- > and without evidence either way it's a matter of opinion
The absence of evidence is used as evidence of the thing (hostile deep state actors) existing, because they're so good they can hide their tracks so well that they can't be found. They must be stopped.
When lack of evidence is the proof... I'm not sure there's much room for rational discussion.
"...and just assume they are just randomly pulling triggers...hinder our own ability to predict and prepare for the future."
Speaking about the current politics and US administration, much of what's coming doesn't need to be 'predicted' - it's unfolding from the project2025 document. Not everything happening is from there, but quite a lot is.
- Hovering over the netscape link renders it slowly, line by line, like images used to come down...
- > Instead of firing the commissioner, the president should be giving the agency a raise in the form of a bigger budget. The goal should be to restore public trust in government statistics, not undermine it.
When you believe that government should not be providing many services, or doing most of what it currently does overall, why would you want to bolster trust in government statistics? Those statistics might contradict the administration, which is not a goal of the administration and its backers.
- > I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
99% of the folks I interact with usually just use whatever size the browser opens in initially, then maybe resize it if they're reading for a while, or need to see more info. If half a pic shows up, they might try to fumble to grab a handle to resize to see more of the pic; sometimes it works, sometimes they end up giving up.
Going 'full screen' may be different than just 'as wide and tall as the monitor', because 'full screen' mode gets rid of the window chrome, which causes confusion.
The only folks I know who consistently use browsers 'full screen' are on mobile devices where that's generally the only option.
- > I think the total reliance is a legitimate concern that needs to be addressed.
> I still think this approach to addressing that issue is complete madness.
You're assuming the 'total reliance' argument and corresponding actions are being done in good faith. The original 'emergency' declarations justifying large initial tariffs in February were because of a 'fentanyl crisis'. Which then morphed in to 'well, we should be manufacturing here for defense purposes' and assorted other arguments along the way ("we're getting ripped off!", etc).
There's a danger in being cynical about this, but also danger in taking everything at face value. There's been no coherent communicated policy with justifications and expected outcomes or timelines ever put forward the same way twice from this administration.
- Going directly in to the Treasury.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-report...
$252 million was collected from excise tariffs on May 6. You can look at this PDF day to day.
EDIT: adding on to this... most days are between $150m and $300m. There's been a few days north of $300m this calendar year. There was also one day - April 16? 17th? - with $11.5b coming in. Under 'excise taxes'. I have to assume that was something to do with early April tariff announcements? But haven't seen anything remotely similar since.
So this "billions of dollars are pouring in from tariffs!" is... simply not true. There's not been a huge shift one way or the other yet.
EDIT 2 - April 22 - https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-report.... $11b in excise taxes deposited.
- More to the point, if high tariffs are GOOD, we should be embracing them and the WH should be working to promote 'pride in tariffs!' messaging. Show how much you love your country and leader by how much in tariffs you pay! It'll be great, because you won't have to pay $3k income tax, just... an extra $5k in cost of living every year. Forever. Even when you stop working.
- And for things that can not be manufactured or grown here... we just suck it up and pay the extra 10-20-30% anyway?
If the 'intent' was to spur manufacturing, you'd enact laws with long term financial stability planned in. Few are going to commit to spending millions equipping factories when the 'tariff moat' that might make those factories sustainable will go away if Trump sees a movie in six weeks that says tariffs are bad.
The 'intent' seems to be to create financial instability and chaos, to allow Trump to position himself as the financial savior, and we are concentrating huge amounts of economic power in the hands of a single person.
- If a business in France uses tech X imported from China, and a competing US business uses the same tech X imported from China but has to pay 145% more than the French company, is that not an advantage they have over the US company?
- I watched the UK/US press conference this morning. Lutnick is infuriating. Anything remotely resembling an explanation or justification for 'tariffs' devolves in to obsequeous praise of how great Trump is. It's as if they can't function for an hour or two without overtly proclaiming the wonder of Trump.
"Jamison and I working together couldn't have put this deal together in 3 years, but President Trump was able to pull this off in less than 45 days!" (paraphrasing but IIRC it was pretty close).
- Came to post the same thing.
How can you not be biased? You built something. You want people to use it (assumption).
- I just can't believe your take on this. The White House press secretary has directly said, multiple times, "this is the most transparent administration ever". /s
In reality, this entire process is insanity. We've had examples of government spending overhaul in the past - early(?) 90s - both sides worked together, cut lots of spending across programs, downsized tens of thousands of federal workers, and balanced a budget, to the point where we had a surplus. It was tough, took time, wasn't perfect, but was deliberated and debated and far far far more open and transparent than all this. But their goal was actually improving government (even if that meant reducing some areas). The current 'leadership' goal is to dismantle/destroy as much as possible, as this is led by people who think government in general should not exist.
- forge is really just cloud provisioning, not the hosting/execution directly. and... shout out to ploi.io, a forge competitor doing good work.
- vultr has fractional GPUs you can get as a VPS. I think I was paying about $55/month to test one out.
- I need the audio streamed in - usually white/brown noise. This blocks out distractions. 30 years ago perhaps people could do 'knowledge work' without these, but most of the people I know who did knowledge work years ago - lawyers, accountants, architects - they all had private offices they could go do heads down work in. 'Open office' plans seem to have ruined this. I spent years in the late 90s in open office plans trying to build web applications, sandwiched in between ad sales and project management people, constantly on the phone. Worked fine for them - they were often on phone calls. But those phone calls bled over in to my ears - unwelcomed - and created constant interruptions and context switching.
The 'underlying anxiety' might be because there's far more noise in our environments - inside and outside - than there was a couple generations ago? More traffic, bigger cars, leaf blowers, lawn mowers, more airplanes. More people in smaller open plan offices... None of these are really under my control. Wearing head phones to block that stuff out is under my control.
Listening to actual music with words or podcasts while trying to work would, in fact, be worse for me, and I think for many folks. Unsure how people do that, but white noise blocking does help many folks.
- After that, I need to be using my hands more - washing them, putting stuff in the locker, tying shoes, etc. Standing there for 20-30-40 seconds is one of the few times one or both hands are free and my brain can go do something else for a bit (read, get a podcast, etc).
- I do it. Typically just checking a few message alerts, or finishing a news story, or starting a podcast download. It's less disruptive than checking those items in front of someone else, when you should be giving the other person attention.
Do I have to? No. Do I always do it? No. But just today at the gym, I used the 30 seconds or so there to start downloading a podcast to listen to during my workout. Every button click takes a couple seconds, pause, wait, etc... Why not stack those non-productive times together?
- I'd tried to put together an RFC years ago to introduce groovy-style accessors in PHP.
$this->foo
would look for a getFoo() method, and execute if it existed, or not if not. Felt like that was easier to reason about, fwiw, but I couldn't get it off the ground. Even then, there were multiple C#-style get/set proposals floating around, so this style seems to be the one more people like. Not a fan of the style, personally, and probably won't use these much directly any time soon. If it helps people maintaining libraries that I use to deliver code that is cleaner and more productive to them... I'm OK with that.
- Not sure I'd care to experience Beatles @ Shea, but would liked to have seen some Cavern and Hamburg shows. Would liked to have gone to some early AC/DC shows too...
I actually stood in line for Achtung Baby tickets ('92 IIRC) as a favor for a friend who couldn't get time off work. But he ended up selling my ticket to someone for double what I was able to pay him (he fronted the money for me to stand in line with). Fun times. Last summer over dinner he said "yeah, that was kind of an asshole move of me..." - so, he still remembered...
- Those projects can be demonstrating your skill/ability in all areas - testing, docs, UI/UX/DX, support, project management, sales/marketing and more. But now you're possibly (likely?) coming across as more accomplished than the rest of the team, and somehow you think you know more than others who've been at the company for years.
- But if you don't have a job right now... you have time to put in to projects that can showcase your specific skills.
But then... you may end up demonstrating that you can take raw ideas and build an entire business out of them yourself, end to end, soup to nuts, and now you're threatening to others on the team who just want someone who codes, not a jack of all trades.
- Odd... you're not the first person I've heard this from, but have been hearing this particular process happening from multiple colleagues over the last 18 months. They are all out of work, all have had multiple interviews with various size companies, and they can never get past an Indian interviewer, and the teams seem to be growing in Indian folks, while non-Indians are let go or passed over for advancement, and eventually leave.
I was slightly skeptical when I heard of this the first time. It sounds a bit like some post hoc justification for why they didn't get hired. But nothing about it sounds far-fetched, really. It sounds more like a natural progression and part of human nature. But still stinks for a lot of my friends/colleagues who can't seem to get hired anywhere.
- Take this online test in 30 minutes with awkwardly or ambiguously worded abstract problem. You don't get to ask anyone for clarification on anything like any normal developer would do in the course of their work.
I've never been in a situation where I could not ask for clarification on something except in interview situations. I asked an interviewer once "is this how people normally work here? they just get a few sentences and plow ahead, without being able to ask for more details, clarifications, or use cases?". "Well, no, but you have to use your best judgement here".
- Not the OP but...
> programmers to master the debugging tools of their ecosystem. I've seen countless experienced developers use printf-based debugging and waste hourse debugging something which could've been easily figured out by setting a breakpoint and stepping through your code.
If you're wasting hours with printf-based debugging, I don't think you've 'mastered the debugging tools of the ecosystem'.
There are multiple ways to debug - step debugger tools, printf, logging to a file, etc. Each have their place.
If you're spending hours on any one approach, and perhaps that's the only approach you know, that's a red flag.
If you've spent hours going through printf, logging and step debugging and STILL don't have a good answer... bring in external eyes.
I've found/fixed bugs in a few minutes because of adding some log stuff first, because in those cases, it's the easiest approach. In other cases, running a debugger and setting a couple breakpoints is indeed the easier approach to start with, and I've done that.
Sometimes you find it with the first approach, sometimes you need to try the next approach.
- I worked in a place where... regardless of what I did in branches, someone else would merge it and their name would be the only thing that showed up in the git metrics, because we only looked at the final 'main' branch. I'd looked at the 'develop' - where feature branches were merged before master - and I think I had something like 75%+ of the commits (over a 14 month period). But to look at the daily dashboard, I was doing nothing, and someone who was barely in weekly meetings for more than 15 minutes was doing 95% of the work.
I didn't particularly care, until people started looking at 'dashboard metrics' to see 'who's doing what'. I wasn't initially wanting visual credit, but when my contributions were effectively erased to the casual viewer, it pissed me off...
- "Suffice it to say that while people are sincerely trying their best, our leaders are not even remotely equipped to handle the volume of people just outright lying to them about IT."
I've tried to come up with some heuristic to determine whether or not a team is competent, good, or doomed. I've been exposed to all over the last... 8-10 years, and one of the key things I've noticed is the ratio of competent/skilled developers to the unskilled ones is a big ... indicator(?). Predictor?
Colleague of mine has been working with a team - dev team has ranged from 5-8 people over the last few years. Few people seem to have any grasp of programming at all. Only two people - my colleague and one other - have ever taken projects from ideas to delivery, or even taken features from requests to successful rollout of already functioning software.
The arguments that people get in to there - days or weeks of people 'researching' whether or not OAUTH 'really' requires 'refresh tokens' or whether it's really supposed to be a JWT. Management has some notion of 'every voice is legitimate and should be heard - we don't support bullying' and so on.
If you have a team of 10, and 1 or 2 people are simply bad at having the ability to think somewhat abstractly, you can survive.
If that number hits, say, 4-5... the team will struggle. A lot. You can keep things going, but it will be slow. And everything becomes a battle.
If that number becomes 7 or 8, and you only really have 1-2 developers who are actually competent developers... things will continue to spiral downward.
On the other side - I worked with a team of about 8-10 people on a 6 month contract. The larger org had another 40 or so folks, handling other projects, and support. Onboarding was great - I pushed production code in the first week. Everyone on the team was competent, including the juniors. I had more development experience, but they had more company experience, and it was really a relatively enjoyable engagement overall.
It was refreshing to be able to ask anyone on the team questions, and either get a workable answer, or an "I'm not sure, let's check with XYZ" to get working answers. The "oh, yeah, it's ABC" when ABC is clearly not the answer stuff never happened. People committing code and pushing to production without ever having run the code at all - I've experienced that - didn't happen - that's happening to my colleague.
The problem with a plurality of tech-incompetent folks in a tech group is that they honestly can not determine that they aren't competent. The only examples of competence are in the minority, and tend to not be trusted (even though that minority is the only portion that turns out working/functional code).
Leaving ends up being the only option in those cases. My colleague is only at his place part time, and has hung around because they've gone through some restructuring where new folks were brought in, and... you hope that things might get better in a few months, then realize they don't.
- It doesn't show on desktop either. It's a hash link to no anchor.
- How about not even look for a new owner, and just... check the content and complaint levels? If I was hacked and hosted spam, getting blocked/banned for months at a time when... the spam is cleaned and the hole that allowed it is fixed ASAP... that gives folks less incentive to fix/clean/remediate.
"table" was never deprecated in HTML at all, but was discouraged for general layout (we were aware of this even in the early 2000s). But for representing tabular data - like... data in rows/columns from spreadsheets (with column headers and such)... HTML tables were absolutely the right (only?) way to present this.
I was at that company less than a year...