gw98 · HackerTrans

4 года назадdiscuss

I've dealt with pretty much everything from steaming nightmare creeping Cthulhu desktop applications right into back end fintech stuff written in the dark ages over the last 30 years. At no point have I found this solution being applied where it solved a problem. I have seen it applied many times where it created problems!

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

You missed the two entire toolchains and the third tool required to stick them together?

It's pretty difficult and expensive to build one stack, let alone three and onboard another tool.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

> And what _we_ have here is unfounded indignation over a perfectly fine way to solve a problem

Absolutely no way is this a fine way to solve the problem. That is crazy talk.

1. It introduces additional toolchains into the solution when it is unnecessary.

2. It now means you need multiple language specialists to maintain it and associated communications and context switching.

3. More interfaces and integration means more fragility when it comes to debugging, problem solving as well as increasing the problem surface.

4. It massively increases the dependency stack which means there are now multiple sets of supply chain issues and patching required.

This makes no problems easier at all! It's even a bad last resort if that's all you have left to try.

Sound software architecture is very very well defined and this is definitely not it. I have seen entire companies burn by taking this approach to problem solving.

I'm really getting tired of solutions before problems and this is a fundamental example of it. Give us a real use case not manufacture a problem for it.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

Buy AMD

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

This. I'd rather have to defend all my ideas than have the bad ones blindly promoted.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

The person is a salaried employee. They are getting paid by their employer. The web site is a personal portfolio / blog /resume site. Traditionally you're paid in attention on that sort of thing and use it to bolster salary via opportunities.

Getting a few dollars here and there from a personal site's ads feels cheap and detracts from the article. Tip jar, fine. But ads no. It just feels dirty. Even if they are "ethical".

From my perspective (as an employer) I see this stuff and think holy hell they'll want to stick advertising on everything. Turns me right off.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

Definitely agree with this. You get that confirmation with siri. I mostly use my watch for it and it will show me what it did on the screen without having to touch anything.

Confirmation is required when dealing with humans as well ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11fCIGcCa9c (this reminds me of Alexa)

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

Yeah it doesn't always work well. I say "hey siri add green milk to the shopping list". I want "green milk" added to the shopping list which in the UK is semi-skimmed milk. What does it do? Adds "green" and "milk" because it thinks I'm a weed smoker...

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

I don't want that to happen because the price variation in toilet paper is huge based on deals and offers available, and Amazon is rarely the cheapest provider these days, so it's actually worth me spending a few minutes on it to save some money.

The reason Alexa exists is to sell you Amazon's prices, not necessarily a good deal.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

It's useful for trivial unambiguous tasks where you have your hands full or don't want to touch your device or it's dangerous to. That's all I can muster mine for.

"Hey Siri, add more toilet paper to the shopping list" (while pooping)

"Hey Siri, shuffle my music" (while driving)

"Hey Siri, countdown 10 minutes" (while shoving a pizza in the oven)

Anything else is a shit show. Anything where trust or accuracy is involved i.e. mutating data, spending money, absolutely no way can I trust it at all and never will.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

I know the point of this article is to demonstrate how to solve a problem but the premise is a bad one and must not be confused with sound software architecture at all. In fact it's slightly painful reading it and I really wish people would stop writing articles like this.

The functional requirement here is to take some HTML, parse it and emit slack flavoured markdown.

Involving WASM / Rust / cross compiling stuff and fucking around with a build tool chain should not even be being discussed anywhere as a solution for this. I mean it's fine as a toy but the problem is that half the industry doesn't have any idea what's a good idea and what isn't from an engineering perspective when it comes to solving problems and this will be taken as gospel on how to solve the thing.

What we have here is a Rube Goldberg machine, not a cleanly solved engineering problem.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

I will fix it later. My colleagues probably won't.

This is a common failure mode I've seen of development teams. There is no time to fix it later.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

Conversely one of my children has a complex medical condition which would have bankrupted me several times over in the US. And the service has been second to none.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

You can make the money in the UK if you know what you're doing.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

For now. I know someone who was "doing waaay better in the US", took 3 weeks of leave and came back to a huge series of lay offs, market saturation, unemployment with no healthcare then his visa renewal was declined. So he had to spend his last wedge of cash getting back to the UK...

Took a position with 2/3 of the US salary but actual tangible security.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

So you traded our bananas republic for a gun toting corporatocracy with low employment protection and comedy healthcare and no food standards.

I'm not sure who's worse off.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

I specified and architected an internal ERP system (PLM/SRM side) to replace a paper system. This was a big Oracle/web thing in the early 00's at the peak of Six Sigma. This was resisted by the engineering teams who had been using the old system since WW2. Rather than use it, there was a mini strike that resulted in nearly 50 engineers taking retirement and lead to a national scandal when a huge defence project was delayed and over budget. It was one of the largest contributing factors of the project failure.

After doing lots of post mortem analysis, the paper system was far more capable and had a better audit trail and most of the objections that were formed were entirely spot on. But we steamrolled them because we were under the six sigma project flag.

After seeing the shit show and reflection, I quit and got a shit job throwing web sites together.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

Ah I just invoiced my ex wife's uncle last time I was expected to help for free at my usual hourly rate. No one asks me for help now.

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

At least it's not goatse :)

gw98

4 года назадdiscuss

Just like to say a big thank you for this. When ActiveX was no longer acceptable I wrote some desktop integration technology which replaced it for web apps with an http based background messaging protocol and activation via URL handler. This was sold to some large corporates. This made me a fuck load of money over the last decade or so. If you hadn't built ActiveX this wouldn't have been possible.

You wrote me a house.

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