jmfldn

22 ms·

211.
We need to reclaim our attention(theguardian.com)
636 points by jmfldn 5y ago|448 comments
212.
by jmfldn 5y ago
I'm a big fan of Mark Fisher's work but I must say that I didn't read this piece in this sort of light. Seems like quite different to the usual co-opting of wisdom in the service of capitalist hegemony. At the very least, mor
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by jmfldn 5y ago
Merry Christmas to all who come here and to the moderators and mainteners of this wonderful site. This is an oasis of intelligent debate and information rarely found on the web.
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by jmfldn 5y ago
Outlier means far from the middle. Let's take a look... https://www.hackreactor.com/blog/software-engineer-salary-re... Even in California the median is around 120k. Well done for earning 500k but that is not a ty
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by jmfldn 5y ago
I'm not valuing it at 200k. You're basing that number on some extreme outlier 500k wage that was plucked out of the air. Hardly the norm in the US. Fwiw, I'll grant that the US is ahead in big tech but I'd never move the
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by jmfldn 5y ago
I guess this is a Silicon Valley megacorp right? Who could afford those wages?! Over here in the UK, if you're absolutely shit hot, principal engineer type material, I guess £150k + is common. Maybe more if you're a true elite eng
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by jmfldn 5y ago
Why does the US dominate digital products? 1. Enormous internal market 2. Extremely wealthy 3. Well-developed capital markets for investment So it's an enormous, wealthy country where there is lots of investment. Obviously there are ot
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by jmfldn 5y ago
Not just for that. I use a T460 with an old i5 as my daily driver. Runs like a charm. Helps that it runs Linux but it was OK with Windows 10 too.
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by jmfldn 5y ago
You of course have a point here, the massive dependency trees of modern apps carries a certain risk. The problem with rolling your own is that, for a non trivial technology like a producionised logging framework or some encryption library,
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by jmfldn 5y ago
Great book. I almost put this down on my list (many Buddhist books have influenced me).
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by jmfldn 5y ago
Here's my list of mainly non-fiction. The Blank Slate - Stephen Pinker Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher Straw Dogs - John Gray Godel Esher Bach - Douglas Hoffstader The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac Path with a Heart - Jack Kornfield
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by jmfldn 5y ago
It will be hard but by no means impossible. Your brain is trainable in the same way, that your body is when you exercise. I'm by no means unaffected by all this, but being 40+, I experienced my entire pre-adult life without the Web or
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by jmfldn 5y ago
"Could you give an example of something that is simple to express in Haskell, but harder and error prone to express in Go/Rust/[other imperative languages]? Honestly curious!" This is hugely subjective but if I'm wr
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by jmfldn 5y ago
The situation is improving from what I can see but what you're describing is hard to dispute. It's such a shame. As I say though, I think things are moving in a better direction now (I haven't taken a look at Haskell for a wh
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by jmfldn 5y ago
Agree on tooling and library support. Not sure what developer ergonomics are? Ease of writing code, expressiveness? That's entirely subjective I would say. My subjective take is that, once you know a language like Haskell, it's hy
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by jmfldn 5y ago
Shell programming through small cli tools was never meant to scale into massive complex software so you're comparing apples and bananas. Do one thing well and text as the universal interface works well in the small for parsing files, d
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by jmfldn 5y ago
That's the one. It's great for any FP learner for sure. A great example of how to write a book on a deep topic in an engaging and beautifully structured way.
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by jmfldn 5y ago
I do indeed. The "red book" aka Functional Programming in Scala I wouldn't recommend to a beginner. It teaches FP at a fairly deep level to the extent of implementing the abstractions yourself. Take a look at that later perha
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by jmfldn 5y ago
I really hope Unison succeeds. It looks like a really interesting take on FP / distributed systems. The fact that Paul Chiusano and Runar Bjarnason are at the helm is exciting, especially to Scala / FP devs like me who know them a
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by jmfldn 5y ago
I think it's partly true at least yep. At least in the mind of any engineer worth their salt. Any problem is solved with tradeoffs though, eg. no regulatatory compulsion to achieve some mandated benchmark might lead to less of a focus
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by jmfldn 5y ago
Funnily enough programmers care about resource usage yes. Why would the user care, it's not their job? You're glad that the person who engineers your car cares about resource usage I'm sure!
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by jmfldn 5y ago
We get all that and we're saying that it comes with massive tradeoffs. The cost is massive resource footprints, inflexibility, sluggish performance, harder to reason about from a security or performance point of view because of the tow
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Omicron variant: the case for cautious optimism(newstatesman.com)
3 points by jmfldn 5y ago|0 comments
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by jmfldn 5y ago
This exact thing happened to me. I was the backend guy on a winning hackathon team and decided it was pointless to build a real server for the proposed idea. It was essentially a single page app, v nicely designed etc, kind of a half-baked
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by jmfldn 5y ago
I read the article and it seems like what she is saying is more nuanced than that. There is significant concern, not least for potential impacts on the elderly and those with co-morbidities. To the point about lockdowns, nobody in govt in t
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by jmfldn 5y ago
You said it really, we're already drowning in dodgy systems code or no code. I'm just concerned to not make the problem worse with an even more powerful way to cause a disaster. Think the excel spreadsheet powering the quarterly r
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by jmfldn 5y ago
Not really. I've granted that there is a middle ground, it's just that you have to draw the line at systems that actually need proper engineering eg where security or performance has serious real world consequences. It's a qu
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by jmfldn 5y ago
So many good points here, best summary of the problem of no code I've read yet. Whether you write lots of code or no code, all the principles you mentioned remain i.e. testing, deployment complexity, maintainability, rollback, release
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by jmfldn 5y ago
I got started in mid 30s from an arts background. 6 years on and I'm a senior engineer at a major tech company mentoring others, designing systems and helping lead a team. Best decision I ever made to scratch the programming itch, not
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by jmfldn 5y ago
Kotlin is growing for sure on the server side. Far from replacing it though.

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