I feel this is a bit of a moot point from the White House. Memory-safe languages have been around for decades. I feel like the amount of C/C++ out there isn’t so much that people think having dangerous stuff around is good, but more that nobody really wants to pay to change it.
Link to the YAML spec, for the (very) brave: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/
I honestly find it worrying that someone would think it’s some sort of deeply ingrained human trait when it’s clearly not culturally universal (eg. small hunter-gatherer tribes wouldn’t exist otherwise) and not present through all of history.
I think “growth” is a strong signal for people to put faith and trust into something. And that these emotions have influenced our behaviour for a long time.
Why did the Roman empire keep expanding? What made them want more? I’m not a historian nor an anthropologist (far from either!). But this feels like “line go up” behaviour. What would it mean for those in power to communicate that some part of the empire was receding? Even if, overall, the empire was objectivetly huge relative to other organised groups?
One thing I think about is there could be eroding confidence and trust of those in power by colleagues and the general population. If people lose faith, the powerful lose power; they lose ability to influence behaviour. Growth is obsessed over because it’s a means to capture influence over the means of production (and capture profit).
The line has to go up because the current economic system demands it has to go up
What about outside of economics? Even metrics on https://fedidb.org: shrinking numbers are coloured red. Growing numbers green. Green = good, red = bad.
Another thought. The other day I was at a cricket match. Grand final. Because the home team was losing, the stadium started to empty. It wasn’t about enjoying the individual balls/plays. Supporters were not satisfied with coming second (an amazing achievement, much “profit”!), it needed to be more.
To stretch this shitty metaphor further, when the supporters (investors?) lost confidence in their ability to deliver more, they just abandoned the entire match (enterprise?) altogether!
Again: I’m not stating anything here as fact. I’m just absolutely dumbfounded as to why “line go up” is, as you say, such an obsession. I hear you when you say that it’s a consequence of how the modern economy works. That makes sense. I guess I wonder what would happen if we snapped our fingers and we could start again. I wonder what the economy system would look like. Would we still be obsessed with growth?
Growth might be impossible, but a steady and “boring” amount of profit should still be possible selling plain-ole-dishwashers. Yet … for some reason, we don’t see that.
God yes this bothers and fascinates me.
Instead companies throw everything into growth and we get the retarded bluetooth enabled dishwasher problem everywhere, and I’d like toknow more about why.
I think it’s alluded to in the article:
They found a way to make consumers spend more money on dishwashing. The line goes up, for one more year. But it’s not enough. It has to go up every year.
Digging deeper: why must the line go up? Pesonally I see it as a deeply emotional, human thing.
When you read those annual financial reports from big companies, they will do anything to make sure things look rosy. Bullshit terms like “negative growth” are used because “loss” or “shrink” sound bad. So what if it sounds bad?
Confidence. Trust. It’s emotional. These are deep in our psyche. It’s how governments get elected, contracts are won, and investments are made. It’s what makes us human. If that line goes down… will it go back up? What’s going to happen? Alarm bells! Uncertaintly. Anxiety. People abandon you. Money, power, influence fades. You could find yourself replaced by the up-and-coming who “show promise”.
Our social emotional species has hundreds of thousands of years (millions?) of years of this stuff hardwired into us. Trust let us cooperate beyond our own individual or family interests. Would we be human otherwise? (I found the article Behavioural Modernity interesting).
Not sure it’s capitalism per se. Perhaps rampant waste. Criticism of capitalism could include monopoly formation; massive tech companies buy small ones (obtain more capital = more control over production = more profit).
There’s despair over everyone, big & small, resolving the same recreated problems. Kelley doesn’t talk about breaking Microsoft up (i.e. redistributing their capital). He implies he’d be ok for Microsoft to maintain its market position if it just fixed some damn bugs.
The art of turning a 500-line text file into a 50MB tarball. Welcome to the future :(
Here’s the article’s source: https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf
That report’s data is a survey they sent out to companies. Quantising “so… what do you think is gonna happen?” seems… shonky?
Fantastic story - thanks for sharing!
So you went 5 years without any programming? What got you back into it?
For me it’s the bloody “video essay” format. Hyper narrated, spoken straight to the camera. Waste of traffic, waste of storage, waste of attention. People think the argument carries more weight, or is just more persuasive, when someone is speaking at you with some vaguely related visual in the background. But really a written piece could be pulled apart so much more quickly.
Unfortunately OpenAI’s Whisper doesn’t do written transcriptions fast enough on my workstation yet for me to use it full time.
BYD employ about 570,000 people and by some measures are the largest carmaker in the world. I’d never heard of them either until a couple years ago. They’ve definitely got the cash to put into PR like this. Past couple years Australia started importing their electric cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Company
I use it for my very basic static site generator: https://www.olowe.co/2021/01/site-build.html
Even with (more) UX engineers, it was incredibly difficult to get any development done. When I was in this space, management and contractors were incredibly entrenched playing political games to grow teams even bigger to get more funding. There was nobody with any authority using the thing end-to-end saying “this sucks”.
I worked for a German car company for a little bit, in a team responsible for a similar system: https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/08/sbt/
Unfortunately for those who have those values, not all paid positions involve acting on those values.
Random brain dump incoming…
Most businesses pay money to solve problems so they can make more money. You can solve their problems - but not in the way that you may be thinking.
This is a generalisation that is not strictly true, but I say it to illustrate a different way of thinking: Businesses do not undertake penetration testing because they want more secure software. They do pentesting so they can stay in business in the face of compliance and bad actors.
To find a job, you want to start learning what people pay for. People pay contractors to come in and fix things, then leave again (politically easier, sometimes cheaper). People pay sotfware developers to develop features (to sell more stuff).
Start looking up job titles and see which ones interest you (DevOps, frontend dev, backend dev, embedded…). Don’t get too stuck on the titles themselves. It’s just to narrow down what kinds of business problems you find interesting.
Other random questions:
Once you’re deep in the belly of the beast, you’ll find ways to exercise those values. It’s hard to know in advance what this will look like.
I’m not so surprised anymore. I’m self-taught using open-source software projects for guidance. But not everyone learns like that. For example in the commercial software dev world, having patches easy to apply with minimum tooling isn’t usually a priority (for better or worse).
This is actually a little story I had half written down; your comment prompted me to finish it. Thanks! https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/11/git-email/
MacPorts is so boring and underrated.
Devil’s advocate: what about the posts and comments I’ve made via Lemmy? They could be presented as files (like email). I could read, write and remove them. I could edit my comments with Microsoft Word or ed. I could run some machine learning processing on all my comments in a Docker container using just a bind mount like you mentioned. I could back them up to Backblaze B2 or a USB drive with the same tools.
But I can’t. They’re in a PostgreSQL database (which I can’t query), accessible via a HTTP API. I’ve actually written a Lemmy API client, then used that to make a read-only file system interface to Lemmy (https://pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Using that file system I’ve written an app to access Lemmy from a weird text editing environment I use (developed at least 30 years before Lemmy was even written!): https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382
More ideas if you’re interested at https://upspin.io
They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.
This touches on something that I’ve been struggling to put into words. I feel like some of the ideas that led to the separation of files and applications to manipulate them have been forgotten.
There’s also a common misunderstanding that files only exist in blocks on physical devices. But files are more of an interface to data than an actual “thing”. I want to present my files - wherever they may be - to all sorts of different applications which let me interact with them in different ways.
Only some self-hosted software grants us this portability.
of course!