or are you just going to continue replying "wrong" to everyone you disagree with as if your opinion is the absolute arbiter of truth?

I could be mistaken, but I believe these sites are normally “using rails” (as in they shell out to other languages, Go has become common, for performance critical end points or portions of those end points that need to work a bit harder). I also suspect they’ve got some pretty heavy modifications.

I can't speak to what they're doing internally, but I would agree this is a safe assumption. I think the point though is that Rails, with some help of external services depending on use case, can certainly be scaled out to a level that is far above the average web service making it more than capable of handling 95% of use cases you could throw at it. In the case of Shopify, they've traditionally been great about contributing optimizations back to Rails so their performance optimizations are shared with the larger ecosystem (and has the benefit of keeping them closer to upstream).

The Ruby language itself has fibers, but last I knew Rails was not making use of fibers for ActiveRecord. The problem is effectively you’re in an interpreted language (bad enough) without real parallelism (worse). So, when any IO occurs one of your non-parallel threads is blocked.

To your point, Ruby recently introduced Ractors which are true parallelism. They're new enough that their use isn't widespread yet, but I've played around with them and it's definitely neat to have real parallelism in Ruby now. And for web services, this would depend too on the web server. For example, using Puma or Unicorn will have multiple worker processes so there is some parallelism between requests regardless.

The problem you run into here is a lack of mature libraries to leverage if you want to do anything non-trivial. e.g., our application needed to read from spreadsheets. The Ruby libraries either A) didn’t have support for common formats like xls or B) would load the entire spread sheet into memory represented as Ruby objects (you can predict how well that performed :) ).

Yeah, I get that. For what it's worth, I really can't think of a situation where there hasn't been some library written in Ruby for something that I needed shy of extremely esoteric stuff that I likely would have needed to write myself if working in another language anyway. But that's going to be highly dependent on a case-by-case basis. For what it's worth, I make it a point to use as few third-party libraries as I can unless they're highly popular. It's a problem in all languages that random person's pet project library, while highly useful, becomes abandonware far too often.

I think we eventually started using something akin to that. However, I’m a big advocate for making the wrong thing look wrong/complicated, and Rails very often makes the wrong thing look simple. Note that gems like this don’t really solve the problem they just inform you when you’ve made the mistake, or alternatively forcing your app into hammering your database even in situations when it doesn’t need to

You might be referring to the Bullet gem which is just a notification that there's an N+1 and where to find it so it may be fixed. However, the JIT Preloader gem actually does automatically solve the problem of N+1s in nearly all cases (see the README for details if you're curious). It's the closest to a silver bullet solution for the N+1 problem as I've seen and I now give almost zero thought to N+1s anymore. I know the devs were wanting to get it merged into Rails to solve this problem for everyone, but I don't know what happened to that effort.

I agree, but there is something to be said for hiring people that are extremely knowledgeable in the framework to help highlight solutions (like those you’ve mentioned here) vs “you’re a great C++ dev, now go do Ruby!”

Right, I wouldn't portend that anyone can make an easy switch from, say, embedded systems to web development in a few weeks or even a few months. I meant more like if you're competent web developer the core concepts of building web backends/frontends don't vary all that much between frameworks. At the end of the day, the underlying concepts deal with HTTP and HTML/JS/CSS so if you have a solid understanding of the base concepts and system design for the backend it shouldn't be much trouble to switch the framework sitting on top of those, especially if you have a team around you that is effective at code reviews, answering questions, and generally investing in new employees. Like you said, switching from something totally unrelated is a different situation though.

Thanks for a thoughtful reply, by the way. :) I really shy away from getting into pointless internet fanboy debates over which tool/language/framework is "best" but always enjoy when there's thought out reasoning behind points.

For something like Lemmy I’m confident it would just fall over (or require a much higher hosting burden). There’s way too much data to render and retrieve in a system like Lemmy, the caching systems for JSON shuck (hello jbuilder caching objects instead of json)

Well, it seems to work well enough for Mastodon. I'd also point out that there are websites far larger than Lemmy using Rails at scale (Shopify and GitHub being the primary examples). It scales quite well.

Ruby performance is awful

Without benchmarks, this is a subjective statement. Ruby 3 is quite speedy now, at least I find it to be. Performance is even better with YJIT enabled in Ruby 3.2. I think this "Ruby is slow!" stereotype is left over from before Ruby 1.9 when YARV was introduced. Is it as fast as a native language? No and it never will be, nor will any other interpreted language. But this idea that Ruby is somehow the slowest possible interpreted language has not been true for a very long time now.

there’s no mitigating factor to allow efficient blocking on IO bound requests (like coroutines or fibers)

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this, but Ruby introduced fibers a while ago.

Ruby used a non-compacting garbage collector so it’s subject to heap fragmentation and wasting memory

Not true anymore. Ruby has had a compacting GC for a while now. This was a difficult problem to solve because of Ruby's support for native extensions. Otherwise it would have been done much sooner.

there’s no static typing (or even type hinting),

You can use RBS (built into Ruby) or Sorbet (third-party Shopify project) for this if you want. Or don't, I personally prefer Ruby's duck typing. I don't think a language using someone's preferred type system makes it "terrible" just because it's not what someone likes. Other people are perfectly happy with it.

the Ruby ecosystem is built on Rails alone at this point (few if any libraries to make use of)

Ruby being a one-stop-shop for Rails has been a criticism of it for years. I'm not sure how that's a knock against Rails or Ruby though. I personally write all sorts of non-Rails things with Ruby as I love the syntax and greatly enjoy writing Ruby code over that of, say, Python. To each their own though. There's Sinatra, Jekyll, Fluentd, Chef, etc. all written in Ruby.

the principle of “developer happiness” results in the need for tools like Rubocop to “resolve” invented problems WRT “how do you style X in a particular context” (among other things),

I personally love the configurability that Rubocop provides. Some people like the "one true way" of formatting for languages like Go (which also for some reason thinks single letter variable names everywhere is a great idea), but other linters like Eslint for JavaScript have the same level of configurability as Rubocop. Alternatively, just don't use them. Rubocop is not something you need to use to use Rails.

and to top it off the framework makes doing the wrong thing easy and the right thing harder (Rails apps are so prone to N + 1 database queries).

Drop in gem that will automatically solve 99% of N+1 issues: https://github.com/clio/jit_preloader

It’s also a ridiculously hard thing to hire for because basically nobody teaches Ruby or Rails. There’s a very limited pool of Rails experts.

Again, subjective statement here. My company has no problem hiring Rails devs. Granted, we operate on the idea that any good engineer can get up to speed with a framework in a reasonable amount of time. I don't believe in the "you are only worth the frameworks that you know" idea. Give me three months and I'm confident I could be proficient & competent with any web framework. Not a true expert per se, but knowledgeable enough to get stuff done, which at the end of the day is what you need to do. Those are the people I want to hire. Not the person that's going to be afraid to jump into something new because they've never worked with it before.

Am I saying that Ruby/Rails is perfect and there's no problems? Of course not. There's no such thing as a perfect language or framework. But I also think that Ruby is unfairly demonized because of lack of familiarity and it being less used than JS and Python frameworks. And oh boy do I have complaints about JS frameworks. But I wouldn't go so far as to call any of them "terrible." Maybe it's not my/your cup of tea and that's okay.

I have to re-auth with AWS every goddamn hour and enter a 2fa code for every. single. command. I run from the CLI. It drives me up a fucking wall even though I have it entirely scripted now. Another great example of how overly tight security leads to worse security as people try to bypass it.

Yeah I'm not sold on Hotwire either. I started a new Rails project last year with Rails 7 and removed all of the Turbo/Hotwire stuff and did it all with import-maps and vanilla JS. Import-maps don't require a third party CDN though. I absolutely love that I can use them to write ES6 JS and have it served directly to the frontend without any Webpack/ESbuild compilation step in between. After a decade of working with the nightmare that was Webpack & Webpacker in Rails I'm totally with you on how that whole asset management system needed a big overhaul and I think with importmaps or esbuild we might finally have something tolerable.

To each their own. I don't fanboy frameworks, they all have their pros and cons. What you specialize in for a personal professional career is different from what you may choose for a free software project though. Plus, I'd argue there's definitely downsides to the JS ecosystem as well but also frameworks you know should not dictate your career prospects. I get this all the time in interviews and career development talks. If you consider yourself a web developer getting up to speed with a new stack or framework shouldn't be an insurmountable task. The nature of web development is that it's constantly changing. Feeling stuck with Rails vs. Django vs. React or whatever else means your skills are not keeping up with the market; it's not a fault of the framework. The only constant in this line of work is change.

That said, Rails isn't going anywhere. JS frameworks are the hot thing (for whatever reason, I despise them for all sorts of reasons, but that's not the point) for many new companies/projects, but there are very large companies whose products are built on Rails: Shopify, GitHub, GitLab, Zendesk, etc.

There’s too much radical changes. First from sprockets to webpacker and then import-maps and propshaft. And then the in-built Hotwire is so hard to grasp.

Would this not be viewed as adapting and keeping up with the trends? Webpack is terrible, but that's what the JS world went with so Rails adopted it. Now there's ESbuild, import-maps, and Hotwire. Rails supports all of them (import-maps, by the way, is a web standard, not a Rails specific thing... and I love using it). You don't need to use them and can pick which works best for your product/project. That's a benefit in my opinion.

I also used my Rails knowledge to contribute to GitLab because I was misinformed that open source contribution would increase my prospective of getting hired. I contributed for around six months, got rejected multiple times, and then stopped all contributions to GitLab.

GitLab certainly has that reputation. I don't see how that's a knock against Rails though. Shitty companies will be shitty companies regardless of what stack they use. Personally, I never contribute any code to projects that have a commercial organization behind them. If it's not GPL licensed (or similar) you're probably getting screwed by spending your time working on it.

Rails. Of course, I'm biased because it's what I know the best, but also because Mastodon is written with Rails so in terms of getting more contributors from a similar project I think Rails would have been a good choice.

I also looked into helping with Lemmy development, but ran into the same problem you've described: I don't know anything about any parts of the stack. I run my own instance so I can run and debug it well enough, but actively working on new features/bug fixes would require more time to get up to speed than I can put in currently.

Edit: I'm not one to complain about imaginary internet downvotes, but can we be better than reddit please? Downvote is not a disagree button. The question was what would I have chosen, not what the most popular web framework is this year. It's cool if you would have chosen something else. This whole thread has become "what framework does everyone like the most currently?"