jjav
At least at every company where I've been in charge of my vendor contracts, I am always grilled by management on how we can lower the cost of the contract and whether we are getting maximum efficiency from each vendor. There is huge pressure every year to find ways to lower the cost.
Here is our EV life:
Need to go to San Francisco (~90 min away, no good place to charge there so need to get back too). Can we make it? Mild panic. No, we can't.
Drive to a fast charger place nearby. Spend 45 minutes charging, bored with nothing to do. We were on time but now we're very late. Child is grumpy because we'll miss the start of the event (this is for watching Fleet Week last month). Finally get going, got there late due to time wasted charging, missed a few planes.
Coming home in the evening, battery is at 30% with half hour to go, partner is panicking. Will we make it? Maybe? Do we detour to a fast charger found on the map? Yes! No, maybe we'll be ok. Rather not stop in some dark sketchy place to charge for 30+ minutes. Let's hope for the best and keep going. Got home with ~10% left, stress on high alert.
Maybe some people like the adrelanine rush of this kind of stress on every road trip, but it's not for me.
For non-technical clients that may well be the case for a while, but I suspect even the most non-technical clients will eventually realize they can claw back a good portion of the efficiency as discounts.
I'm negotiating some contracts where I could do the work in-house for about 1/20th of the previously-reasonable vendor cost. I'd rather not do it, so I'm happy to pay 1/20th plus a reasonable percentage above that, but that's the limit. The vendor can accept that, or goodbye.
Interesting times on vendor contract negotiations these days.
No, not necessarily. Sometimes, yes. For anything important, the last thing I want is a company that's moving too fast.
An email company? The base protocol RFC was written in the 70s. It's as mature as computer technology gets. There is zero value in moving fast here, all the value is in building an absolutely rock solid and secure solution.
The very opposite of move fast and break things.
Tone deaf award of the decade surely goes to that guy.
If it were some social game app or something, I guess it wouldn't be as tragic, but for a company whose sole reason to exist is to provide security... wow. Goodbye any trust ever again.
Definitely not all projects need the same level of quality.
But per the thread, if you allow the skills of all the engineers in your company to rot, what happens when there is a system that needs the higher level of quality?
For a very brief period, and then when the really big money started rolling in, all the personalities that used to flock to wall street became programmers.
The Silicon Valley of the 90s was completely different to the thing it is now here.
Same here! Aside from the basic unix tools in /[usr]/bin/, there is very little software with the longevity of emacs. I fully switched from vi to emacs in 1992 and been using it heavily every day since then. So good.
(The only other program I can think of from that era that I still use is trn to read USENET)
You could simply try it. Find an API that is not publicly documented and thus not part of any training set. Take any AI model, give it the documentation and tell it to create some code that uses that API.
This is a pretty biased take. If there is anything the world is finally learning, it is that being completely dependent (not only for functionality but also availability) on a single vendor operating from a potentially uncooperative government, is not a great position to be in.
You don't rely on the model knowing about such things up front. You feed it the latest API documentation and then work off that.
Linux is the most common platform and many Linux distributions have an issue with license compatibility (or perceived one), which hinders adoption.
There is nothing complicated about having zfs be your filesystem. You can use its extra features like snapshots, send/receive, etc, but only if you wanted to. Otherwise it's just a filesystem, there is nothing to use as such, so nothing complicated.
> and isn’t necessary for most workloads.
Not sure what that means. What workload wouldn't benefit from a reliable filesystem?
Not really, this is an example (of many) where that quote is taken out of context and does not apply.
The premature optimization quote is about spending tons of time fine-tuning functions for optimal performance, shaving a millisecond here or there.
The choice of languages and/or frameworks to allow the product to reach your intended goals is a critical early architectural choice. One that is costly to revert later.
IOW, if you're building a niche SaaS app that you don't intend (or want) to market to a larger customer base then it makes sense to use a slow language if it does what you want conveniently.
OTOH, if your business plan is to scale to millions/billions of users as soon as you can get there, it is a mistake to paint yourself into a corner where you'll have to rewrite everything soon in the growth curve.
Now, perhaps, in the age of AI this matters less if you can use AI to rewrite everything when you get to that point. Although I haven't gone through an exercise of using AI to rewrite the whole company codebase at once, not sure yet how well that'll work.
Unfortunately there are nowhere near enough choices for people who want a bit more joy out of their neighborhood than that.
What does this have to do with a HOA being allowed to demand color of windowshades or what kind of flowers someone likes to plant in their yard?
Of course not, that's not how it works. The city contracts with a trash collector and they set a weekly schedule for each neighborhood.
> Who else is going to fix the roads?
Is this a trick question? The county of course. They own the roads.
HOAs have no purpose.
Sure. I think very few, if any, people dispute that. If there actually are common facilities like pools, it makes sense to have a common pot of money everyone contributes into, to maintain those facilities. Just about everyone will agree with that.
How do you make the huge leap from that, into saying a HOA has any kind of right to demand what kinds of flowers or windowshades or decorations someone installs into their private (not shared!) property?
Give me a neighborhood with freedom where every house is different, every yard is different. That's a community.
Also, we have no HOA, so there are no ridiculous restrictions, which means the neighborhood has character. Every house is painted in unique colorful styles, instead of endless shades of dull beige. Every house has unique vegetation choices based on owner preferences so it is fun to walk around and sightsee. We have no HOA, so there are zero restrictions on decorations, so we are the Halloween capital of the county (coming up in a few weeks!)
It's a vibrant unique neighborhood full of facilities and character, precisely because there is no HOA to destroy it.
A similar neighborhood across town (we're a small town so across town is just a mile away) has a HOA, every house is a dull shade of beige and they have very harsh rules, like HOAs of course do, on decorations, so Halloween and Christmas are DOA over there.
Very easy answer: they don't get access to the pool, river docks, common lakes (per peer thread) that the HOA maintains.
They of course must maintain full control and ownership of their private home.
If you answer that there is nothing they would lose access to (no pool, no rivers, no lakes) then that is a very strong answer stating the HOA has no right to exist.
Neighbors in a HOA are very clearly never paying upkeep of your property, that's is nonsense.
A condo association is a whole different ballgame, since there is legitimate shared structural walls, roofs, elevators, etc. But single family home HOAs, there is nothing the HOA does to maintain individual homes.
Since presumably you're also preventing people from outside the neighborhood from using it, then it is beyond trivial to prevent the non-paying neighbor as well, using the same gate key mechanism.
Not OP, but that is exactly what happened in my neighborhood. It has parks and trails and several sports courts, two playgrounds, dog parks. It was all turned over to the city to be public land to avoid having a HOA.
> generally isolated and (largely) accessible to only a specific neighborhood?
No. It's just land around the neighborhood, easily accessible to anyone in town (or nearby towns).