While there are areas where my functional convictions have greatly diminished, my mid career zeal had the tremendous benefit of illuminating new architecture and data design principles.
Storing data as discreet changes and relying on pure function selectors to calculate values is wonderful.
It's not always a viable approach at scale (at least not for my ability in certain circumstances) but, when it is, testing is a breeze and I love being able to debug forward/backward in time with consistent results guaranteed.
It would have been a beautiful "footprints in the sand" moment if you had turned off the ignition and carried the motorcycle those last hundred feet for the photo.
> I gave up after a paragraph or two. It looked like it was going to moan about people trying to have fun and do some self care. I don’t have time for that.
The author had quite the opposite conclusion:
> The Great Regression isn’t really a regression at all. It’s a sign of resilience in the face of profound adversity.
Just as I was fading a few paragraphs in, one of the straw men (IMHO) thrown out caught my eye.
How had I not heard of Alexis de Tocqueville's 1835 critique, Democracy in America?
Honestly, you and Tocqueville are saying something very similar at the core. A polite society has a known exploit: not behaving politely. The exploit is used by those seeking to amass power and influence.
The result, he posits:
> It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
My perspective is that I had recently realized that I didn't have a great justification for having used JWTs in my last two projects (and worried I had been part of a cargo cult myself). Truly.
I can't see their value against a bearer token + session tracking on the server for most cases (e.g. it won't be a huge performance hit to do a lookup of some sort on each request).
The two apps I'm referring to have a few thousand users who only make occasional requests.
I think a lot of apps fall into this broad category and I don't see what extra value JWT is providing. Encoding user data is pretty convenient (though more opaque) but if you want to be able to ad-hoc invalidate them you need refresh tokens or a session list. Not only does that re-introduce needing to do a sort of lookup and server user tracking, the encoded data on the token is no longer a positive, since you bifurcated knowledge of the user (token + list), and all its data would be more discoverable by including it where you are now tracking sessions anyways.
Help me out if I'm missing something. My mind is open.
You can track JWTs on the server, via a sessionId or whatever you wish, it just breaks the intended pattern. If you have to do a lookup on each request (necessary to invalidate the token imperatively) your JWT is no longer stateless which is a core tenet of the JWT approach.
It'd be like building a React app and calling getElementById(id) to update DOM values. You _can_ do it but...
Do you think (remember) that the incentives for bands were different? I know people listened to more full albums because it'd be tedious otherwise, but was consuming music more of a dedicated activity than it is today?
If so, with record sales being viable income streams, it'd make sense why it'd optimize for more varied, blended, complex, and interesting listens (indexing on FM play for comparison; we're awash with incredible music elsewhere).
I enjoy some music for accompaniment or sing alongs, and then some as a captivating experience (like a movie or even more so a roller coaster).
The blues, jazz, and fusion scenes were vibrant as well and had the same _music as activity_ feature distinct from a dance floor. The audience is expected to actively respond mid song to leads and fills that were moving.
(I know I riffed on my own question but it's not intended to be rhetorical)
I feel similarly about the quality (don't know what else to call it) of the many songs I listen to from that time, compared to similarly popular songs over the past decades.
Though for me they're also nostalgic in a way which clouds my judgement: I was introduced to vast amounts by my dad in the 90s.
I do think there's some selection bias when we sample tunes that already ran through the filter of their time and 50 to 60 more years of collective filtering.
One group I still didn't know much about and I think many people still don't (paradoxically so) was the Beatles.
When I was 18, a friend lent me every album from Revolver through Abbey Road.
If you haven't listed to those all the way through, you may be in for a treat.
Also, if you want to hear an incredible modern artist's own
version of a protest song, check out Sturgill Simpson's Sea Stories. Dude was in the navy and wrote it as part of a concept album dedicated to giving his first child life advice.
I have similar thoughts but they can be broken into two distinct feelings:
Ideally everyone would routinely have their attention called to the sword of Damocles, or at least listen to Dan Carlin's Destroyer of World's once every few years. So I should take what I can get from the NYC ad...but having one produced seemingly apropos of nothing with the tone of an Ad Council billboard creeps me out too.
I also want people to be respectfully fearful but fear populations who are afraid.
I'm just going to reread Slaughter House Five, cloak myself in cynical realism, and then spend time outdoors while I enjoy the back 9 of life.
It may seem so boring at first because it is so real. The depth of insight into the characters and culture is what makes it so moving as the plot picks up.
Another perspective shift that makes it more enjoyable: it's a time machine. I wouldn't care for that level of detail in a modern American context or even a fantasy, but a distinct culture nearly 200 years ago? Sign me up.
Then again, if you don't dig it no shame in moving on. There are more books than there is time to read them.
If you don't think the default school is important, why would you care if a kid switched?
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If the response was that it's too expensive to allow them to switch that'd be logical, but I don't think that's the common response. Tbf I am not really aware of people matching the initial premise either.
I agree about the contradictions and hypocrisy but the answer can be much more pragmatic:
> As a non-US, non-Chinese citizen, is there something that makes TikTok espionage and Facebook not? Or is it just "china scary"?
There's problems with US big tech and TikTok but the case against TikTok is easier to push through.
There's nothing wrong with patching the first of many holes in your roof and starting with the one easiest to get to.
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My primary emotional and ethical driver is to point out my own government (the US) not living up to its marketing material, but it doesn't mean I wouldn't support eliminating a vector for another (openly autocratic) government to meddle with my country as well.
Edit: distinguish my reply to prior comment from my ramblings about my reply.
> Overcomplicating things leads to overcomplicating things.
This would be the most efficient title, subtitle, and entire contents of most posts about programming principles.
However, each reader has to have a similar enough perspective, background, and experience to understand and apply it. In that sense, the trend line measuring the value of commenting about comments about random blog posts indeed indicates wasted time, but hopefully it's a local minima.
My pithy corollary to your helpful tautology is a quote from Tommy Angelo that's stuck with me since my poker days: "The decisions that trouble us most are the ones that matter least."
Decisions are necessarily difficult to make when the expected value of either outcome are similar. We waste an awful lot of time on choices that could have been made just as well with a coin flip.
So there you go world: two quotes that are generally useful about generalities that are locked, loaded, and ready to shoot you in the foot when misapplied.
I appreciated their synthesis but I think some general recommendations would have also been useful for the public (imperfect but helpful):
1. Ask primary care physician for a lab referral or purchase a nutrient deficiency test from a straight to consumer lab (cost was lower than I expected at ~$100-$200).
2. Google whether nutrient is actually bioavailable when taken as a supplement.
3. Use independent tests to ascertain brand quality for specific supplement or overall trustworthiness (labdoor is the one I'm familiar with).
The proliferation of these sources have torpedoed my Google effectiveness.
Not only do these sources amplify themselves, they are of near necessity targeted at simple use cases. The result? Google has ample popular material filled with my relevant keywords but void of any usefulness to anyone not just getting started. As it happens, the people with the most questions _are_ just getting started, and do find the results relevant pushing content on the margins further down the list.
Worse still, with Google's increased focus on natural language processing, their seeming approach of "what you're really asking is..." makes loose queries even more difficult. Definitionally the most common questions aren't edge cases, at least not the single one you're interested in.
After all these years, I think I need to retrain myself on how to Google (distinct keywords no longer cut it unless I have a sequence where I can look for an exact match), and recently started falling back to other search engines with some success.
It's strange but really cool to zoom out and see various meetings between people in different rooms, or when we bring an outside contact into our space for a meeting you can introduce them to coworkers ad-hoc (like a real office).
Swinging by with a guest, like other real world experiences translated into a 2D world, require developing a new set of social norms. For instance, if you're screen sharing through their app, you won't see someone approaching and the screen share feed will show up expanded by default for whomever enters. That can be problematic for a number of reasons (client data, personal info you were sharing with a close coworker, etc.).
We also have recreated games like tag using the confetti feature, have rituals like hitting a lap around the entire space on go karts after code reviews, and occasionally raid Client Experience's office for supplies.
It is a jealous god when it comes to CPU though and since modern JS environments are greedy as well, my fan gets a lot of work.
I think it's a good point that there are many more domains within large organizations than one might expect from the outside.
However, people are undoubtedly in more specialized roles and teams on the whole.
I'm merely trying to explore the differences in growth as a developer between the two extremes.
While I don't think as many people who build React interfaces at Facebook are also spending days creating Postgres schema diagrams and responding to mission criticial DevOps failures, I certainly grant that the small team varied project approach might be more similar than I realize.
In that case or either way, the most impactful difference in how personal growth is impacted may be the surrounding ecosystem and knowledge base.
In one scenario you are flush with existing infrastructure and the thoughtful people who designed or maintain it. This can focus your work as you mentioned and is also a great learning environment.
While on the other side you are working without a safety net slogging your way through creating everything* from scratch. This forces you to learn new skills in unfamiliar areas and managing all sorts of tradeoffs autonomously (there could be literally no one else to motivate you or to ask a question aside from your search bar).
* Infrastructure, tools, processes, etc. I'm not talking about reinventing the wheel though you are free to do so for your own pleasure or peril.
I find the mental overhead of the always-on camera exhausting, and I prefer voice only communication for certain types of conversations so I can dedicate all my processing power to what's being said. I also pace when I'm thinking, make coffee, lay down, etc.
In a pleasant twist of fate, migrating our full company (20ish people) into gather.town has largely made it a moot point for me now.
I have the choice between zoom like video boxes or switching to small thumbnails I largely ignore in favor of viewing/interacting with the 2D scene.
Also, when you see someone walking by and they "drop in" for a quick chat, the context for the visual feed seems more natural and less encumbering than spinning up a zoom meeting: they approach, you talk, they walk away, and you're alone again. If I pace IRL during the discussion and am off camera, my avatar is reinforcing that I'm still in the same space with the other participants.
If I don't want to be interrupted I go to a blocked off private area; the 2D equivalent of a DnD status.
(Wish I didn't have to add this disclaimer but this is the internet: I am not, nor have ever been affiliated with gather in any way. That friends was just an earnest anecdote and soft reccomendation)
Are you able to compare the experience of being at a Big Tech company against a very small team with wide responsibilities?
I'm in my 11th year as a developer and left a pure tech company 6 years ago where I was surrounded by other engineers for a small one where I've been 1 of a 2 until this past year (I now lead a team of 3 stateside and nominally 3 more overseas).
Note for traditional startup folks: the lack of team growth may seem like an obvious signal of low performance. Fwiw - we're entirely self-funded and our revenue has grown by nearly 5x and total staff by 3-4x during that time.
From a career/skill growth perspective, I often wonder how being on my little island nets out against joining a larger elite team.
I've no doubt developed idiosyncrasies but I've also directly or collaboratively coded, designed, deployed, and promoted every piece of software, including several web products from scratch, that have been foundational to our success since the first year the company existed.
I really have no idea how to compare that experience with being a cog in a massive machine but surrounded by brilliant work and brilliant people I could learn from.
Are you referring to people often misapplying the concept, or its replicability issues (which I had admittedly come across before but don't hold in active memory)?
I'm confident I nailed the former (I thought I was better at things than I was in reality when I was younger, and am now more likely better than I think I am in those same domains today).
If you referring to the latter, it's tricky for me. It's like the famous two humped camel in programming aptitude. It seems to be useful in describing experiential observations but didn't (doesn't?) replicate. I've stopped using it at this point because I don't want to mislead people.
DK also has the appearance of explanatory power at a minimum, and utility in communicating the simple form of the concept. I don't like the replicability issue but wonder how bad the down side is if all I'm really saying is we aren't often humble enough about new things, and aren't confident enough about things we've dedicated time to?
Welp, that justification for promoting something potentially falsifiable surely isn't going to come back to bite me and expose my hypocrisy elsewhere...
Storing data as discreet changes and relying on pure function selectors to calculate values is wonderful.
It's not always a viable approach at scale (at least not for my ability in certain circumstances) but, when it is, testing is a breeze and I love being able to debug forward/backward in time with consistent results guaranteed.