I agree with most of what you said, but just want to clarify for others that VAT registration is optional until revenue is high enough to reach the threshold.
Not being VAT registered when starting out is not necessarily a sign of a tax dodge.
Who will want to buy American military technology, when the ability to employ it is at the whim of whoever wins the next election?
Especially as it's clear now than any alliance with the US is fragile at best, and could end overnight depending on which side of the bed Trump wakes up on.
UK governments have been pushing for this for years, usually invoking some recent terrorist event as justification.
I'm not suggesting you're wrong, but I don't think this is _just_ the UK being a US puppet, there is very much an appetite for it in the UK parliament too.
It's easy to sell people that "we just need this one more bit of access to your private data, it helps us stops paedophiles and terrorists", but each step takes us further down a bad path.
I'm sure everybody would agree that having full camera surveillance inside every UK home is too far, but no oversight at all is also bad.
There is a point along that line where society would say "no, that's enough", but successive governments have realised that they can slowly push that point further right and nobody seems to notice, or care.
The general public either don't know about growing mass surveillance and privacy invasions, or don't care. "Terrorism and child abuse = bad, and if this prevents it and I have nothing to hide then why would it be a problem for me?"
In higher dimensions, are the spheres just a visual metaphor based on the 3-dimensional problem, or are mathematicians really visualising spheres with physical space between them?
Is that even a valid question, or does it just betray my inability to perceive higher dimensions?
This is fascinating and I'm in awe of the people that do this work.
Is the author suggesting that current AI tools are capable of:
> “write an auth library” or “modernize these unit tests” ?
If so, I'm genuinely interested to know what tools people are using that can do this.
Our experience is that AI will perform well if given a specific and well-bounded sub-task ("parse the JWT token and return a collection of claims" or "re-write this test using framework x" to extend the author's examples), but would still need a competent developer (junior or otherwise) to fit the pieces together and act as quality control.
I can't speak for the US, but in my country that was sometimes the case, but not always.
I was an engineer and had 'non-camo' uniform, and only wore camo in the field or on exercise.
People who's job was primarily 'in the field' though (e.g. the Army) didn't have that, and would wear camo as their uniform 90% of the time (the exception was formal dress uniform for parades etc.)
I think I'm disagreeing with the definition implied by the article.
To me, an integration test involves integrating with another system.
Testing groups of functions or classes together is still a unit test, by Wikipedia's definition at least
"unit testing is a software testing method by which individual units of source code—sets of one or more computer program modules together with associated control data, usage procedures, and operating procedures—are tested to determine whether they are fit for use" [1]
and by Michael Feather's definition
"A test is not a unit test if:
- It talks to the database
- It communicates across the network
- It touches the file system
- It can't run at the same time as any of your other unit tests
- You have to do special things to your environment (such as editing config files) to run it." [2]
Indeed, it's the inevitable result of doing TDD; the refactor step is likely to break out smaller classes/functions already covered by the existing tests.
If we write new, more granular tests every time we do the refactor step, then we end up with brittle tests.
Edit: To clarify, I'm not talking about calling the public API over the network, I'm talking about the public methods that consumers (including your network layer) would call.
Most criticisms of unit tests in articles like this are actually criticisms of bad unit tests.
They also overlook a large part of the value of unit tests, which is fast feedback during development time.
We could push all of our tests up to the browser level, but then I lose the almost instant feedback that unit tests give me.
Sure, if your tests mock everything, and only test individual methods, then they probably are brittle and provide little value over more 'expensive' (e.g. slower) tests higher up the test pyramid.
If the tests only interact with the public APIs (e.g. the 'ports' in a ports and adapters architecture), then they are less coupled to implementation, can represent real business scenarios (instead of 'input x gives result y'), and add more value.
Exactly. The site calls them ailerons (presumably because they are on the wing and can roll the plane) but they are quite far back from the cg and so function more like elevators when used together.
Concorde worked this way [1], and called them 'elevons'. When I used to work on Tornados these were called 'tailerons'.
We have 121s and retrospectives in place, so I'll focus on helping people to feel safe enough to give honest feedback/suggestions in those sessions.
I like the idea of framing the question differently, rather than asking "what can I do better", people may feel more comfortable answering "what areas can be improved upon"
(we already use that question as a starting point for process changes in retrospectives, but asking it to ICs in 121s is something I can start doing).
I think this would cause a fundamental shift in our society.
Who would want to work minimum wage server jobs when offered the same salary for something more rewarding?
Who wants to do gruelling, poorly paid labouring on a construction site, if the alternative is training to be a craftsman for the same wage?
Those jobs would either need to be paid much more attractively (pushing up the cost of restaurant food and construction, in these examples), or - as quoted above - eliminated entirely.
I would be really interested to see how this would play out at scale.
Not being VAT registered when starting out is not necessarily a sign of a tax dodge.