combatentropy (u/combatentropy)

combatentropy commented on How I estimate work seangoedecke.com/how-i-es... · Posted by u/mattjhall

This is clever advice, to first find out what estimate is tolerable to management and then adapt your design to fit. It's sort of like what the makers of Basecamp, in their book Getting Real, say in chapter 7, "Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope"<https://basecamp.com/gettingreal/02.4-fix-time-and-budget-fl...>.

I wonder if it was a mistake to ever call it "engineering", because that leads people to think that software engineering is akin to mechanical or civil engineering, where you hire one expensive architect to do the design, and then hand off the grunt work to lower-paid programmers to bang out the code in a repetitive and predictable timeline with no more hard thinking needed. I think that Jack Reeves was right when he said, in 1992, that every line of code is architecture. The grunt work of building it afterward is the job of the compiler and linker. Therefore every time you write code, you are still working on the blueprint. "What is Software Design?"<https://www.bleading-edge.com/Publications/C++Journal/Cpjour...>

Martin Fowler cites this in his 2005 essay about agile programming, "The New Methodology"<https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html>. Jeff Atwood, also in 2005, explains why software is so different from engineering physical objects, because the laws of physics constrain houses and bridges and aircraft. "Bridges, Software Engineering, and God"<https://blog.codinghorror.com/bridges-software-engineering-a...>. All this explains not only why estimates are so hard but also why two programs can do the same thing but one is a thousand lines of code and one is a million.

I came into programming from a liberal arts background, specifically writing, not science or math. I see a lot of similarities between programming and writing. Both let you say the same thing an infinite number of ways. I think I benefitted more from Strunk and White's advice to "omit needless words" than I might have from a course in how to build city hall.

combatentropy commented on People keep flocking to Linux, not just to escape Windows zdnet.com/article/why-peo... · Posted by u/breve

nickjj · 4 months ago

I still want to switch, have been trying for like 8 years. Not yet unfortunately.

Video editing is still pretty sub-par on Linux compared to Windows.

DaVinci Resolve technically works on Linux and it's an amazing piece of software that I'd love to use but on Linux there's no h264 support unless you pay $300. Ok no problem, I'd do that except the studio version doesn't support AAC for audio on Linux.

If you want to record from OBS, you have to re-encode the video for Resolve and then after rendering your video with Resolve you have to re-encode it again with another tool for h264 / AAC. That means you have to record + render + edit + render + render instead of just record + edit + render. A huge time sink and waste of drive space.

Kdenlive is there but its text editing capabilities are really lack luster. If you want to do things like create a text call out with a rectangle behind it and have your text styled up where different words are colored up differently or you want to underline a word or 2 you have to spend 10 minutes fighting its text UI, duplicating layers, fiddling with z-indexes and if you decide to change your text later, you have to re-do everything. That or you have to use an external tool like GIMP but that breaks you out of the flow and takes a lot more time.

On Windows, there's Camtasia. It "just works" and you can make text call outs described above in seconds.

Until I can easily create text call outs in videos on Linux (something I do a few times a week) I will use Windows 10 + WSL 2.

combatentropy · 4 months ago

Have you tried Lightworks? https://lwks.com/

It dates back to the 1990s and has used in Hollywood movies, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightworks

There is a free version to try out with limited features, then subscriptions and also options to pay just once ($200 or $420).

combatentropy commented on My Favorite PostgreSQL 18 Feature: Virtual Generated Columns tselai.com/virtual-gencol... · Posted by u/fforflo

_el1s7 · 6 months ago

I don't really find these kind of features necessary.

You can, and probably should, do these things in your application code. I mean, it's not really that hard to make a string lowercase, you don't need to define a "virtual colum" for that...

combatentropy · 6 months ago

You're right, it's not that hard. But why would you rather do it there?

combatentropy commented on Unconditional Love eden.bearblog.dev/uncondi... · Posted by u/memorable

combatentropy · 3 years ago

> what you're saying is you love someone for who they are as opposed to for what they are doing at any particular moment? but then what if they change? what if they become someone other than who they were when you decided to offer them "unconditional love"? (does no one question this?)

No, loving someone for what kind of person they are, would still be conditional.

> you can't expect to feel the same about someone no matter what [...]

Love is not a feeling.

Well, okay, "love" is perhaps an overloaded word. It means many different things in many different contexts. "I love pizza" means something a little different than "I love you".

Many will say that love is really an action. I love you, by feeding you or taking you to the hospital when you need to, and so on. Of course, that doesn't quite capture it either, because if your mother told you "I love you and will do anything for you, but I don't really feel anything towards you," well, that would feel cold indeed.

Many will say that love is an act of the will, but falling in love is independent of the will and sometimes even contrary to it, like when someone falls in love with someone who is already married --- even married to a friend. And so you don't act on that feeling, because the loving thing to do is to sacrifice yourself in that case.

In fact all love will eventually entail some kind of sacrifice. Else it has never been tested, and that is no sure love at all.

> what if the person you grew up with becomes a monster, with little left of their former self? how can you love someone who no longer gives you reason to love them?

You can love someone who has gone wrong. It is the hardest kind of love, because loving them in action is always doing the opposite of what they want, of what they ask you to do for them. Imagine your child becomes addicted to crack. To love them would be to not give them crack.

In sum, love is something that can start on its own through no act of the will but at times, even in happy relationships, you have to downshift into doing it out of sheer will, to keep it alive throughout the years. It more than a feeling, but also more than a cold action. Sometimes the feeling motivates the action, and sometimes the action motivates the feeling. It's weird.

How can you love someone you don't even like? I just remembered that C. S. Lewis addressed this in one of his books (was it Mere Christianity or The Four Loves?). He said, there is one person you have been loving your whole life even when you don't like them, and that is yourself. Often we do things that we detest, and we berate ourselves over how terrible a person we are or were. Yet we keep on loving ourselves, by feeding ourselves, tending our bodies, etc.

combatentropy commented on You might not need an ORM sometechblog.com/posts/yo... · Posted by u/l5870uoo9y

combatentropy · 3 years ago

If you're happy with your ORM (and, ahem, your users are happy with your app's speed), then you can disregard this post.

An ORM is an abstraction over what already is a huge abstraction, which is SQL. Therefore it would feel to me like driving a bus by remote control, or something like that.

SQL isn't a procedural language, like C, Fortran, Cobol, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc. It is a "query language", I guess, where you tell it what you want, and it decides how it's actually going to find, filter, sort, etc., that data. It's also the only game in town. Is there any widespread alternative to SQL, at least for querying tabular data?

The problem with it being so abstract doesn't rear its head with simple SELECT statements. They all seem to go fast enough. It isn't until you're joining tables together, or no longer getting data row for row but instead aggregating, summing, averaging, etc. Suddenly sometimes the whole thing can slow to a crawl.

Thankfully databases like Postgres let you prepend a command called EXPLAIN to the problematic query, so that you can diagnose the slowness (if you can understand the output of EXPLAIN). But it was a long time before I got good at reading the EXPLAIN output and finding a way to get it to run faster. Even though SQL is so abstract, more just a description of what you want, there is more than one way to write it --- and the difference in speed can be hundreds or thousands of times.

I have had the luxury of working mainly with Postgres for 17 years, and toward the end of it I finally feel supremely confident working directly with it, just using the psql command-line client, and hand-typed SQL in text files, to get exactly what I want, and as fast as I want it (which usually is less than a second). Mind you, I don't work with Big Data, just a variety of CRUD apps but they often have mindbending reports requirements.

It should not have taken me years and years to master SQL (nor should it you). I think the reason is partly distraction, for those of us that are "full-stack developers", and also that there is so little education about how to master SQL. I mean, the books and posts are out there, but the attention to them from the community at large is small.

But SQL is really not harder than the other languages and techniques you know so well. If developers spent as much time on SQL as they do on the ins and outs of React, containerization, CI/CD pipelines, or the quirks of their favorite programming language, I think they would find it easier than most of those things. And it pays rich dividends, because SQL is cross-platform, you can carry that knowledge with you from job to job for the rest of your life, and your inefficient database queries are making your app use quadruple the hardware and 10 times the latency than if you truly mastered SQL.

combatentropy commented on A simple guide on words to avoid in government civilservice.blog.gov.uk/... · Posted by u/open-source-ux

combatentropy · 3 years ago

> This last example is a particularly hot topic for us on the intranet team. Every single week we receive requests to create a 'one-stop shop', a 'hub', a 'single front door' or a 'portal'.

I too was on an intranet team, and I too often received requests for a "portal". It took me a long time to grasp why they were so fond of that word. Was a "portal" subtly different from a "page" or "site"? After many years, I concluded that a "portal" is a page with a bunch of links on it --- a hypertextual table of contents, if you will, for the requester's department or project.

I did not work in government, just for a large company. This article is useful because highfalutin language is commonplace in any bureaucracy.

combatentropy commented on A simple guide on words to avoid in government civilservice.blog.gov.uk/... · Posted by u/open-source-ux

sjducb · 3 years ago

I think this ignores the reason jargon exists. -- To demonstrate that the speaker is part of the "in" crowd.

If you stop using jargon then people assume you don't know what you're talking about. This affect is real. Your precieved credibility goes way down when you stop speaking in jargon.

It's the reason that the speaker used all of the tech jargon (launching a website). If they didn't do that then we would think they didn't know about websites.

combatentropy · 3 years ago

First of all, that's false. Time and again, experts who can explain complicated concepts with everyday words seem smarter, not dumber. To wit: Richard Feynman, Steven Pinker, C.S. Lewis.

Second, even if it were true, that would be all the more reason to stop it, because the reason is bad. It is selfish, at the expense of others. If you make things harder for people so that life is easier for you, then you are by definition evil.

"Short words are best, and old words are best of all." --- Winston Churchill