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.
Depends how you look at it! Here’s me accessing Mastodon and the fediverse via email: https://lemmy.world/post/11020167 I’ve written a a couple more prototypes to connect one to the other. If anyone is interested I could write up more about how it works or do a more public demo
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?
Thanks for helping me reframe my thoughts.
Haha don’t worry it’s for framing my thoughts too! ;)
To that end, I’d want topics to be problems or shout outs. Something like “how do we test credit cards” might be a sign of “our documentation isn’t great and it slows me down” but it’s talked about as a discreet item.
Devil’s advocate: what are those good practices? What constitutes improvement? One way to focus discussion is to try and pick some specific team values/objectives. Let’s go with the example about Jira.
Similarly “I haven’t seen Jira used this way before” isn’t a problem; maybe the underlying issue is “I don’t understand how we use Jira” or “what we’re doing causes a lot of paperwork”
The statement “I haven’t seen Jira used this way before” is not ideal starting point for discussion - agreed! But with a value in mind I think we can work with it. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, the goal is stronger shared understanding of project management.
You mentioned other team members asked “what’s the problem you’re hoping to solve?”. I think that’s a very pragmatic, specific question (I’m a software engineer, too, I get it!) but it’s not really in the service of the goal of the discussion: a stronger understanding of project management.
So how can discussion help with that? What about a Q&A session? The interactive, conversational exchange is a natural way for people to learn (I hear ChatGPT is pretty popular!), and it’s likely others will learn a bunch of stuff too about why things are done the way they are.
Another technique is to use the free-flowing discussion format for what its best at: exploration of ideas, not necessarily solving problems. Solving problems usually takes code, data, testing, experimentation… things that require time at the keyboard.
Taking the credit card example:
Something like “how do we test credit cards” might be a sign of “our documentation isn’t great and it slows me down” but it’s talked about as a discreet item.
Use the conversational format to its advantage. Respond to the question with another question: “why do you ask how we test credit cards?” From there they might reply with something about documentation, or maybe the tests aren’t clear, or they’re not run often enough. Maybe they want ways to run credit card tests on their own workstation as unit tests? From there we identify a whole bunch of ways to improve the code/project/workflow/better align with best practices.
Anyway, I’m not a manager :) I’m just thinking out loud so next time I start speaking to a team to join maybe I understand the dynamics a bit more.
Hm. Interesting. This is something that gets me too…
Taking a step back: what are you hoping to achieve with the retrospective?
I find that the items people are bringing up aren’t really important or could just be a question in Slack.
What criteria would make something important? Conversely: what makes something minor?
Once we nail these it might be easier to focus the discussion.
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?
I wonder whether they are aware of the ForgeFed project?
Thought that’s already supported? e.g. https://gitlab.com/diasporg/diaspora.atom
Oh wow thanks! :) One program syncs my home Mastodon timeline, with all replies, to a Maildir. Dovecot serves that over IMAP. Sending involves a custom SMTP server which reads the mail message and creates a post from it.
For Mastodon it was all about converting statuses (toots? Posts?) into RFC 5322 messages. Using the status’ ID as Message-Id in the message header is handy. Mail clients do the heavy lifting of rendering threads thankfully!
Ha good eyes! :) I have basic receive-only working with Lemmy using a virtual file system interface I wrote (https://pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Just realised we actually spoke about this a while ago haha (https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382 )
But synchronising to disk is super inefficient: too many API calls. Should subscribe using ActivityPub proper and store updates received as RFC 5322 messages.
From there we could serve the messages via NNTP. Then, finally, we could use nntpfs(4)
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
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.
Ah yes! That is a great trick that kept me going doing software dev professionally.
Instead of trying to get the system I was working with to interact correctly with some shit enterprise system, I would find common protocols (or related protocols) and implement that well. Then I would discover more specifically where the shit enterprise system was behaving badly, and point to something politically neutral (like an IETF RFC) to help get us out of a rut.
It made debugging so much easier. Those specifications and open-source implementations have had much more engineering talent put in them than what I was usually dealing with.
of course!