pims (u/pims) - Readit News

pims commented on I still like Sublime Text ohdoylerules.com/workflow... · Posted by u/james2doyle

ben-schaaf · a year ago

Sublime Text developer here, thank you for all the praise! I'm looking forward to what we can accomplish this year. If you have any questions I'd be happy to answer.

pims · a year ago

Piling up to the grateful comments, I've been using Sublime Text for years and still love it. It has never quite done it as an IDE for me as I'm used to more fully fledged ones like IntelliJ, however it is an amazing scratch pad and text manipulation tool. I pretty much have it permanently open. This post made me realise I had never bought a license, it is now done. Thank you for it being fair, by the way.

pims commented on RFC 35140: HTTP Do-Not-Stab (2023) 5snb.club/posts/2023/do-n... · Posted by u/zkldi

latexr · a year ago

> It's amusing to see this message heavily upvoted on HN when most mentions of Firefox here are welcomed with an avalanche of perfect solution fallacies.

HN is not a hive mind. There are people here who love Firefox, people who despite it, and everyone in between. It’s tiring to always be reading your type of comment, as if everyone is a hypocrite. Maybe, just maybe, the people making those contradictory comments are not the same individuals.

And it’s not like Mozilla is free from controversies, including several of betraying user trust. If every major browser maker is going to break your trust and sell your data, I can see why people choose their poison based on other factors.

I use neither Firefox nor Chrome. Is Safari any better? Or Brave? In some areas yes, in others no. I don’t think there’s a single browser vendor which gets it unambiguously right.

pims · a year ago

> HN is not a hive mind. There are people here who love Firefox, people who despite it, and everyone in between. It’s tiring to always be reading your type of comment, as if everyone is a hypocrite. Maybe, just maybe, the people making those contradictory comments are not the same individuals.

I didn't mean to say that all of HN despises Firefox, but simply that it very often brings negative sentiments, so seeing the comment I was responding to so high up in the thread made me react. It was also a kind reminder that militating is as simple as using an alternative to Chrome.

> And it’s not like Mozilla is free from controversies, including several of betraying user trust. If every major browser maker is going to break your trust and sell your data, I can see why people choose their poison based on other factors. > I use neither Firefox nor Chrome. Is Safari any better? Or Brave? In some areas yes, in others no. I don’t think there’s a single browser vendor which gets it unambiguously right.

And you're making my point about the perfect solution fallacy as well! Of course Firefox isn't perfect and has screwed up on several occasions, does that mean it's comparable to a piece of software that sends every single bit of information it can gather to its parent ad company?

pims commented on RFC 35140: HTTP Do-Not-Stab (2023) 5snb.club/posts/2023/do-n... · Posted by u/zkldi

mschuster91 · a year ago

Chrome had the advantage for a long term because their dev tools were just so much better than Firebug in both features and performance. Even today, I can't pinpoint it to specific things because it's (relatively) little and subtle differences, but Chrome's dev tools feel way more polished than Firefox's.

It's almost as if Steve Ballmer and the legendary "developers developers developers" speech still rings true today - the key to getting people to use your software is to make life as easy for the power users as possible, let them spread the word. And it's ironic how Microsoft lost its ways there... a lot of people I know have gone from Windows to Mac and convinced their close relationships (aka those whose computers they fix) to do the same. It's just so much more relaxing to boot into an OS that doesn't try to shove advertising down your throat at every turn.

pims · a year ago

> Chrome had the advantage for a long term because their dev tools were just so much better than Firebug in both features and performance. Even today, I can't pinpoint it to specific things because it's (relatively) little and subtle differences, but Chrome's dev tools feel way more polished than Firefox's.

My point exactly! You're talking about which browser to use for web development. That's not relevant for engineers not touching html/js/css, and for all non tech savvy family members whose computers we set up.

pims commented on RFC 35140: HTTP Do-Not-Stab (2023) 5snb.club/posts/2023/do-n... · Posted by u/zkldi

foundry27 · a year ago

It’s great satire, but it really does mirror a larger societal shift where the burden of safeguarding personal autonomy has shifted from institutions/regulators to individual users. Do-Not-Stab, Do-Not-Track, whatever it might be, any sort of “voluntary compliance” is a non-starter in the face of financial pressures

IMO we need to start normalizing being militant about this stuff again, to aggressively and adversarially defend the freedom to use your computer the way you choose to use it

pims · a year ago

It's amusing to see this message heavily upvoted on HN when most mentions of Firefox here are welcomed with an avalanche of perfect solution fallacies.

I'm dubious about people becoming militant about this when the software engineering industry gave Chrome a red carpet by using it and installing it on their relatives' computers while knowing very well it's adware and when switching to the alternative is incredibly cheap.

pims commented on Bike Manufacturers Are Making Bikes Less Repairable ifixit.com/News/101675/bi... · Posted by u/LorenDB

oulipo · a year ago

Founder of Gouach, the repairable (and fireproof!) e-bike battery mentioned in the article, happy to answer any question!

- we salvaged 100s of discarded e-bike batteries

- we found that 90% of components were like new

- batteries were thrown away because of the spot-welding and the glue which prevents repairability

- we spent 2 years (and 5 patents) to design a robust, safe, and easy to assemble system that requires nothing but a screwdriver

Our batteries have been in use since 2 years in the streets of France, on micro-mobility e-bikes, in the harshest possible conditions (rain, snow, cold, heat, shocks), and we're very happy with their performances!

We're now opening it to the general public (for conversion kits, and to replace old batteries that are no longer manufactured)

We plan to open-source at least part of the embedded software, so people can write extensions (to let their battery "talk" with any e-bike system, and share it — using WASM embeddable code — to other people on the web!)

Let's fight planned obsolescence!

(and if you're looking for a new battery, there's 25% off on https://get.gouach.com)

pims · a year ago

Hello,

I own a Specialized Vado SL from 2022. Can I use your battery as a range extender?

pims commented on Ask HN: How to prepare the continuation of my career as as software engineer? · Posted by u/pims

AnimalMuppet · 2 years ago

I'm 62. I've been a software engineer for 39 years.

You can continue to be a software engineer all the way to a normal-age retirement. (I'm in the US, though - I don't know about France.) But you can't be the same software engineer for the whole time.

Your code should be better designed and architected than it was 10 years ago. You shouldn't write the same bugs you did 10 years ago. You should document your code better than you did 10 years ago.

Every five years or so, you should ask yourself what you need to learn now for the next few years of your career - and then learn it. (Hat tip to my wife.) One of the coolest things about software is that you can often get paid for learning that - you can find a project at your current company that will grow you in the direction you want.

What you cannot do is continue to be a better paid version of a junior programmer. You need to be more valuable than the new people. (This is why you don't need to worry about the "growing pool of software engineers" - it's growing largely by adding new people with no experience. They can't replace you, because they don't have your experience.)

pims · 2 years ago

This is definitely on my radar, and not just technical skills which have a diminishing return at some point. Mainly understanding business considerations (product, market, timelines, costs, etc.) to be a person deciders can bounce ideas off of when still considering and defining features.

I like the personal five-year plan idea. It will help setting clear expectations and action plans. Thank you!

pims commented on Ask HN: How to prepare the continuation of my career as as software engineer? · Posted by u/pims

illuminant · 2 years ago

Yeah, throw all/most of that insight away, it's a sea anchor dragging you into the depths.

You're barely half way through your "commoditized workforce" lifecycle. Start doing things for yourself at any time.

Say a sentence to yourself that you want to be true. "I have made a vision detection solution for classifying cats." "I have created infographic heat maps of political manuer." "I have created a web game." And do that on the side until it is true. If you liked it as much as you thought you would, angle for that. It will at least give you something peppy for the interviews.

Otherwise, keep turning the lathe and hope abstract economic stabilities continue to grease your wheels of life.

pims · 2 years ago

Building some kind of steady, independent lifestyle business (that's how I interpret your answer, correct me if I'm wrong) is an option but stays a bet and nothing says it would survive through the years. Salaried employment feels like a safer bet, despite the doubts I mentioned.

There are several side projects I started, halted, came back to, etc. over the years, and I love them but none of them could actually pay the bills. I also struggle to be consistently productive when I'm not part of a team.

pims commented on Ask HN: How to prepare the continuation of my career as as software engineer? · Posted by u/pims

ilaksh · 2 years ago

I'm 46. I think this question is going to be different depending on who you are, where you are, your background, network, etc. I've always been a freelance programmer and a lot of times actually just scraping by.

At the moment I have a good contract.

Ageism definitely becomes a factor. One thing that is important is not to contribute to it. For example, part of your post implies that as you get older you will struggle to keep up with relevant technologies.

The real concern for every software engineer and actually every job is the powerful AI that we have to anticipate within the next 0-10 years.

OpenAIs newest model, although amazing, still has some weird brittleness to it, so it's not going to literally replace an actual software engineer easily. But it is a significant step closer than the day before yesterday. Probably at least 15-20% better, or a lot more depending on how you measure it.

I keep seeing people reacting to the current state of the art AI and saying that they are not concerned. This is incredibly short-sighted. The history of technology is hundreds of major innovations breaking through performance wall after performance wall.

There are not only upgrades but also new paradigms on the way for increasing AI performance, in the areas of hardware, ML model architecture, and software. And the reality is that with this latest OpenAI model and the right feedback loop and constrained platform/domain, we can actually automate quite a lot of software engineering work.

As AI is integrated better with systems, we will definitely need fewer people doing what currently is considered software engineering. And again, don't think about what the current model can do. Look at the trajectory of history over the last 60+ years of computing. Engineers always break through barriers and consistently increase performance by orders of magnitude.

This is not just a concern for software engineering but for every job. But it can be a huge improvement if society is able to adapt and take advantage of it in an equitable way.

I think the best option is to start leveraging AI and robotics to build out goods and services. Individuals without capital or very little capital can take advantage of AI and robotics to become entrepreneurs.

pims · 2 years ago

AI is a variable in the equation but it's hard to tell how much actual impact it will have. Many jobs in software engineering go beyond taking in requirements and outputting code such as understanding business concerns, technical limitations, trade-offs, maintainability, etc. Today AI is just barely okay at the outputting code part, who knows when and how much it'll be able to do the rest.

It's definitely a tool I use though, but as a centralised documentation. And I keep up with it to somewhat understand how it works under the hood. But even this does not answer the question of how to prepare should it actually help making most software engineering jobs obsolete.

pims commented on Psilocybin 'promising' for depression bbc.co.uk/news/health-567... · Posted by u/aluket

simonswords82 · 5 years ago

Your best bet is to find a local friend or acquaintance who does have experience who can talk to you in detail about it and help source etc.

Reddit is a good source of anecdotal information:

https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/7fv5oj/beginner...

https://www.reddit.com/r/microdosing/

This is also good:

https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/microdosing-guide-and-explain...

pims · 5 years ago

Thank you.