46
points
lifeisstillgood
Joined 23,697 karma
Artisanal Software Engineer - hand-crafted code sold here.
Hardest part of parenting: living by standards you set for your children.
my newsletter: https://tinyletter.com/lifeisstillgood
Slightly dog-eared home site www.mikadosoftware.com
I am also campaigning to get Open Source developers to work with local government - www.oss4gov.org
paul@mikadosoftware.com @lifeistillgood
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- It depends - most likely that’s storing as a language specific data structure (dict in python then serialised to disk). At this point we’re walking into harder to turn around decisions and might as well do it properly. It still really “it depends” …
- ChatGPT with no deeper diving thinks you are further off “”” Social/public rental makes up about 43% of the city’s housing stock; around half of that is city-owned public housing. The rest includes limited-profit housing associations and private housing.
“”” This compares with London around 20%, paris 24% and NYC 9%
So yeah that makes a huge difference…
- Absolutely
But hidden in this is the failing of every sql-bridge ever - it’s definitely easier for a programmer to read customers(3).balance but the trade off now is I have to provide class based semantics for all operations - and that tends to hide (oh you know, impedance mismatch).
I would far prefer “store the records as plain as we can” and add on functions to operate over it (think pandas stores basically just ints floats and strings as it is numpy underneath)
(Yes you can store pyobjects somehow but the performance drops off a cliff.)
Anyway - keep the storage and data structure as raw and simple as possible and write functions to run over it. And move to pandas or SQLite pretty quickly :-)
- I am interested in what is working in Vienna when “housing problem” is what almost every city in “the West” has or thinks it has.
To me it seems to be a combination of
- wealth inequality (eg 20/30 trillion dollars was printed and furloughed out in Covid, which funnels its way up to the holders of the most assets, seeing asset price inflation but no attempt to tax back the money printed). Repeat on different scales for unfair tax systems and poor infrastructure and and and
- urban planning (we think the ideal city is dense using seven storey or so apartment buildings and fairly aggressive anti-car (ie far less parking than seems possible) with better public transport and lots of pedestrian access. This describes almost no cities
- mortgages and other pro house incentives. You want house price inflation for decade after decade, just allow people to borrow a greater ratio against their salary — and allow married women into the workplace. Suddenly turning a mortgage limit of 2.5 x a man’s salary into 5x a dual couples salary. People bid up prices, forcing more couples to have two salaries to compete. And companies don’t have to increase salary to compensate … people combine salaries and go deeper into debt. Hell if you only had one policy weapon, forcing 2.5 borrowing against one highest paid persons salary is not a bad one. You won’t get re-elected however.
- I went to the doctor and I said “It hurts when I do this”
The doctor said, “don’t do that”.
Edit: so yeah a rather snarky reply. Sorry. But it’s worth asking why we want to use classes and objects everywhere. Alan Kay is well known for saying object orientated is about message passing (mostly by Erlang people).
A list of lists (where each list is four different types repeated) seems a fine data structure, which can be operated on by external functions, and serialised pretty easily. Turning it into classes and objects might not be a useful refactoring, I would certainly want to learn more before giving the go ahead.
- There is a trade off here (of course) as in anything.
You can write the type heavy language with the nullable-type and the carefully thought through logic. Or you can use the dynamic language with the likelihood that it will crash. The issue is not “you are a bad coder, and should be guilty” but that there is a cost to a crash and a cost to moving wholesale to Haskell or perhaps more realistically to typed python, and those costs are quantifiable- and perhaps sometimes the throwaway code that has made it to production is on the right side of the cost curve.
- “””Whether it’s socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down”””. Buffet, BH annual report 2008
- I have for a long time been saying software is a new form of literacy - and I really need to finish writing the book !
- 432 points
- 1 point
- This seems one of the more important comments here - a K shaped economy (Rich get richer up the rising arm of the K and the rest of us are on the down arm) dominates everything (ie asset price inflation means if you had assets in 2020 you probably still do else good luck) and this just is one of many ways the playing field has tilted towards the richest.
And it is always a choice - we choose platforms and regulations and spending priorities. If “we” choose a different set of tech regulations the K shaped economy can be put back in its box.
For me the problem was most clearly outlined by Cory Doctorow “developers did not unionise or rebel in time because they thought of themselves as temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs”.
- That reminds me of the explanation of why sometimes you look at the second hand of a clock and it seems like it takes longer than a second to tick- because your brain is actually (IIRR) delaying and extending the time it sends the image (I think)
- Ok I just never imagined that photons hitting camera lenses would not produce a “raw” image that made sense to my eyes - I am stunned and this is a fantastic addition to the canon of things one should know about the modern world.
(I also just realised that the world become more complex than I could understand when some guy mixed two ochres together and finger painted a Woolly Mammoth.)
- Social media compromises
- asymmetric social activity - standing in a crowd social activity - discovery - curated/accidental/mediated - directed presentation - advertising
I’m not too sure what Bluesky’s approach is but all the different approaches to federation and replacing Twitter fail to be as simple and intuitive as adding your mate to a WhatsApp group, nor as simple as “everyone is on Twitter”
Twitter will tend to revert to its mean (imagine a pub where suddenly the MAGA convention from next door comes in and starts ordering drinks - the pub will change it’s nature but plenty of the tables will just carry on.
You just don’t know which ones, till you sit down and listen to the conversation- a lot like real life.
I’m not convinced that any technological change will make a difference - whatsapp already solves the “invite people you know” problem, and that’s good enough for most of the world. The problem of “somewhere in the world Paul Dirac is chatting with Einstein, can I listen in” is solved with scientific publications, “can I join in” is unsolvable and I think a misunderstanding of what was once happening on Twitter back when people cared
- Yes I had forgotten about that - if an exec had knowledge of this contract and got a bonus then … yeah …
My thinking is this is a moral hazard for all large orgs - that if you are an exec in this awkward position you need to know that even after twenty years they will still take your life savings and put you in jail if you don’t blow the whistle.
- After 20 years, TV documentaries, long running newspaper campaigns, parliamentary inquiries, finally a smoking gun. And hopefully some jail time, and even more hopefully some way to force companies to admit to wrong doing
However this scandal has ruined one more thing for me - the Hollywood feel good movie where the hero walks into the newspaper offices, lays out the terrible thing the big corporate firm has been murdering people to cover up, and credits roll.
Now we know credits roll for 20 years and people still deny there is anything wrong.
This is why ordinary Russians liked Putin and why the strongman is a popular political figure. Democracy does need a way to fix scandals like this. (Cf the selling of hundreds of millions of pounds of Tyneside property for one pound an acre)
- 6 points
- I’m going to go with this as probably in the top three definitions of software developer …
along with
- the job was better titled as “Analyst Programmer” - you need both.
And
- you can make a changeset, but you have to also sell the change
- Oh I like the oocyte idea - it’s actually concrete
It reminds me as well that I am a wave - the cells that make up my body have all been formed from food I ate in the past decade or so - my skin my liver my heart my brain. None of it is what is was when I was 18. But I still think it is.
And that reaches back to my mothers own birth is amazing.
- 158 points
- I am of course not a historian, but whenever some historical (or contemporary political theory) flies against what we know about human nature, I always hold it in deep suspicion
- 1 point
- I am struggling with a why for this (other than “huh cool, that will get investors”). All the jurisdiction and regulation arguments and the “we could get the costs down” seem to meet the objection of “for the same investment we could do just as well or better on the ground”.
The one that does not is the physics of the whole thing. I struggle to work out how exactly but being slightly time dilated compared to the ground does not seem like a win, but being able to gather data from opposite sides of the planet slightly faster than cables does seem like a potential win. Most stock exchanges make a significant chunk of their revenues renting out data space, so it seems a possibility.
But either way it seems very niche.
- I think it was Bertram Russell who said he was raised by his grandfather, who knew Napoleon.
The modern world is a lot more crammed together than we think it is
- It’s impressive that surgical teams put aside ego enough to do this - and I suspect that barely 1 in 1000 businesses and teams could decide their own work as deeply.
- What are you trying to protect yourself against?
1. Microservices imply distributed computing. So work with the grain on that - which is basically message passing with shared nothing resources. Most microservices try to do that so we are pretty good from a technical pov
2. Semantic loops - which is kind of what we are doing here with poly trees. This is really trying to model the business in software
Now here comes the hard part - this is not merely hard it’s sometimes bad politics to find out how a business really works. Is think far more software projects fail because the business they are in is unwilling to admit it is not the shape they are telling the software developers it is. Politics, fraud or anything in steer.
- 3 points
That since for 100,000 years humans were roaming the landscape gathering or hunting, and for 10,000 years engaged in heavy agricultural work, is the modern day rise in depression not just correlated but caused by the modern day reduction in daily heavy exercise?
It’s such an obvious idea I am wondering if folks know of any research / studies on it?