typical tech bro - they don't want any government regulation and want all the federal dollars they can get for nothing in return. we shouldn't be giving tax payer money to any private or public profit driven corporation ever. Mind you that's also a libertarian principle but tech libertarians always leave that part off.
Readit Newsmdgrech23 commented on Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock wsj.com/opinion/uncle-sam... · Posted by u/aspenmayer
mdgrech23 commented on “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams spectrum.ieee.org/10x-eng... · Posted by u/jnord
I could not disagree more with nearly everything in this article. Individuals ship software not teams, unless you are pair programming. Nearly all complex technical projects are owned by one super smart person (Ex: linux). You don't need to have a scientific measurement of productivity to know that in your median team of 12 there really are 2 people carrying the water for everyone else. A players hire A players, B players hire C players etc. Building a team from the ground up is very much an iterative process of fighting complacency and mediocrity all day every day, and this guys pitch is just "give in, its not so bad".
when people talk about a players I feel like a lot of times it's really just the person who knows the project best or maybe they wrote a lot of the original code so they have the best idea of how it works. My point being who's an A player in my opinion is not reflective of actual skill per se but rather other factors.
mdgrech23 commented on Most people don't care about quality shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/12/... · Posted by u/ColinWright
This is basically the difference between creating art and creating commoditized product. The distinction and the unwillingness to acknowledge the distinction (even though it’s made regardless) creates a lot of friction.
The masses don’t give a damn, and if all you’re trying to do is extract maximum revenue as efficiently as possible, there is no reason to expend the additional resources (and incur the additional risks) of doing more than the necessary minimum.
The artists/craftspeople have a vision and they care. Then the money arrives and none of that matters to the money.
Examples are everywhere. Video game studios discover that they can make a billion with crap story so stop investing resources in story, only the people who care even notice, and there aren’t enough of them to matter: they aren’t the audience anymore. Etc.
Since OP mentioned quality to me that's almost always synonymous and things like TDD and Agile which I view as a false prophet to quality.
mdgrech23 commented on Software Design Is Knowledge Building olano.dev/blog/software-d... · Posted by u/signa11
Most of our white collar jobs are about knowledge sharing and synchronization between people.
And surprisingly this is an aspect in which I see very very little progress.
The most we have are tools like confluence or Jira that are actually quite bad in my opinion.
The bad part is how knowledge is shared. At the moment is just formatted text with a questionable search.
LLMs I believe can help in synthesize what knowledge is there and what is missing.
Moreover it would be possible to ask what is missing or what could be improved. And it would be possible to continuously test the knowledge base, asking the model question about the topic and checking the answer.
I am working on a prototype and it is looking great. If someone is interested, please let me know.
knowledge is power and people don't always want to share. Maybe it's more reflective of my company culture but I've seen knowledge effectively hoarded and used strategically as a weapon at times.
"How can anyone know these aren't a threat without knowing whose they are?"
Easy. They didn't say they don't know whose they are. They could belong to a private contractor who is paid by the military but the military doesn't own the drones nor company (plausible deniability /outsourcing.) Or they could be a friendly country (e.g. UK) red-teaming the US with our consent.
I've never heard anyone apply the Five Eyes horse trading to inter-country UFO-related dynamics of operation but its fairly conceivable and has a bit of precedent, right?
yea this is the sad shitty answer - it's just a private company w/ a government contract gathering data on us
mdgrech23 commented on AI makes tech debt more expensive gauge.sh/blog/ai-makes-te... · Posted by u/0x63_Problems
I recently watched a team speedrun this phenomenon in rather dramatic fashion. They released a ground-up rewrite of an existing service to much fanfare, talking about how much simpler it was than the old version. Only to spend the next year systematically restoring most of those pieces of complexity as whoever was on pager duty that week got to experience a high-pressure object lesson in why some design quirk of the original existed in the first place.
Fast forward to now and we're basically back to where we started. Only now they're working on code that was written in a different language, which I suppose is (to misappropriate a Royce quote) "worth something, but not much."
That said, this is also a great example of why I get so irritated with colleagues who believe it's possible for code to be "self-documenting" on anything larger than a micro-scale. That's what the original code tried to do, and it meant that its current maintainers were left without any frickin' clue why all those epicycles were in there. Sure, documentation can go stale, but even a slightly inaccurate accounting for the reason would have, at the very least, served as a clear reminder that a reason did indeed exist. Without that, there wasn't much to prevent them from falling into the perennially popular assumption that one's esteemed predecessors were idiots who had no clue what they were doing.
100% hear this and I know as a developer at a big company I have no say over the business side of things but there's probably something to be said for we should all push for clear logical business processes that make sense. Take something like a complicated offering of subscriptions, it's bad for the customer, it's bad for sales people, it's bad for customer support, honestly it's probably even bad for marketing. Keep things simple. But I suppose those complexities ultimately probably allow for greater revenue as it would allow for greater extraction of dollars per customer e.g. people who met this criteria are willing to pay more so we'll have this niche plan but like I outlined above at what cost? Are you even coming out ahead in the long run?
mdgrech23 commented on The decline of the working musician newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/tintinnabula
This is a technology problem. Media technology (radio, recordings, television, and movies) has essentially killed live performance of all kind compared to what it was once like. Bars and hotels that used to rely on gig musicians can now play a Spotify playlist over the speakers. Repertory theatres once existed in every small and medium sized city in the country, each supporting several actors earning salaries sufficient to raise a family—all wiped out by television.
It would have once been unthinkable for even a small city of <=100,000 people to lack multiple live entertainment options 7 days a week. No more—we’re all at home, watching our particular chosen thing, listening to our particular chosen album, playing our own chosen game.
Some will claim this has been an advancement. “How lame,” they say, “it must have been to have to go to the Local Entertainment Venue and just listen to whatever act was on that night. Nowadays I can listen to Acid Techno Super Hop, my particular chosen favorite, as much as I want.” But the losses in communal behavior have been significant. Most critical is the disappearance of dance. Dance is a fundamental human behavior, stretching back to Paleolithic times. It is nowhere to be seen in many cities today, because no one has any occasion to do it except weddings, at which it is very common now to stand around awkwardly after the bride and groom have fumbled through some rehearsed step.
wow oh wow what a great comment. I think the reason dance went away is a lot of men engaged in predatory behavior while drunk, that is that would approach the woman from behind and "grind" himself on her which is really just sexual assault.
I often think about how we replace things with technology and say it's better. Bread is another example in my opinion. Towns used to have bread makers, well respected and well paid. Now, at least here in the USA we replaced the bread makers with machines. We got rid of the bread makers and ultimately replaced them with engineers who design the machines and repair men. Even they've been replaced, once designed there's no need for the engineer and it's often cheaper to buy than repair so the repair man too went away. What we're left with is subpar bread. How is any of this progress?
mdgrech23 commented on Trump wins presidency for second time thehill.com/homenews/camp... · Posted by u/koolba
It’s all about the economy (remember, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’).
We keep hearing statistics showing that the economy is doing well, but I have yet to meet anyone who feels like they’re actually better off.
I’m not saying that the stats are wrong, but when it comes to politics, you can’t address economic anxiety by just pointing to statistics and saying, ‘Look, the numbers say everything is fine.’
honestly feel like we're actively being lied to about how "good" the economy is.
mdgrech23 commented on Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price coinbase.com/price/bitcoi... · Posted by u/ca98am79
So I suppose people must use it all the time to buy goods and services. Right?
this isn't why people buy Bitcoin. they buy it b/c they don't have confidence in the power of the US dollar or want to hedge their bets. It's the equivalent of gold, that is people turn to it when they think shit may hit the fan but it doesn't have the downsides of physically holding gold.