Voyager's 15 Billion Mile Software Update
lysdexic @ lysdexic @programming.dev Posts 65Comments 357Joined 2 yr. ago
lysdexic @ lysdexic @programming.dev
Posts
65
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357
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2 yr. ago
(...) there’s really nothing here for any competent programmer, even a fresh graduate. It turns out they they update the software by sending the update by radio.
How they send the payload is hardly the hard part of applying a software update. The hard part is stuff that you need to do after you have the payload: ensure the payload is valid, have the infrastructure in place to roll it out without bricking the hardware, be able to roll back faulty changes if some problem occurs after rolling stuff out, etc.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that this stuff is challenging for the majority of competent programmers out there, and they have the luxury of falling back to telling users to reboot or reinstall the app.
Taking UK as an example, you can call yourself civil engineer all day long without having to worry any legal consequences because there simply is no such thing as a licensing system for engineers.
Britain's Engineering Council disagrees.
https://www.engc.org.uk/international-activity/access-to-practise-in-the-uk/
That is the work of a software engineer.
To build upon this, we need to keep in mind that at least in some jurisdictions the role of a certified engineer is only required in projects with relevant size, and the responsibility of that engineer is to ensure the project complies with all requirements and therefore be held responsible for any mishap. This means that it's perfectly fine if non-engineers work independently on complex tasks, provided that an engineer attests that their output is fine and takes responsibility in case it isn't and it causes problems.
This really depends on the country you live in.
Not really. There are two aspects to this problem: one is how people assign arbitrary and meaningless titles to themselves, and another is regulatory requirements by jurisdictions to be able to legally assume a role.
I can call myself senior dubstep engineer, and that's perfectly fine. I can't call myself a civil engineer and sign off on a construction project or a permit. No one cares if I'm actually a senior dubstep engineer or if I'm junior at best. In the meantime, you will get in trouble if you try to sign off on a construction project, no matter of how stubborn you are with regards to calling yourself an engineer.
As a former civil engineer who now works in software, “software engineer” irks me. “Engineer” means you’re supposed to be licensed and you have a responsibility for the public good above your responsibility to your employer.
This. I think some people don't understand that titles are not whimsical status symbols and hold actual legal and regulatory meaning. A random guy can hold an engineering degree and not be an engineer, while a random guy with no degree can actually be a engineer if he jumps through all the hoops.
In engineering fields, being a member of a professional engineering body is critical to work in the field, because the main value proposition of these credentials is to prevent incompetent people from working on critical tasks which can potentially have important consequences to society if they are done poorly. For example, people can die if an engineer signs off on a project for a residential building that collapses due to shoddy work. If that happens then the engineers who signed off on the project will be investigated and if they are held responsible not only can they be held criminally responsible for their work but their license will be pulled, which is society's response to ensure this problem won't happen again.
Poorly defined nomenclature. Simple as that. I’m an “automation engineer”, have had many other titles (...)
Anyone can call themselves what they feel like it. However, in some jurisdictions and contexts the title "engineer" does have a specific meaning, consisting of someone who not only has the necessary and sufficient training but also is a member of a specific professional body. These credentials have meaning and those who try to pass themselves off as one without having the certification or credentials might be breaking laws.
Non profit doesn’t mean they earn nothing
You need a valid business model to keep an organization ticking. Staff doesn't live out of hopes and dreams. It's hard enough to get a for-profit software company to stay up. If your starting point is that the company is not focused on getting a profit then it all sounds as hopes and dreams instead of an actual business plan.
I’m not sold on user replaceable phone batteries, but USB-C was a long time coming.
As someone who had a perfectly fine Android smartphone die because its battery went dead, and had to replace it with an off-brand one to keep it ticking... I can assure you that the lack of support for user-replaceable phone batteries is forcing people to throw away perfectly good hardware.
There are parallels to be drawn between licensed professionals (like doctors, CPAs, lawyers, civil engineers) that they all have time under a professional and the professional then signs off and bears some responsibility vouching for a trainee.
We need to keep in mind that the main value proposition of these licenses is to bar people from practicing. There is no other purpose.
In some activities this gatekeeping mechanismo is well justified: a doctor who kills people out of incompetence should be prevented from practicing, and so do accountants who embezzle and civil engineers who get people killed by designing and building subpar things.
Your average software developers doesn't handle stuff that gets people killed. Society gains nothing by preventing a software developer from implementing a button in a social network webapp.
As a counter balance to that though, interviewers need to understand what they are hiring for and tailor the questions asked to those requirements.
This does not happen. At all.
Back in reality we have recruiters who can't even spell the name of the teck stacks they are hiring for as a precondition, and asking for impossible qualifications such as years of experience in tech stacks that were released only a few months ago.
From my personal experience, cultural fit and prior experience are far more critical hiring factors, and experience in tech stacks are only relevant in terms of dictating how fast someone can onboard onto a project.
Furthermore, engineering is all about solving problems that you never met before. Experience is important, but you don't assess that with leetcode or trivia questions.
to add to this, id like standardization of qualification and competencies - kind of like a license so I don’t have to “demonstrate” myself during interviews.
I strongly disagree. There is already a standardization of qualification of competences in the form of cloud vendor certifications. They are all utter bullshit and a huge moneygrab which do nothing to attest someone's experience or competence.
Certifications also validate optimizing for the wrong metric, like validating a "papers, please" attitude towards recruitment instead of actually demonstrate competence, skill, and experience.
Also, certifications validate the parasitic role of a IT recruiter, the likes of which is responsible for barring candidates for not having decades of experience in tech stacks they can't even spell and released just a few months ago. Relying on certifications empower parasitic recruiters to go from clueless filterers to outright gatekeepers, and in the process validate business models of circumventing their own certification requirements.
We already went down this road. It's a disaster. The only need this approach meets is ladder-pulling by incompetent people who paid for irrelevant certifications and have a legal mechanism to prevent extremely incompetent people from practicing, and the latter serves absolutely no purpose on software development.
We spend so much time building devices that are meant to break, and be unfixable, and making software that fights the user instead of helping.
Kudos to the EU for forcing mobile phone manufacturers to support replaceable batteries and standardize on USB-C charging.
User first, non-profit software companies.
How do you expect to keep a non-profit software company afloat?
(...) so more open standards and just Web apps instead of proprietary apps
What do you classify as "proprietary apps", and from the user's standpoint where do you see a difference between them and web apps?
You can always find a new shitshow
Having to deal with different volumes and types of shit can be a very welcomed move. Perfect is the enemy of good.
If it’s not constant at you may get the loop invariant movement. But only if the compiler can tell that it’s invariant.
The point is that if the predicate is evaluated at runtime then the compiler plays no role because there is no compile-time constant and all code paths are deemed possible.
I suppose what I should have said is more like “in many cases you won’t see any performance difference because the compiler will do that for you anyway.”
I understand that you're trying to say that compilers can leverage compile-time constants to infer if code paths are dead code or not.
That's just a corner case though. Your compiler has no say on what code paths are dead if you're evaluating a predicate from, say, the response of a HTTP request. It doesn't make sense to expect this hypothetical scenario to be realistic when you have no info on where a predicate is coming from.
Should have still used them. It was harder to read this way.
The blog author is literally using de-facto standard for placeholder names.
The var names used by the author are perfectly fine. They don't cause any issue, nor do they make things hard to read.
My advice: use descriptive variable names.
The article is really not about naming conventions.
Ive been paying attention which is why I dont see the communities youre talking about (especially after ive tweaked things).
You're not paying any attention to what your bot is doing if you aren't noticing where and what your bot is posting.
If you want it removed from c++ node and cloud I can do that (I assume you do considering what youve been saying so will remove the three communities from the bots sight)
That does not fix the problem you're creating.
The problem is that your bot is dumping spam onto Lemmy, and apparently you don't even realize how broken your bot is.
If I wanted to ban your bot from the communities I moderate, I would already have done so. That does not fix the problem though.
I don't see how it's reasonable to expect that your misjudgement in deploying a broken bot should be solved by forcing others to cleanup after you, or do extra maintenance work just to avoid the mess you're creating.
In the very least, your bot should be opt-in, and it should directly cross-post stuff onto the communities that want a bot to generate traffic for them instead of annoying people.
Lastly, if you want additional evidence that your bot is broken by design, here's the absurd suggestion it posted onto !gamedev@programming.dev triggered by a post with a Godot example.
Do you really believe you're doing anyone any favor by suggesting to post a Godot C# sample to communities dedicated to the C programming language and .NET?
I'm sure everyone is still in
comp.lang.fortrantelling all kids to get off their lawns.