This is anecdotal, but I had a positive experience with the lack of privacy recently. I bought a baby stroller, after doing the typical research and finding a used model, I ended up buying a new one from some babyshop. All the pictures had shown the thing with the stroller “hat/head/sunscreen thing” (sorry I don’t know the English word for kalche), anyway, it wasn’t included and that was why the brand new stroller had been priced the same as the used ones.
But it’s bought and it’s nice, so whatever I hit the manufacturer website and find the correct product and google it, and get a flash sale from one of our most prominent baby stores. It was 350 Danish kr including delivery. Without closing the tap I check a few baby shops and a price checker website and see it’s actually 600-700 Danish krs everywhere, including on from the company the flash sale on google is form. So I buy it.
Apparently I hit the right combination of search history, and store advertising/inventory at exactly the right time.
Being curious I called my local baby store to ask why they could flash sale me at half price, and after a bit back and forth they apparently do this thing where they’ll catch you early with a cheap item and then when you come back they to buy it the next day it’ll be priced higher, except by then you’ve made up your mind to buy it and will pay the extra and I was just lucky having already made up my mind when I got it because the other store has been cheeky.
Not really related to DDG, but it’s the first time selling my privacy has paid off.
In the UX world they are usually called urgency or scarcity triggers [1][2]. They also play in to the social default bias [3] people tend to have, where when alone you tend to do things that you know others have done.
I wonder what the author means when he says “ classical polymorphic OOP”. In my experience, subtyping is the absolute worst part of OOP. More so in an enterprise setting, where after two decades, you end up with some really mutated weird ass looking ducks (Animal).
As far as functions vs class go, both are terrible to maintain in the long run. Both lead you on a never ending path of go-to-definition, because the documentation is rotten and the tests aren’t right/even there. The only difference is whether or not you want to search a few large or a metric fuckton of single responsibility files.
Maybe it’s different if your code bases aren’t crap and you’re a better developer than me.
I live in Denmark, where we lift a lot of the burden of civilisation together, to give everyone access to education, health/elderly/child care as well as a solid security system for those who get unemployed.
And here society is hard enough these days, pressing more and more people beyond their limits. I really wonder how you all do it in America.
A lot of Americans think they can make it themselves without help from others. Smart people don’t believe that and make the government subsidize their stuff left and right. Often while deluding themselves into thinking that they are “self made”. And then you have the people who constantly vote against their own interests while enduring the hardships the system imposes.
The United States and Denmark are very different countries.
The U.S. has nearly 4x as fast population growth, 2x as many immigrants, 10x the incarceration rate, much greater religious and racial diversity, 100x more billionaires, 17% less GDP per capita, and 3x as much debt/GDP.
I'll refrain from opining as to what is cause and what is effect, but the differences are many.
Denmark has a dramatically greater household debt to income ratio than the US, and is one of the most indebted countries in the world. They're in horrible debt shape. Their household debt as a percentage of disposable income is 282%, the worst in the world; that contrasts with 105% for the US, which is only slightly worse than Germany at 95%. Denmark's quality of life is coming at the expense of the future, as they load up massively on debt today to fake their standard of living.
>Denmark's quality of life is coming at the expense of the future, as they load up massively on debt today to fake their standard of living.
It's probably worth it in the end. How much longer do we have to endure low quality of life for the sake of some future? Let's say you endured and now your son becomes an adult. Is that now the time to start improving things and enjoying a better quality of life? Probably not, people will say it isn't time yet and we aren't ready, therefore your son will have to sacrifice his happiness and wellbeing too, for his children.
The average person in Denmark will probably die of natural cause, after a relatively happy and fulfilling life. Doesn't seem like they're getting any worse either for it.
What do we have to show for our sacrifices? Nothing it seems. The powers that be will cry about muh inflation all day and won't bail out people, but they're ready to bend over and print money if the corporations and ultra rich need it though.
> And here society is hard enough these days, pressing more and more people beyond their limits. I really wonder how you all do it in America.
It's all relative. Someone in the US is looking at failed states in Central America and Africa and thinking the same thing. One day, people will look at Denmark and think the same.
Objectively people may be having a better or worse time in different places at different times, but how you personally feel about your situation is all relative at the end of the day.
I work in the public sector of Europe. One of the primary reasons that we prefer Azure and AWS to google cloud is support.
When things go really wrong on our office365 platform or any part of Azure, Seattle will call us on the the hour with updates until it’s fixed. We have programs within Microsoft support where our developers and sysops can suggest changes, and if the suggestions gather enough popularity and fit within whatever criteria Microsoft have internally they’ll happen.
AWS didn’t always have the great support they do now, but as far as cloud operations (the nerdy bits) go, I think they’re actually better at it than even Microsoft. It build up gradually along with GDPR, but they were the first of the major three to offer things like support for AWS services that’s actually located within the European Union. I’m not updated on Microsoft, but AWS may still be the only company to do that.
Compare that to Google, where we get to talk with an automated system, the same as though we weren’t a 3,3 billion a year budget organisation. I’ve had better personal support for my free google account than I have for our company google cloud account.
Don’t get me wrong, we would probably have a lot of GDPR related reasons to prefer Azure or AWS even if google had better support, but the lack of support means we’ve never gotten beyond that step in our risk assessments.
I work pretty exclusively with AWS these days as a CloudOp. I remember building an environment in GCP and getting answers from support was terrible. I eventually left that job after 11 months.
The next job was pure AWS and sweet Jesus was the contrast strong. AWS not only had people who would phone you within 10-15 minutes, more often quicker than that, but they had a frickin' account manager who visited us every month and we only spent a thousands per month with them. Absolutely worlds apart.
I think there has been a steady reduction in the required IT personal needed to do a lot of things. Need a web-page/web-store? You buy a standard product for almost no money, and you don’t really need anyone to run it for you. 25 years ago that was a several month project that involves a dozen of engineers and had a costly fee attached to after launch support.
At the same time we’ve come up with a bunch of new stuff which gave those engineers new jobs.
I do see some reduction in office workers by automation. We still haven’t succeeded with getting non coders to do RPA development for their repetitive tasks, but the tools are getting better and better and our workers are getting more and more tech savvy. In a decade every new hire will have had programming in school, like they have had math today. They may not be experts, but they’ll be able to do a lot of the things we still need developers to do, while primary being there to do whatever business logic they do.
But I’m not too worried, we moved all of our service to virtual a decade ago and are now moving more and more into places like Azure, and it hasn’t reduced the need for sysops engineers. If anything it’s only increased the requirements for them. In the late 90ies you could hire any computer nerdy kid to operate your servers, and you’d probably be alright, today you’ll want someone who really knows what they are doing within whatever complex setup you have.
The same will be true for developers to some extend, but I do think we’ll continue the trend where you’ll need to be actually specialised at something to be really useful. If virtual reality becomes the new smartphone, you’ll have two decades of gold rush there, and that’s not likely to be the last thing that changes our lives with entirely new tech.
> 25 years ago that was a several month project that involves a dozen of engineers and had a costly fee attached to after launch support.
25 years ago, yes, but white-label hosted web store things were around in the early noughties. I think there were even a few in the late 90s, but those weren't very good.
When do you need to drop a column in a production DB? Maybe my anecdotal bubble is about to burst, but I work in the public sector, and have for a while and on our 200 different production DBs behind around 300 systems we’ve never dropped a column.
Depends on the maturity of your schema - if it's all figured out based on your business domain it won't happen much. If you're still finding product-market fit (or equivalent) splitting a table into two happens sometimes.
"Splitting" a table usually means creating two new ones and dropping the old one after migrating its content with a complex migration script followed by thorough testing. Dropping columns is not only abnormal (adding columns is far more common: features tent to be added, not removed, over time) but also a very crude tool.
Well what I meant was: when you break one table out of another. The kind of thing that comes up when you learn that there's a one-to-many in the domain that you didn't know about when you started.
There are also operational concerns here. Dropping columns may require rebuilding indices, which can have a high cost that isn't worth paying for just to keep the schema clean.
I really wish a lot of things started with the conclusion or TLDR. I have ADHD and I have issues reading to the end of an email without skipping and quitting before the end.
I mean, I know there is a certain way to write research articles and that they aren’t exactly meant for people with attention problems, but without people like you I’d never see the conclusion. Hell I might even look for it and then not find it and forget all about it.
I kind of knew exercise was good for me though. I even like doing it. The real issue is to begin to exercising instead of just thinking about starting it for a whole day without actually getting started.
I always found America’s grips on these things a tad weird. In my country you’re accountable to print the truth, and if you don’t, it comes with fines or even prison time. Because lying to the public is dangerous.
That hasn’t stopped opinion pieces, but it has stopped media outlets from printing things like “the earth is flat” or “drinking bleach cures covid”. Unfortunately this is yet to apply to social media stars, but when they have audiences larger than news papers I think they should frankly be under the same laws.
Yet in America you seem to put that sort of thing in the same box as Chinese censorship. Which is really just so strange to me. Do you really think you can have a functioning democracy when people live in completely different bubbles of subjective truth?
Whatever portion of government handles that in your country, is quite literally analogous to the "Ministry of Truth" in 1984.
>Do you really think you can have a functioning democracy when people live in completely different bubbles of subjective truth?
Nobody knows, its always been an experiment. The experiment is done with the basis that other ways of going about it (some system of enforcing a consistent "truth" among all citizens) would be totalitarian and tend towards tyranny every single time.
Countries that ask media to print the truth certainly go after religious sects that financially/morally exploit their worshipers.
Every time there are threads than mention free speech, it's as if political science and those millennial old problems were new to hn.
> It’s almost impossible to lead en ethical life in this day and age if you do anything related to tech.
That doesn't change that an engineer in the bay area can choose to work for Google or choose to find an alternative place of employment. People can choose more ethical choices without living in a pure ethical panacea.
Sure, but then we're back to "What mental gymnastics do techies do to justify buying hardware they know is made in sweatshop conditions in China?"
Take that template and apply it to Googlers. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism; everyone has compromised a rigid belief structure somewhere.
I don't think it has to be mental gymnastics, but you are right that it is a real challenge.
I think people (especially those in privileged positions like engs in the bay area) should feel empowered to think and decide their line as to what they want to support and contribute to the world.
Hey alter-me, it's a nice thought. But, realistically, many people are faced with living a subpar life in the bay area (rent small apartments for the rest of your life) or working for a big corp and living a better life (own a home - can afford many things). It's not like these people are going to find a company that is perfectly ethical on every side while also still paying $400k+/yr for senior software engineers.
A lot of engineers are wage slaves as much as anyone else. It's not like everyone wants to do this stuff.
EDIT: On a more personal note - I hope your name is actually "Bradly" and you're not "Bradley". And that you actually go by that in real life instead of "Brad". As I know there's some "Brad"s out there that like to buy up Bradly variations without actually going by it. It's killing me.
I agree with you, I just think some big corps are worse than others, so I choose one that is on the better end of big-evil-corp. Is the pay that much worse at Stripe, Square, GitHub, Netflix than advertising companies?
--
Yes, I am a Bradly. About half my coworkers/friends/family call me Bradly and about half call me Brad. I introduce my self as both interchangeably depending on the situation.
I don't know if those companies could take on every engineer leaving a supposedly morally lesser company - which employs many more people.
My point is - not everyone has a choice. You might get the pick of the litter but there are many people who are lucky if they even get one offer from a company paying $400k+/yr. And - for reference - I am one of the people who has never received an offer from one. All my offers have been under $200k/yr (that doesn't include that I have to pay over $2,000/month to buy options that will "maybe one day if we're all lucky" pan out for something).
The world of living in silicon valley under $200k/yr vs $400k+/yr is wildly different. One feels like you're no better off than a retail worker and the other feels like you're a working class professional.
No, the lesson is take a hard look at yourself before casting stones at "others". We can sit here and say that people who work at Google are so amoral, so are those at Twitter, at Apple, at Uber, at Microsoft, at Amazon, etc.
The truth is most for-profit organization will not have a flawless ethical image that satisfied everyone, and that probably includes your employer. I'm not saying we should all look the other way, but let's keep things grounded in reality. Censorship is a delicate subject, especially as it concerns expressions involvong multiple cultures. This doesn't make Google immediately evil for electing to / not electing to act one way or another.
Maybe your accusation is that Google is choosing profit over ethics in this case? Then the "Chinese hardware" argument has to come into play. Are you, yourself choosing price and convenience when you know it means your dollars are ending up in those poorly run Chinese factories? What are you going to do about it? Should Googlers quit their jobs before or after you source all your hardware from ethically run, blame-free factories?
Not necessarily, but if you can justify one thing for yourself then it should help you understand why other people behave similarly.
Whether buying hardware or working for google is worse is another debate, but you should be able to see why people can work at google and not necessarily feel guilty about it.
I am paying my taxes to my government as well, does not mean I agree with everything my government does. When it comes to purchasing certain categories of items (like electronics) you have no choice but to buy something made in China, most of the time.
Yes, by paying taxes you are supporting the government you are paying your taxes too. And yes, this leads to paying for things you disagree with if you do not agree with some of your country's policies.
Hopefully, however, you have a voice (vote) in that government. The same obviously does not apply to you with China, nor generally does it apply to Chinese people within China.
You also generally have less choice when it comes to paying taxes, and significantly more choice when it comes to not buying things from China. If there are no non-Chinese alternative for X item, you can always choose to not buy X. However, that probably means not buying quite a few things, as you point out. But that was GC's point – it is fairly hard as a techie to not support the CCP. But just because something is hard to avoid does not mean you aren't doing it or aren't responsible for doing it.
And democracy's legitamacy is derived from monkeys voting in a system rigged against them, after listening to false promises of growth. While still supporting cheap, often exploitative labor.
I mean, from your description, I'd rather want a system that actually shows continued growth, rather than hollowed promises of growth.
Let's be honest here, democracy's real growth had been going to war with nations and extracting/exploiting resources from them. Hence why the past 50 years, there has been no real growth in democratic countries because they are not able to as easily extract from the rest of the world.
What exactly are you defining as "real growth" in order to come to the fantastic conclusion that there hasn't been any?
I'm also fairly certain that the US (and other countries) have been warring a lot in the Middle East in the past 50 years, and many people claim that this is directly related to oil, an "exploited resource".
I try to avoid buying Chinese products, but unfortunately I end up doing so more often than I'd like. But ultimately, my lifetime contribution to the Chinese regime of a few thousand dollars worth of consumer products pales in comparison to the lifetime contribution of millions of dollars of capital that each Google employee is raising for the company to spend on directly supporting the regime with censorship and surveillance tools.
I think they are choosing react native because they genuinely like react.
I don’t remember which video it was exactly, but one of the higher ups talked about future technologies within Microsoft and how they were doing more and more GUI-based thing with react. And if you look at it, they’ve done pretty amazing things within the JavaScript eco-system in general. Office 365 is amazing, Visual Studio Code is amazing and it just wouldn’t make sense for them to go from typescript to dart.
Especially when you consider how unfinished flutter is. We’re a C#/power shell with a little Python shop with a lot of Enterprise Microsoft techs. We still considered Flutter because Xamarin wasn’t working out for us and we’re not big on JS or big enough to do native, but flutter just doesn’t fill our needs either. That’s anecdotal, but the difference is that react and react native are proven techs and flutter still isn’t.
Yeah Flutter's main focus is mobile, they are working on Desktop Flutter, you can try it out on the master channel.
It looks like they are making progress, Chris Sells, a Flutter PM, tweeted
"While things have been delayed on the desktop side for Flutter due to the current crisis, the team has been working hard to bring both Windows and Linux support to alpha. I think you're going to be happy about what you see."
https://twitter.com/csells/status/1261036199294062592
But it’s bought and it’s nice, so whatever I hit the manufacturer website and find the correct product and google it, and get a flash sale from one of our most prominent baby stores. It was 350 Danish kr including delivery. Without closing the tap I check a few baby shops and a price checker website and see it’s actually 600-700 Danish krs everywhere, including on from the company the flash sale on google is form. So I buy it.
Apparently I hit the right combination of search history, and store advertising/inventory at exactly the right time.
Being curious I called my local baby store to ask why they could flash sale me at half price, and after a bit back and forth they apparently do this thing where they’ll catch you early with a cheap item and then when you come back they to buy it the next day it’ll be priced higher, except by then you’ve made up your mind to buy it and will pay the extra and I was just lucky having already made up my mind when I got it because the other store has been cheeky.
Not really related to DDG, but it’s the first time selling my privacy has paid off.