OldOneEye
Information density in the English language is higher than in romance languages, and that's great for work.
I vastly prefer to write documentation in English.
I, on the other hand, still prefer more indulgently verbose languages when it comes to lyricism and entertainment. There's a charm to it.
12 years ago I had to choose whether to specialize myself in AWS, GCP or Azure, and from my very brief foray with Azure I could see it was an absolute mess of broken, slow and click-ops methodology. This article confirms my suspicions at that time, and my colleague experience.
Learning a new tool is a mental effort that makes sense for the seller to propose, but doesn't for me. My mental energy is better spent on my loved ones. It has to be truly revolutionary for me to invest time into it, like the LLM stuff. But otherwise I've been happy with Bash, Vim, JetBrains products and Terraform for a very long while. I don't see any need to change that.
I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the excellent games that you all built in that era. Thief 1 and 2 are part of my formative games. I played it when I was a teen. The lore, the ambient, the thrill of playing a non combat game (well, at least until you get the sword to beat the bad guys in the last stages, in Thief 1). I could never like mainstream games to the same extent all my friends did after playing Thief 1 and 2. They may have had better graphics, but they did not have the same soul, passion and love that those games had.
It was with a lot of sadness that I read about the demise of Looking Glass studio.
To add a funny anecdote to this, I enjoyed the game even though I barely understood the dialogue and text, being a Spaniard. But it was one of those games that sparked my interest to learn English (alongside Zelda, A link to the past xDD)
I've been 3d printing with resin for a long time before I had my dog. Now I don't do it, unless I can be sure that I can have the dog out my printing room for several days straight, for the water-washable resin to solidify on the sun after usage, and all the different after-print steps that have to be taken care of.
It's also annoying to clean the plate, and deal with the resin bottles when you stop using them. There's no easily accessible infrastructure to dispose of the waste from the printing process so if you become lazy, you end up creating toxic hazards for anyone in the community. Not a good outcome at all.
Still, safe 3d printing brings me a lot of joy, specially to prepare board games sessions with friends and neighbours. Printing, painting, etc. You just have to be responsible and civic and do the right thing.
There's a safe way to handle this stuff, but you have to be very disciplined about it. Animals and kids complicate that big time.
I love that you've made it open source and that it's in Rust, thanks a lot for the work!
Of course, not for the content itself, but because it's really a time capsule of the feelings and hopes of our time, back then, when we were teens, discovering this new exciting thing called Internet, the excitement of meeting like minded people and have discussions that you could never have with your friends.
I feel like nothing is ever gonna replicate that excitement anymore, but that may be more related to us being 40+ than the technology not being available xD
Geocities/Lycos/others, then switching to phpbb forums that you modded and where you had your first programming experiences to try to build games...great innocent times all around, before everything was enshittified for commercial purposes.
It is so much better to run scripts with Just than it is doing it with Make. And although I frankly tend to prefer using a bash script directly (much as described by the parent commenter), Just is much less terrible than Make.
Now the only problem is convincing teams to stop following the Make dogma, because it is so massively ingrained and it has so many probems and weirdnesses that just don't add anything if you just want a command executor.
The PHONY stuff, the variable scaping, the every-line-is-a-separate-shell, and just a lot of stuff that don't help at all.
You surely care about what your partner thinks about you. Your parents perhaps? Your friends? It's part of the emotional connection.
You can be laid back and easy going, but you're still going to care if your loved ones strongly go against your core beliefs and ways of living, right?
But they made it very difficult to try it out at scale (we generate quite a lot of logs) and at one point they only wanted to talk to the CTO instead of the persons in charge of the PoCs.
That move made them untrustable to me, and they were disqualified from the process. If they wanted to compete on selling the solution to non-technical people that told us all we needed to know about them and how support would be. We ended up choosing managed Opensearch by AWS, which was a shitshow in several fronts. I wish we had given Loki a bigger chance at that time. We've ended up migrating to it anyway.
I've only used them for personal projects, though, so I can't say anything to the suitability in a corporate environment. In particular their support. That's quite an important factor when working in a corporate setting.
I wish they already had that S3-like service they've announced for some time. It would be really handy.
I really wish AWS conceded the IaC war and stopped putting resources into Cloudformation. I never suffer as much as when I have to work with CF. The only worse thing I can think of is having to interact with Azure, which around 5 years ago was a terrible experience all around with regard to automation.
Going back to my CF rant: As soon as you get into any amount of complexity (and this also includes CDK, as it inherits all of CF problems), like for example using nested stacks and custom resources, it becomes almost impossible to troubleshoot incidents and problems. Error messages are obtuse. Fail states are too frequent. Update and deploy times are incredibly slow. Working with CF makes me reconsider my whole job every time. I curse the day that I chose to ignore my general precaution with CF and go for a database (Opensearch) managed with CDK.
There's a night and day difference between managing infrastructure state with Terraform and CF. Terraform also has its quirks and warts, of course, but at the very least there's very little that cannot be recovered by yourself. And it is also fast enough. CF is mostly a black box of misery.
I feel LLMs are great at suggestions that you follow up yourself (if only for sanity checking, but nothing you wouldn't do with a human too).
I've already used some LLMs to ask questions about licenses and legal consequences for software related matters, and it gave me a base, without having to involve a very expensive professional into it for what are mostly questions for hobby things I'm doing.
If there was a significant amount of money involved in the decision, though, I will of course use the services of a professional. These are the kinds of topics you can't be "mostly right".
As years have passed, I found physical books are great for gifting, but terrible to keep. I never read any given book more than once, twice at most. Having those books be occupying space in my home, having to be managed across moves, and then just forgotten, perhaps only to be remembered with some nostalgia when you linger your gaze idly on them from time to time...I find that wasteful.
I've been very happy reading from an ebook device for almost two decades now. I don't think the tactile sensation of a book to be that great anyway. It's much more convenient, and, above all, I don't have the burden of having to manage all that space. The same way that I was burdened by my father's passing and having to manage his books and comics (of course, this was only a minor annoyance, but not something I would have ever wished to do, because of course...I couldn't bring myself to just throw it all out to the recycling boxes, and gifting them all to some place is no that easy now that almost no one is taking in physical books anymore). All of that...for an ephemeral experience. A passing distraction. Much like a movie.
Now...how does this relates to the library disappearing? I think libraries as they're designed don't provide that much value when you can get almost all what you want in a single kindle. Indeed, physical books make no sense to me, specially having to store them in a public building, whose space could be put to better use for the community.
The concept of accessing the literature freely should never disappear, I'm not advocating for that. But I would prefer that this would be done by lending or allowing the use of e-books rather than physical books. Or even just pdf files to be read with the user's own devices. Perhaps a self-deleting pdf if some kind of lending wants to be implemented?
Instead, the physical space currently occupied by books could be used to promote communal activities, between kids and between adults. There are public buildings like that in Barcelona, that can be used by cultural neighborhood associations that allow the people of the city to bond in much the same way that ancient communal places like the church would have performed. So, for example, food distribution citizen cooperatives, or role playing/board game groups, singing and dancing groups, theater play associations or courses, historical recreation societies...the sky's the limit!
All of the previous activities provide more integration and community than what a traditional library could ever provide. Reading being mostly a personal experience, even taking into account potential reading clubs.
And what I've come to believe is that it is much more important to enabling opportunities and social integration, to provide shared spaces rather than trying to cover that need by giving free access to self-learning or leisure resources. I would prefer my public money to be used towards communal integration, rather than reinforcing the solitude crisis that we're all drifting to.
I've been an avid reader all my life, mostly of fiction novels, but not only.
Over time, as the habits of my work have permeated into my daily life I've found the following:
- I skim over most written text to get to gist of it, even for novels
- as a consequence, I usually lose the nuance and the details of a text, even though I get mostly 80% of the content. I find myself needing to go back when I don't understand why something happens, or a character comes out of nowhere, etc.
The same thing has also filtered to my non-reading habits, for example when listening to people. I quickly switch to getting the gist of what someone is telling me and making up the rest in my mind.
And this has gotten me into trouble several times, even though it is an effective technique most of the time when programming or with similarly related tasks and you research across many tabs and search results and you need to get knowledge quickly without stopping to read everything.
I've tried to slow down myself and really listen until the end when people talk to me, and making a conscious effort to try to remember what they're saying to me, or what I'm reading. This works better.
I also feel that having access to all those helps, reminders, and also search engines, has greatly deteriorated my memory capacity or willingness to store facts, plans, ideas, in my mind, as I know I can retrieve it later if I need it, or I trust tools to remind me of things. I've become more forgetful over time.
Well...at least it is important to be aware to try to fix it.
I'm not from the US, I think it is a global phenomenon for similar cultures.
This game surprised me so much, because I just picked it on a whim a short while ago. It is so much more than what the cover suggests.
A very emotional and impactful story, really looking forward what they do for the next chapter of her story.
We're experienced with managing a big scale elastic cluster, but never managed the ML jobs, so knowing about this limitation is definitely useful!
New Relic could not handle the query aspect of having at around 5TB+ terabytes of logs (I know, a ludicrous amount of logs, but that's what it is) per day. Their architecture does not really allow for that. For small volumes I guess it would be enough. Not to ingest, that it did fine, but to query them under a reasonable time frame without a timeout, that's where it couldn't handle the high volume.
Also, their support service, while trying to win us over, that is, in their best moment, was nothing really stellar. Favouring sending us sales/presales people to solve technical problems.
It didn't leave us a good aftertaste.
I remember having the same experience during my third job, in a french consultancy in Spain. For the sake of vindication (so many years after the fact xDD) I will just name it: Sopra [0].
So, for each business task (like adding some feature to the application we were developing), "Analysts" would write the "specification" in uml-like models in Eclipse (some kind of modelling plugin for Eclipse, I think it was a framework developed by the company over the EMF plugin suite), and a very short description of what this was supposed to accomplish, business-wise.
Our[1] task would be, then, to generate a scaffolding from these models (via Eclipse) and then to fill in the blank of the methods generated this way.
The problem lay at how the incentives were laid in that company (and many others like it, the whole IT "consultancy"[2] business, in fact) : Programming was a job that was poorly paid (but still, much higher than the median salary in Madrid, which is why I was there). So, every person had every incentive to get to either management or higher "design" roles (Technical Analyst, Business Analyst, Architect) as soon as possible. This meant that the people who remained in the company[3] were either the people that had 1 year, 2 year tops, of programming experience that got to now design whole systems and applications, or the sociopaths that floated to management by stabbing everyone on the way up.
You can imagine the quality of the systems produced this way...
Models were hilariously under specified, and clearly the person doing them did not have experience on how programas behave in real life. But because they were so insecure in their positions (remember the backstabbing and the lack of experience), any back and forth between the programmers and the analysts was handled with hostility and contempt from the analyst side.
Obviously we also looked at analysts with contempt. Still, they were paid better than us, so of course they were right and they had management support, and were told by our team leads to make it work anyway, so it was common to implement something completely different under the scaffolding, to avoid having discussions with the analysts, that checked that the scaffolding itself did not deviate from their designs.
So, my take in this kind of 5th generation (as they were called back then) code generation frameworks is that it encourages the kind of behaviour I saw. And when the same people that do the design also do the programming (the mason architects coders of our time [4]), this way of working is just redundant. Diagrams and models have their place in documenting a project, but certainly not in trying (and failing) to specify everything that can happen in a system.
Wow...I've almost written a blog post xD
-----
[0]: What a shitty place to work in, at every level. No joy was possible in that environment. Sociopaths thrived and naturally floated to the management positions. As we say in Spain: shit always float to the top.
I have so many stories to tell of that place...and I was only 6 months there!
[1]: lowly paid and lowly valued programmer-monkeys, literally the term they used when they thought we couldn't hear it (and for a more colourful spanish variation of it: "picatas" which was a derogative term meaning Typist)...how the tables have turned since then...
[2]: As we all know, it's just a sham. We were never consultancies, just the equivalent of cheap sweatshops for our french overlords, who came to Spain because programmer's salaries and labor rights were lower than in France. Still...they offered better salaries than the native "consultancies", so there's that. A common theme in Spain, actually. At least foreign exploiters treat labor better than our own national exploiters.
The situation has greatly improved since those times, and you can find genuinely good (foreign) companies to work at, in Madrid or Barcelona. The consultancies still exist, but they're no longer 100% of the job market now.
[3]: Because, naturally, the churn was stupidly high at the "picatas" level, who could find better offers and situations just by changing jobs every 6 months, which I did. I remember at that time how they tried to FUD us into "loyalty" by saying that they did not recruit people that had this kind of job-hopping CVs. It was false, of course, they were desperate to find people, so they took what they could. My father said the same to me. I don't doubt that was how it was at his time. That era of employee and employer loyalty had long passed by that time, if it ever really existed from the employer side in the first place (I doubt it, IMO it's just that employees had even less choice and were educated by society into loyalty for your task masters)
[4]: I'm very glad of how the industry has evolved, job-wise. These times are much more interesting from a technical point of view, than what existed in the past. I get enjoyment out of my job now, and that is priceless. Also the high salaries help. Not as high as outside Spain, of course, but high enough for a good life.
Every time I have to use it, I have time to ponder about my life choices (like why am I using a mac to do sysadmin/dev work?).