namingthingsiseasy @ namingthingsiseasy @programming.dev

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2 yr. ago

This is very interesting! Things like this make me wish programmers would give functional^W declarative programming more of a chance. I've long fantasized about being able to write programs as declarative code that the computer can optimize automatically without human intervention. When you implement your program in more restrictive (ie. stateless) paradigms, you can more easily reason about the code, and thereby make it easier to optimize or run in different environments.

SQL is a great example of this - when you look at some of the optimizations that servers like PostgreSQL can do under the hood, this is because the language inherently limits what you can do so the actual system executing your instructions can do different things with it for better performance and reliability. Things like this are what make query optimizers possible, and it's really fascinating if you actually read carefully what query analyzers report (beyond just checking whether your indices are being used or not).

Beautiful chart. Thanks for sharing!

How is it that you're so well-versed in all of Stallman's negative quotes (from over a decade ago), yet conveniently omitted the fact that he later retracted those statements?

On September 16, 2019, Stallman announced his resignation from both MIT and FSF, "due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations".[124] In a post on his website, Stallman asserted that his posts to the email lists were not to defend Epstein, stating "Nothing could be further from the truth. I've called him a 'serial rapist', and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him—and other inaccurate claims—and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said.

The FSF board on April 12 made a statement re-affirming its decision to bring back Richard Stallman.[133] Following this, Stallman issued a statement explaining his poor social skills and apologizing.[134]

I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.

Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don't rely on tracking information.

And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That's what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That's much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.

And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.

Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it's right or wrong, it's done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.

I don't doubt you at all - I've seen quite a few stories of Google exhibiting retribution against employees attempting to unionize.

The point I was trying to make (admittedly quite badly) is that Google employees should have unionized a long time ago, when they had the upper hand. At this point, it's a much steeper uphill climb. But it is still a very worthy fight.

You could also blame the idiots who had a chance to unionize but never did.

If you go back 5-10 years, everyone would say, "why do we need to unionize? Working in IT is great, we don't need to unionize!" And now see where we are today to realize how stupid of a mindset that was. I guess they don't buy insurance for the same reason.

I thought you had to be smart to work at Google, but seeing people take dumb positions like that made me realize that while they might have been brilliant engineers, they were definitely not very smart people.

(I'm not holding Google blameless here by the way - fuck them hard! But Google employees had the chance and wasted it, and this is what they left behind.)

All negative basic human instincts are like this though, but it's greed that we allow to grow unfettered. Anger is considered socially acceptable until you go berserk and start killing people and breaking things. Lust/sex is fine, until you start humping everyone and everything you see in the street. Greed has no upper bound like these though. And it's high time that we started imposing some sort of control to stop this growth.

we cant have nice things because humans are just so fucking greedy and incapable of controlling that greed.

That's not completely true though! One thing that a lot of people forget about Google is that they didn't have to become a publicly traded for-profit company. A lot of people around 2002-2004-ish saw Google's meteoric rise and wondered what path they were going to take. Some speculated/hoped that they would go the Wikipedia route and become a service that existed for the public good instead of a for-profit venture.

We all know what happened after. The pursuit of profit inevitably leads all companies to becoming sociopathic and evil. They didn't have to be this way. And this is true for lots of tech startups. I wish we had seen more of them become wikipedias instead of googles.

It's also worth pointing out that the original founders did want to make a company that was good and not evil. They tried to succeed by creating legitimately good products, and not screwing over their users. They did make mistakes along the way, but their intentions were at least good. The major problems started (as they usually do), when the second CEO took charge of the company, and it was evident that he had not clue whatsoever how to create a product. All Sundar Pichai knows how to do is suck as much blood as he can out of a stone. But Google's founders are not blameless here: they were the ones that set the corporate structure up this way, and they were the ones that got bored and decided to fuck off. And they cheated on their taxes the way all corporations do, so no matter how good their intentions were, they were still pretty awful people.

Because the USA haven't had the balls to hold corporations responsible for their actions in decades. They can save them from failure, but have no willpower to correct any of their malevolent behaviors.

I really hope this generation is the one that finally changes that trend.

+1, I would recommend neovim with lazyvim. The documentation is excellent, and it's very easy to set up.

https://www.lazyvim.org/installation

What exactly is it that people obsess over? The desktop environment and terminal customisation? Setting up NetworkManager with nmcli? Using Vim to edit a .conf file?

Welcome to the crowd! Eventually, you realize that an operating system is just an operating system: something you use to get work done, and the less you notice it, the better it's doing its job. The pride of setting it all up mostly ends very shortly after you're done. At that point, you realize that pretty much all distros are the same, give or take.

That said, there are always moments that make you realize that your OS is amazing. When you're faced with a new and difficult task that you don't know how to achieve, then you look at your distro's documentation and solve it in a few elegant steps. And I'm not an Arch user, but that's when the Arch wiki will really be your friend, as well as all the other resources that Arch has for its users. I can't think of examples of these kinds of moments because they're so rare, but those are the moments that feel great and really make you appreciate your OS.

Yes, I agree, and I think it's a reflection of society's values over the past 50 years.

We are living in a world with more of a "make money and fuck all else" mindset. Children of wealthy elites are living very privileged childhoods, and as a result, have less empathy and more contempt for real people. We are now seeing the effects of living in a society where the needle of social values is pointed 100% on the side of capitalism and 0% on the side of moral values. And how that has affected our perspectives of a society at large: a general lack of caring, a lack of empathy, a lack of conscientiousness from the top, tossing normal, real people aside like rubbish in a bin.

We're seeing what happens when you let a generation of incredibly entitled children grow up to take the reins of society. We all know how it ends....

(And for what it's worth, I think a long, extended Great Depression-style event is much more likely than a violent conflict, especially given how docile citizens of the west have proven themselves to be over the past several decades.)

One for every current ~0.5% market share!

The “just add reddit” or “just add site:reddit.com” has been trash for a while

Has that ever been true? I always assumed it was some sort of shadow marketing campaign to get people to look at reddit more. Pretending that one website is the only reliable source of answers on the internet is incredibly audacious, it always seemed very farfetched to suggest that

“Ukraine’s decision fundamentally threatens the security of supply in Hungary,” the country’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said Monday

Oh my God!!! I can't possibly imagine them being concerned about anything more serious than that right now!!!

I dunno. I’m a believer that there is real benefit to diverse teams and there is some evidence in support of this.

You're 100% right! But good luck convincing the bean counters.

Can I interest you in links?

Or how about lynx?

With the exception of maybe Princeton or Columbia, top research isn’t coming out of Ivy League schools.

Doesn't Harvard have one of the most advanced medical programs in the entire world? Perhaps the best even. Especially in fields related to cancer research.

I would vote for docker as well. The last time I had to inherit a system that ran on virtual machines, it was quite a pain to figure out how the software was installed, what was where in the file system, and where all the configuration was coming from. Replicating that setup took months of preparation.

By contrast, with Docker, all your setup is documented. The commands that were used to install our software into the virtual machines and were long gone are present right there in the Docker file. And building the code? An even bigger win for Docker. In the VM project, the build environment for the C++ portion of our codebase was configured by about a dozen environment variables, none of which were documented. If it were built in Docker, all the necessary environment variables would have been right there in the build environment. Not to mention the build commands themselves would be there too, whereas with VMs, we would often have developers build locally and then copy it into the VM, which was terrible for reproducibility and onboarding new developers.

That said, this all comes down to execution - a well-managed VM system can easily be much better than a poorly managed Docker system. But in general, I feel that Docker tends to be easier to work with than a VM. While Docker is far from flawless, there are a lot more things that can make life harder with VMs, at least from my experience.

Do you know how vim has distributions like lunarvim, lazvim, nvchad, etc.? Simply installing something like lazyvim can quickly and easily convert vim from a text editor to a full blown IDE.

I think Gnome needs something like this. A curated set of plugins that are easy to install and maintain compatibility with different versions of Gnome - something that would deal with the API churn in Gnome while maintaining a stable, usable desktop environment.

I don't know if this is feasible, because I haven't used Gnome since 2.x, but I think it would really help make it an actual full blown DE.