- The day I stopped giving half a fraction of a shit was the day Google served me malware in an ad. It was one of those fake "Download" buttons on a very popular open source tool. I wonder how many people have been harmed by that.
> medium you are consuming may not exist at all
I've realized that's not my problem. It's not like most of the internet is healthy anyway. It's psychologically manipulative and designed to keep you fearful, angry, spiteful, jealous, and above all, depressed.
Fuck Google. Fuck Meta. And fuck every single last person working for them.
- It pretends to be. But in reality it's always been a VC honey pot.
I've stopped commenting here. I've made it a personal rule to only speak out against this tyranny and never talk about tech fluff, which is 100% of the front page of HN. I don't give two solid fucks about SQLite when the US government is throwing people in death camps in El Salvador.
This site is straight tech bro fascism. People are finally realizing that Elon isn't the guy his PR team created. He's not Tony Stark.
- you have a lot of faith that Big Balls hasn't been compromised. Because surely none of them are using their personal smartphones or laptops and are following strict access protocols. Seeing that they are so so careful with everything else they've been doing.
I feel like this is a bad episode of the Twilight Zone.
- The deal still has me scratching my head. They tossed out the brand name and logo. Elon already had the X name and domain. For much less than $44B I feel like you could clone Twitter and come up with a strategy to acquire users. Hell, for $1 billion you could probably pay a good number of influencers to move to your platform. $44 billion is an absolute fuckton of money to kill Twitter and move those people to your pet project.
- I know it's fashionable to use flatpak, Docker, etc. but I'd still rather not have 30 instances of Gtk running for every GUI app I decide to run. Consider that we still run on Raspberry Pi, etc.
> aren’t these shared libraries a supply chain attack vector
Not any more than the apps themselves. If you're downloading a static binary you don't know what's in it. I don't know why anyone trusts half the Docker images that we all download and use. But we do it anyway.
- There was also Kahn, which was a similar competitor.
I remember playing Duke3d over the internet. I was completely giddy as me and my friends all flew around with jetpacks on trying to kill each other with pipebombs.
The downside was that those games were obviously not optimized for internet latency and there wasn't much you could do about it. But I definitely had a blast.
- EVs are the worst proposition for a car rental. When you rent a car, you're planning on driving it. Much more than the car that sits on your driveway and only takes you to work and back every day.
But it doesn't help that Tesla is a tech company and their product is sold as a tech product. No one wants to buy a 3 year old used iPhone, either.
- I can understand why people wanted that, and the benefit of doing that.
With that said, I also see benefit in having limitations. There is a certain comfort in knowing what a tool can do and cannot do. A hammer cannot become a screwdriver. And that's fine because you can then decide to use a screwdriver. You're capable of selection.
Take PostgreSQL. How many devs today know when it's the right solution? When should they use Redis instead? Or a queue solution? Cloud services add even more confusion. What are the limitations and weaknesses of AWS RDS? Or any AWS service? Ask your typical dev this today and they will give you a blank stare. It's really hard to even know what the right tool is today, when everything is abstracted away and put into fee tiers, ingress/egress charges, etc. etc.
tl;dr: limitations and knowledge of those limitations are an important part of being able to select the right tool for the job
- Here's a good video from Jason Cammisa about the new (at the time) mk8:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGbPHp6QfkQ
I had a mk7 and it is the best interior + UX I've seen in a car. Everything is as simple and ergonomic as possible. The volume adjustment is a knob, with soft rubber knurling and indents for feedback. It's not some awful feeling smooth afterthought that you see on certain Toyotas or Hondas. It's not a push button (beep beep beep beep) you find on old Pioneer stereos from the '90s. It's exactly what you want to adjust the volume. The AC is similar. Heated seats are a button with 3 LEDs indicating high/med/low. Everything just makes sense.
And then VW got cheap and greedy. The mk8 is almost the complete opposite of what the mk7 was.
- There are lots of reasons why Half-life was a success. You shouldn't discount stupid luck, as well. Their first iteration was awful, as mentioned in the YouTube video. They essentially had to start over with a "cabal" and pull the game together with the good scraps of work they had already done.
Here's a more detailed article on the cabal process (starting on page 2):
https://web.archive.org/web/20210823181232/https://www.gamas...
From 1999 and much more detailed than the video.
Now, game development is inherently waterfall. You work for years and built up to this huge release. Nowadays you might have some agile processes embedded into milestones, etc. But fundamentally it's all leading to a huge waterfall.
That's important. Because what agile does, today, is that it turns autonomous developers into cogs of a large machine. But Valve's "cabal" was entirely free to do whatever they felt best. Gabe Newell probably had final say and input, but ultimately the group had flexibility. The developers had full system awareness. They weren't pulling Jira tickets off a board like a blind man in the elephant parable[1]. They knew how the pieces fit because they put them there. And if the pieces weren't fitting, they had the authority to make them fit.
Perhaps more interesting is how the story of Half-life can be viewed through The Mythical Man-Month[2]
> When designing a new kind of system, a team will design a throw-away system (whether it intends to or not). This system acts as a "pilot plan" that reveals techniques that will subsequently cause a complete redesign of the system.
Their cabal has a bit of overlap with the "surgical team" concept and usage of formal documents. The rest of the employees did nothing while this group operated. Thus, they reduced manpower that actually allowed them to move forward. Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast (from the US Navy Seals). Most companies do the opposite. They crank up the number of employees to hit deadlines, which creates more bugs and more work.
- Amazon is already there.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-is-quietly-building-th...
Interestingly, Amazon's move to ad placement seems to coincide with how terrible Amazon's search is. It's a pay-to-play free-for-all wasteland. Not too dissimilar to the SEO wasteland of Google search.
- I'm sure internal politics plays a large role. Managers knee-capping each other and so forth.
But there is another way to look at it. A company of Google's size will not be satisfied by a "small" $10M ARR business or perhaps even a $100M ARR business. It's not going to move the needle. The needle being, effectively, Google's stock price.
There are two ways to move the stock price: increased profit or decreased spend. Increase the pie or stop the number of people eating the existing pie.
All of those projects had more value in being ritualistic offerings to the stock gods. Much like the unreleased Batgirl film had more value being a tax write-off than selling for market value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batgirl_(film)
- I'm imagining more of an AI that takes a standard movie screenplay and a sidecar file, similar to a CSS file for the web and generates the movie. This sidecar file would contain the "director" of the movie, with camera angles, shot length and speed, color grading, etc. Don't like how the new Dune movie looks? Edit the stylesheet and make it your own. Personalized remixed blockbusters.
On a more serious note, I don't think Roger Deakins has anything to worry about right now. Or maybe ever. We've been here before. DAWs opened up an entire world of audio production to people that could afford a laptop and some basic gear. But we certainly do not have a thousand Beatles out there. It still requires talent and effort.
- > rather have you listening uncritically to ChatGPT than to a lot of crap on the internet
This, to me, seems to be an amusing reversal of trends. Before the internet there was the "mainstream media". NBC, CBS, ABC run by the big conglomerates such as GE. Which would mold public consensus in the US. Now there is a desire to go back to that. Let LLM do the thinking and the managing of biases and just tell me what to think.
The unfiltered internet is too much. It's overwhelming. It's the raw sewage of the Facebook feed. We need someone to coddle us. And that champion, today, is OpenAI.
- You're assuming bad code is code that throws errors.
SQL injection is bad code that "works". Most security issues come from bad code that just "works". I can't believe I have to say this, on HN of all places, but you have to actually know what you are doing when writing code. Some of you scare the fucking shit out of me.
- I'd definitely say LLMs are stuck on step 3: "Failure to live up to the hype"
They are certainly impressive, but their utility-to-hype/gimmick ratio is incredibly low right now, which could cause a crash. The greater the disappointment the greater the crash.
I'm reminded of 3D TVs. Remember those? Avatar came out in 2009. By 2016 the trend was dead. Despite the cries of "this time it's different." Of course, that time it was not different. The tech was impressive. Much more than the previous time the fad was around in the '80s. Remember the blue/red glasses? Absolutely not a single person talks about 3D TV today.
The 3D TV was a technical success but it was too much of a gimmick that it died out. My Facebook feed is a never-ending stream of AI generated garbage. I think people are going to tire of it, realize the images it makes are about as goofy as a 2004 MySpace page, and maybe it will stick around to fill out the useless corporate email and document bureaucracy and boilerplate framework code monkey BS.
But ChatGPT isn't writing Breaking Bad or The Sopranos anytime soon.
- Nestjs is my least favorite framework I've used in the past 10 years. Just a step below RxJS.
It's an ORM which means performance you may as well forget it. It's such a memory hog. On top of GraphQL, which can easily cause performance issues on its very own without help thank you very much. It's like the N + 1 problem had a baby with a memory leak. Why devs keep doing this to themselves I'll never understand. You don't need this level of pain for even a massive API codebase.
- > People can also live closer to work
Not in America. We have a thing called "suburbs" here. That's where people live. For cost, quality of life, school, etc. reasons. Some cities don't even have a center, such as LA which is just sprawl in every direction as far as the eye can see. You may work in Santa Monica and your spouse works in DTLA. At least one of you is going to have an absolute hell of a commute. SV isn't better. Your place of work probably is the suburbs. Just not your suburbs.
> no one thinks college is better remote
Says who? My college experience: go sit in a giant auditorium with 60 other people and listen to a lecture with no actual interaction with the professor. I could have stayed home and watched a YouTube video with less distraction and more comfort. In college you are entirely on your own to learn the material. That's the best time to go remote. I can sit and rewind a video until I understand it. I can pause and take a break.
> happiness of a larger house
That's probably the last reason you buy a house in CA. But you don't have to make that trade-off today. Because remote is a thing.
Today I went and took a shit in my private bathroom. I didn't have some guy come in and sit down not even 2 feet away and start gassing me with his morning diarrhea. I also didn't go back to my open office hot desk under the harsh florescent lights and try to read my morning email with people walking and talking behind me wondering if these people are looking at my screen.
- why would a software dev have a portfolio? The comparison to design or writing doesn't make sense. A graphic designer can point to logos or marketing material that is publicly available. I'm not going to put proprietary code on a portfolio nor am I going to spend multiple years building some open source project when I already have a full time job.
Software engineering must be the only profession where employment history means nothing. And yet... interviewers always want salary history to knock you down. If you don't care about the work I did in the past, then why do you care about how much I was given for that work?
- Some companies seem to lie about their top range number as well. If you pass the interview and ask you for a figure and you come back with their top range number, suddenly there are reasons you shouldn't be making that. I strongly suspect they have no intention of giving out that amount but are instead using it to entice people that are willing to accept less than they are worth. It plants the idea that one day you will be making that much at the company if you accept less for now.
https://www.fsf.org/
But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.