I am using a service called Invoicely for recurring invoices in my small business. One day I randomly googled for some of its features and found a post of a guy who claimed (and I believe him) that Invoicely is a blatant screen-by-screen clone of their own SaaS.
I felt really bad for that guy, and after some time I thought that it's a good idea to switch to them. The problem: their website name is so difficult to remember, I never got around to actually opening an account there.
Some shifty guys literally copied an existing service up to their Javascript and CSS, and improved it dramatically just by giving it a name I can remember.
The short version is that what makes a person their nationality can either be adherence to a set of values (civil society) or that their parents were that nationality (an ethnic society).
China is clearly an ethnic society. America is practically on the verge of civil war over whether they are primarily an ethnic (white christian) society (GOP), or whether they are a civil (rule of law, believes in human rights) society (the very imperfect DNC).
Civil societies aim for everyone to be an "us," while ethnic societies have a strong idea of "us vs them." So when these societies ask "how should resources be distributed?" Ethnic societies tend to believe they are in competition with everyone else for all resources and they should try their best to attain as many resources as possible. This directly results in supremacist leaning beliefs and old world imperialism. Setting up British schools in India and taking all their resources is absolutely a supremacist policy, as is killing native Americans and taking their land. The fact that these softer forms of supremacy are not taught next to the holocaust is a disservice to the average persons intuitive understanding of what supremacy looks like and what kind of spectrum genocide exists along.
Ethnic societies are not governed directly by a set of values, so they tend to be ruled by dominance alone.
So from a jaded point of view America is an empire just as China is an empire, but from a forgiving charitable (extra emphasis on charitable) point of view, a Chinese empire is trying to suck all the resources of earth up in to china, while the American "empire" is trying to establish a set of laws and values that apply to all people (human rights) while trying to address the very real tragedies of the commons we are facing (over fishing, global warming, nuclear annihilation).
The reality though is that ethnic forces in america are strongly at work trying to achieve power, and liberal civil forces in america are extremely weak, so the "liberal world order" can be supplanted by "American supremacy" (America first), and we end up in a state where we look old wold imperialist via neocolonialism.
At the end of the day that means the most important thing for Americans to do is fight the ethnic party, and if we can't do that, then we don't deserve to exert our influence abroad, and should rightly be resisted.
> And sometimes disobeying the system delegitimizes the movement and prevents critical-mass political coalitions from forming, which in turn prevents change from happening
This is much rarer than its opposite, as I had mentioned. The number of revolutions that happened peacefully is much lower than those that happened violently, to give a political example.
> but still isn't good enough
It was good though, but now it's not anymore, that's the problem. There are two distinct groups of pirates that we should separate, because both are not the same and to discuss them as equal doesn't bring about the whole picture.
One, the serious pirates. These are the people you are talking about, who want higher quality and easy access. These are the people, like me, who download 4k rips to watch on their OLED TV and organize their Plex servers to auto-download new media that comes out. They may even have terabytes-large NAS. You will never get a cent out of these people, because, like you probably have experience with, they are not in the business of paying for media. Their act of piracy is itself what is satisfying. For example, I gain more enjoyment out of the fact that I can watch at higher qualities than paying customers can, than I do actually watching said media. I have not once in my life bought a movie or TV show (although I will go to a theater because that is an incomparable experience to watching on a TV; and I do buy software sometimes, especially if it's a creator I really like and wish to support). However, these types of pirates are extremely few compared to the second category:
Two, the casual pirates. Most pirates are not like me or others in this thread, they do not download 4k rips to watch on their OLED TV, they do not organize their Plex servers. The vast majority of pirates are those who search "{movie} watch online free" and click the first link. Their needs were well met when Netflix came onto the scene, where with one service at a low price, they could watch whatever they wanted. Same with Limewire being usurped by Spotify. Now with multiple streaming services, more people are searching "{movie} watch online free" because they don't want to sign up to yet another service. Piracy is a problem of convenience for most people.
Look at piracy statistics before Spotify and Steam, and look at them afterwards. Most casual pirates stopped pirating songs because they have an easy to use interface with 99.99% of all the songs they could want. Contrast that to Netflix 10 years ago versus today. The meme is real: https://i.redd.it/d3423w2g5ur21.jpg. With more fragmentation, don't wonder why piracy is coming back among group two.
Content creators cannot treat groups one and two as equal because one is rigid, they will never pay, so don't even try to convince them; but two is malleable, if your service is good enough, most of them will pay.
In the tech industry, it used to be that the real customer was the investor and the real product was the user (e.g. Social media monetizing users to meet the needs of investors).
Nowadays, the real customer is the founder and the real product is the investor (monetizing investors to meet the needs of founders).
Regret, like everything else, is an evolutionary corollary built out of destiny optimization that allows for counterfactual consideration of painful paths to avoid similar outcomes in the future. In the end, what physics decrees shall occur shall occur and the only thing we can do in those times of war is burn down the ships behind us and continue charging forward in this strange yet charming universe we find ourselves shackled within.
In the end, we must imagine Sisyphus—the final mirror—happy.
In my admittedly still short life, I have started to notice something: you can broadly divide the world into two groups - those who do things and those who keep wondering if they should have done things.
So for what’s worth, here is my advice to you: drop Gladwell and self-help books, if you want to and can switch to a new job, do it. Should it work or fail, you will have experienced trying. If you don’t feel like it or find yourself unable to because banks won’t loan to you, you can’t be hired or it’s finally not financially viable, don’t do it and rest in peace knowing it was your decision/you tried.
You don’t need an external reason like being too old or outside validation, you are old enough to make your own choice.
Every time there's a new post about 'big new features' in current or future Rust releases there's someone shouting in fear of how Rust is getting more and more complex. Rust may be complex, but 99% of newly added features have not made it more complex than the initial release.
Consider a different language with three orthogonal features. You could think of its 'design space' as a cube, where each feature corresponds to a dimension, and where code that uses some features are a point in the space. If the implementors of this hypothetical language didn't know exactly how all three features should interact together but they could figure out how pairs of features would work, you could imagine their initial implementation as the same cube with a chunk missing out of the corner. Later, after users and implementors gather experience about how the language feels, they make a big proposal: The next release will be a full cube instead of a cube with a corner missing! Wow! Now the big question: did this release make the language "more complex"? Well, it is more capable. But it doesn't add any new orthogonal concepts, it just filled out the full space that was implied by the original three. And arguably "cube" is simpler than "cube with a corner missing".
The design of Rust is the cartesian product of about five primary orthogonal features on top of some basic concepts that might be familiar to C programmers. Maybe they are: lifetimes, generics, traits, enums, unsafe. (Argue away if you choose a different five.) When these features were chosen all the way back in 2015 the designers did their best to consider what might happen if you tried to use various combinations of them at once; but crucially, large portions of the corners of this 'space' were left unimplemented simply because it was too hard to do all at once [1]. 65 releases later, Rust has added very few new features -- as in orthogonal concepts -- [2] but has made a lot of progress filling in bits of the design space that was unimplemented but implied by the original five.
And that's literally what this whole article is about: Niko's vision for filling in Rust's implied design space that was left unimplemented for practical reasons, "Making Rust feel simpler by making it more uniform".
[1]: At some point after you've laid the foundation for a big idea it's better to let your idea tell you how it wants to work instead of forcing it, and that requires time and experience with it.
Do you really think the majority of Uber engineers have forsaken all morality? A more plausible explanation is that bad patterns can emerge from systems where most of the players are still behaving [locally] ethically.
Haskell is the "Periodic Table of Computation". You really can't advance to "organic chem" levels of complexity without first mapping out the elements and their key properties, and then further super-specializing in the structures of Carbon. Haskell's C/H/N/O is functor/applicative/monad/arrow and these are the elements of data/interpreters/evaluators/compilers. Software engineering is still in the alchemy stage – thousands of king-funded charlatans attempting to transmute lead into gold
Because automation is generally good, but making an exemption for specific cases of automation that personally inconvenience you is rooted is cowardice/selfishness. Similar to NIMBYism.
I'm not nearly educated enough about this subject to try to summarise it, but the research being carried out by Michael Levin's group into how organisms control anatomy growth is completely fascinating and has the feel of a breakthrough. Almost all the talks I've seen are good, for example:
It’s like they are either getting old and don’t like to keep up with modern web development but it’s easy to see this behavior elsewhere too.
Aversion towards new way of doing things where people feel like the old way was just working is too common and predictable sometimes. “Things work” using old way, but, does that mean that no optimizations are to be made? Optimizations further lead to reiteration of the way we do things.
Also, an individual can stick to their old way of doing things but to rant over the new way is just- tasteless.
My old Master Sergeant in the Marines told us about one of his guys being blown to bits for messing with an IED when he was told repeatedly not to. He said that instead of feeling bad he laughed at how fucking stupid the guy must have been.
We are grown ass adults. How many warnings do you ignore before something bad happens?
In the spirit of my Master Sergeant I laugh at these imbeciles losing all of their money.
Not wanting children is fine. It’s a very personal and individualized choice.
The best advice I can give on the topic is that it’s critically important to make a fully informed decision on the matter. Getting information from heavily biased sources toward having children (e.g. your grandparents who desperately want great-grandchildren) or being childfree (e.g. /r/childfree, the subreddit so miserable that even most childless parents can’t stand it) is not a recipe for making informed decisions. Likewise, evaluating child raising by only observing vocally unhappy parents in your social circle while ignoring the quietly happy parents is an easy mistake. If your only impression of child raising is changing diapers and listening to crying babies, you’re not getting the full picture.
Nearly half of my parent friends thought they would never want children when they were younger. They’re all happy (and deliberate) parents now after revisiting their decisions as they grew older. And that’s fine.
I also have some friends who have decided to never have children and stayed that way. And that’s fine too.
Generally, ignore anyone who is militant that there is only one correct decision (having kids or being childfree). Ignore anyone who harbors hatred or loathing for children in general (kids are people too). And try to ignore the parents who try to make themselves out to be martyrs by talking endlessly about how challenging their kids are. You might have to seek out the happy parents in your social circles to ask what child raising is really like, because in my experience many of the happiest and most successful parents aren’t constantly talking about how happy they are with their decision in the same way that the /r/childfree zealots are actively spreading their message. You have to look a bit deeper to find the reality.
The "I would think that marriage should be an incredible experience to learn about yourself and your partner" is quite a bizarre statement.
Marrying somebody means inviting a third party, the State, in private affairs. Now, marriage can be convenient or recommended for religious and tax affairs, particular convictions, and for the protection of kids (then...).
But getting married to learn about yourself and your partner by, in essence, inviting a third party that in typical fashion would obfuscate instead of giving light, reminds me of the guy who wanted to be kicked in the genitals so that he could feel something brand new that day.
I used to work with a very smart man that I'm sure was some kind of secret genius. He's was that sort of tech gofer. Hardware, software, didn't matter, if there was a problem he'd solve it. Sort of guy you'd see carrying a thick ass SQL book around because he 'needed to learn it' to solve just one little problem. He built whole entire solutions for the company I worked at in his spare time that the company once tried to sell for 500k and at a previous company I heard he figured out a way for the pain mixing machines to save on paint or recycle it or something saving them 1.3 Mil a year. When Raspberry Pis first came out he was one of the first people I saw tinkering with them and he was in his 50's doing it just for fun, I think he ended up using it to open and close his garage door from work or something just to scare his wife.
That sort of guy. Well he once told me something about executives and upper managers working for corporations that I have never forgotten. He said to me, and of course I am paraphrasing:
"Change gives the illusion of progress". I asked him what he meant and he responded with something to the effect of "They have the habit of changing big things every 5-10 years on purpose to make it look like they are productive, and to justify their own roles, one guy will come in and 'cut costs', the new guy after him will 'invest'".
This justification -- Rome should be written in JS otherwise Rome users are less likely to contribute -- irresponsibly focuses on a secondary goal of the project, at the cost of the primary goal, which is to be a end-to-end toolchain for one of the most popular languages in the world.
Using Rust promises performance and stability, key features for the thousands of engineers that will be running Rome as a critical part of their workflow. The vast majority of those developers would prefer that the tool runs faster and has fewer errors over having a lower barrier to entry for contributing.
"Contributing" may also encompass the plugin/extensibility ecosystem around the tool, and can be closely tied to the underlying implementation language. This functionality has been integral to the growth of things like Babel and Webpack, but it seems in this case Rome is trying to replace much of that very ecosystem.
I there are some toolchains that may prioritize "barrier of entry to contributions" -- new languages, or niche communities for example -- but I don't think it's an appropriate priority for a toolchain for a massively popular established programming language with $4.5 million in funding [1].
Run highly targeted advertisements, and specifically include in the advertisement that you are looking for beta test users to talk to - and what kind of users you are looking for.
The most success we had was with LinkedIn Lead Gen forms. We got meetings with about 50 people at $25-$50 a pop. Be very personal and transparent - there are lots of somewhat bored professionals out there who would love nothing more than try out your app and give you feedback.
Another option is to sponsor a professional mixer event in your area. Depending on the event, you might be able to get a 5 minute speaking spot for less than a few hundred bucks.
> I value the guy who runs the sriracha sauce company higher than Buffett:
Value him in what sense? The sriracha guy made a terrible commercial mistake. The capitalist in me doesn't value a person who does that and I would hesitate investing in a venture he did over, say, Warren Buffet (hypothetically speaking of course).
People "like" Warren Buffett because he's the ultimate capitalist. Also...
If you value the sriracha guy over Buffett in a "altruistic this is better for the consumer" type of way, then sure you could make that case (as the article does), but also remember that Buffett is giving away all (most) of his profits to charity. The utilitarian could argue that Buffett's value is far greater. He's gobbled up all of the profits from various industries (for example luxury goods which provide little benefit to "the little guy") and is reapportioning those profits to charities that may actually save lives (not just dress up your rice). I don't know, I'm not arguing for Buffett personally, but there's more than whats on the surface.
Yeah these last two days especially, can't argue there. But if it were my fault, I'd apologize.
> Please seek help, it seems that you think people are out to get you
Yeah I should amend those comments, went a little too far there. Although you talk about seeking help like it's going to dawn on me I just might be a little off. No shit, work on your reading comprehension, those walls of text? Top to bottom, left to right. Yeah am in fact a bit off, what did you expect would happen when malpracticed on my brain? You know malpractice on a bone harms the bone and it needs more care later, stomach same thing, like please assure me you're a doctor for you to be giving me medical advice?
You can't just give yourself a smug little pat on the back for telling me to seek help as though that will fix my wretched life, it's not automatic, there's a whole art to actually obtaining psychiatric care that isn't designed to harm you. 60% of psychs are antagonistic, I'd say. And the psych ward? I'm a fish in the water in there, know the protocols, know the law, know the laws that apply and the ones that should but that you just have to let go.
I spend a huge percentage of my income on psychiatric care, and it can't just be any doctor, with a carefully chosen doctor, of whom I demand the absolute best care, highly tailored. It's my highest priority in my budget, you realize, because if my mind is out of commission I'm screwed, whereas if I'm strong in my skull I can solve all my problems singlehandedly?
Dude you think it's a simple matter of calling a hotline? Oh oh, just google the number! The contempt is unbelievable, if you wound up in a psych ward you'd never get out, never get respect from the staff, get drugged with whatever was in the medicine cabinet when you consented the least, never get any insights into working with the system and also plain working the system.
> I doubt anyone actually cares
That would be a dream come true! I got for sure harassed, arguably persecuted, I talked to a lawyer about it at length, like 26 hours ago in a Lider supermarket on Merced in Santiago Centro that accused me of not paying but refused to look at my receipt. 6 guards, insincere apologies, I made them cut the shit real fast. Before that a few weeks ago and in that case told I would be hunted down and gutted like a fish for telling some street urchins their speaker was too loud, for which they fought me in front of 100 witnesses, being righteous brings problems, I have witnesses. Do you want to talk to any of my witnesses, see any of my proof? You don't, you don't. Like hit and run, you want to give advice that makes you look good--to someone--for giving it, but never take responsibility for your words and actions and their consequences. Then you'd get a wall of text.
And about that bitchvictim media you asked about--you answered your own questions.
> Gen Z is also more diverse and broadly anti-American (or “anti-imperialist”) [...] and feel less connected to European conflicts than previous generations. [...] Those videos of Ukrainians discriminating against people or color were signal boosted everywhere on Twitter. [...] You also have people bringing up Yemen, Syria, Palestine, etc to emphasize the “white-supremacist” support of Ukraine receiving overwhelming attention.
I've noticed this too, and I need to make a point:
In the long run, this will be a serious security threat to Europe.
In this, Europe took almost completely the wrong lessons regarding America's role in NATO. Yes a stronger NATO is good. Yes, stronger ties to America are necessary to counter Russia.
But now is not the time to abandon strategic autonomy. Just the opposite. Macron is right, just as DeGaulle before him was right. Yes, Europe should ally with the United States, but it also must begin to stand on its own two feet.
Why? Because the next American generations don't give a shit about Europe. In a very deep way, Europeans have not absorbed the social earthquakes that have hit the United States. In younger American minds, Europe doesn't matter. Ukraine doesn't matter.
Europe should maintain its alliances, but it also needs to plan for a future in which it depends only on itself for its defense. It needs to do this seriously and as though its life depends on it.
You are the boss of a company of one. Your company sells labor to the labor market, it makes investments in assets, it borrows funds, etc.
It’s your job to decide how that company is run. It’s your job to decide what investments that company needs to make to get good returns.
It’s also your job to interpret the contracts your company enters into and decide what is acceptable, and to appropriately risk-manage legal hazard, reputational hazard, etc.
There is nobody else to run this company. It does not have a right to a good outcome. A lot of companies fail. Your company of one WILL fail if you make poor decisions.
When you truly internalise that last fact is when you become an adult.
(Edit: clarified that the last paragraph refers to the previous one specifically)
> 90% of PR and Web/UI/UX people could be safely fired after a couple of interactions of the design (and brought back 3-5-7 years later when the new or re-design would be needed). Sitting and not doing anything would make them fired, so they invent "new", "innovative" and other bullshit named things to justify their pay.
Isn't this most positions and just people in general, in some capacity?
Business and sales pushing for new features that no one necessarily needs.
Back end devs padding their CVs with hot tech and often doing refactoring for the sake of refactoring.
Front end devs adding more bloat for marginal visual gains and messing with the UI/UX.
DBAs mucking about with indices which will either improve or worsen things when the DB is performing adequately already.
Ops pushing for using new industry practices which will probably introduce undue complexity into the mix.
QA being overly nitpicky about bugs or even visual flaws that no one will ever even run into or notice.
Security complaining about supposed CVEs that automated scanning picked up, but that cannot realistically be exploited.
Humans are pretty curious by nature and like to feel like they're doing a good job, so i can't help but to feel that it's turtles all the way down, regardless in which direction you look - everyone will be trying to follow industry trends and not miss out, keep their skills relevant or just do anything to justify the existence of their own position.
Your post does nothing but make noise and clutter the discussion. It's frustrating when someone points out a fact that is overwhelmingly true and someone else jumps in with some ridiculous counterexample, even if your intention is to do it sarcastically.
Behavior Consistency. I recently learned about this phenomenon. People make decisions on an emotional level and then logically support them afterward. In fact, there are studies where people who have had their brain damaged and no longer process emotion have a really hard time, or simply can't, make decisions.
Someone has to emotionally decide to put X amount of hard earned money on something before hand. The rationalization of this affects the overall experience. When an item is free their commitment to the app was zero.
There was a fascinating study about this.
Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203.
Where participants were given a task to convince other people to perform a long and boring task. One group was given $1 to convince people while another group was given $20. They found the $1 dollar convincers actually believed what they were saying where as the $20 group shrugged off their actions to convince people to perform the boring task as, "I did it for the money." $1 was too low to rationalize away.
I used to blog a lot. I used to be active on lots of forums and they were the source of inspiration. Someone would ask a question, I'd write it out as a blog post and then keep linking to it instead of answering repeatedly. I remember writing blog posts like tweets.
Now, there are too many contents online (both good and bad), and I always felt "someone must have written about it somewhere."
A few years back, I began to write again but this time, I write for myself, family, and friends. I no longer care about who reads or visits my blog(s). I have no analytics, no comments, no nothing.
Not as frequent as 15+ years ago but now I write our family stories, collect and document things I'm inspired by, aspire to be, etc on our blog(s). I'm even writing my memoir so I can read it later in life. This is a fun one, trying to remember early/younger years friends. Write about the adventures with the friends who have died, organizing search effort for friends whom I have lost touch and then finding them in places where Internet is still a luxury. If you just sit still for a while, you began to realize your life is an adventure.
I also write a lot on physical pen/paper too. I have one special paper notebook dedicated to my daughters. It is not hidden but is usually around my desk, and I write as and when I feel like or prompted by incidents. I want it to be written in my handwriting for them to read, now and in the future.
