Investing has some nuance, it’s not a homogeneous thing. It varies from insanely conservative to high risk gambling. I like to think everyone involved with NFT type investing is fully aware they are gambling.
It's insane to me that regulators are just letting the forced bid hack unfold with their heads in the sand as if they are unaware of what's happening or the press it's receiving.
Sometimes there are clever ways to hack the system and the regulators can react and blame poor hindsight, that's not the case here.
The administration has given their orders to the regulators, whether explicit or implicit, and this is playing out exactly as they want it to. This is not "by accident" or "by negligence". This is by design.
Idk, the general javascript spinner situation is beyond normalized at this point. I think mainly driven by React and other large/overkill JS frameworks. I avoid JS/TS heavy stuff so I don't really know but that's largely the impression I get. The whole thing reminds me of dialup era internet were we all were watching progressive JPGs load on a slow connection despite the fact I have fiber. I can't believe anyone is Ok with that UX, I don't see how any framework choice justifies introducing that type of behavior.
> Imagine walking through life and everything is clear, obvious, easy to process and having to watch humanity make stupid choices over and over and over again when the answers have been long known...
I don’t claim to be book smart or have a high IQ or whatever but I feel this way about small things that I feel are common sense. It’s maddening to me to watch people fumble around. Or do X when obviously it will result in -Y a bad thing. I really have learned to just not vocalize it, most of the time. It’s especially unhealthy for my close family relationships as I just see so much of it that I could nag them to death.
One of the things I try to teach my kid is: You are going to have to deal with the fact that there are deeply stupid people all around you, without it affecting your mental health. Those stupid people might be in a position of power over you, they might be other kids in school (or coworkers, later), they might be the president of the country, they might be your neighbor, or they might just be obstacles on the road on your way to work every day. You need to learn how to cope and accept this, gracefully deal with them, and how to protect yourself from their stupidity when it might affect you. It's emotional regulation that smart people need to learn or they go crazy.
A lesson which I wish I had learned as a kid; I had examples to work from, but nobody taught me how to deal correctly. To cope and accept without it eating me up.
I'm still not sure how to deal with people being not only wrong but either too dumb or too arrogant to change how wrong they are. (Which is of course me being wrong and unable to change…)
The older I get, the more I realize that individual variation in humans is truly enormous. Any trait you could pick is much more widely distributed than any individual human can see from their perspective.
Just the other day I was watching a video on youtube, of someone absolutely struggling at a task that had a built-in checklist, verification steps, pictures, and basically (in my opinion) perfect guidance. This is something where, if I was doing it, I would just... do the steps. in order. and it would work, probably... 99.9% of the time, the first time, and relatively quickly, to boot.
I watched them fail to succeed like... 5 times in a row. At no point did they actually complete all the steps and verification in order. And this was a reasonable, intelligent, thoughtful, thorough person. They just could not follow a checklist, visual or written instructions, probably to literally save their life.
Same wrt my wife and I. She’s quite clumsy and to my assertion doesn’t always think things through. So it’s a bad combination for “accidents” to always happen which I think are very preventable and quite obvious to occur using her approach. A lot of it is just mental errors that I don’t make, but it’s not that I’m perfect I probably just make different mistakes (I think less volume too ;)
Yesterday she literally failed miserably at a single task. Her mission was grocery shopping. She drove to grocery store, shopped, and came home and left the groceries in the car. Didn’t realize it until she was making breakfast the next morning and there was no milk.
I see this two ways; 1) I would never make that mistake 2) I know her quite well, partners for over 20 years now, and this kind of thing is just her normal par for the course type of “oops”. The second part is what frustrates me the most, I like to learn from my mistakes and she treats it as a given that she’s just spacey/dimwit by nature and leans into everything being an “accident”. Obviously not healthy if I treat her like a child so I just watch her fumble through life and try to have a sense of humor about it all.
Well, how hard should you beat yourself up over a mistake like that? If I forgot my groceries in the car, I'd just laugh about it being a silly one-time mistake. But if it happened twice I'd take it more seriously, and maybe make a note or something to remind me. I'm sure everyone has made some silly mistake like forgetting a jacket at a party or leaving a phone at home sometime. I think we should be a little extra forgiving toward others, because we'd so easily forgive our own mistakes
Does your wife have ADHD? She may not be physically capable of learning from her mistakes without the use of frameworks built to address the disorder.
If she's unsure, it's worth looking into. The immediate relief available by way of the strategies that documentation on the disorder provides can be life-changing and don't require medication nor therapy in order to be put to use.
Sounds like valid issues to me. Pristine software isn’t the objective of most businesses. Leaving as a problem for another day, if we’re lucky that day will come, for many businesses, products, and startups it doesn’t and the shoddy prototype usually isn’t to blame.
I feel like SWE’s that make this gripe really need to step back and understand their role and the process for value creation. Because it’s certainly a process, the quality of code/architecture matters little if the low bar of functionality is met. Functionality can be sold to customers or used to test the market. It’s basically the whole MVP thing and the MVP should be a bit jank. If it wasn’t, you spent too much time/effort on it.
All said, there’s definitely some approaches to make it less jank from day one. Unfortunately, jankiness is a subjective metric.
It’s not about pristine software. Customers expect something that works. But changes will then be requested and the expectation is that the software will continue working. It’s hard to do that with janky code.
If you have a good architecture and keep good code hygiene, then velocity is easy. Without that, everything will slow to a crawl.
> If you have a good architecture and keep good code hygiene
That's a big "if" however - customers have a tendency to come up with requirements that aren't covered (or only covered in awkward ways) by the architecture you envisioned initially, while many of the well-architected parts will remain unused.
Then redesign the architecture. No need to go for a full rewrite as it can be done progressively. One thing I’ve seen is that people can be afraid to delete code, even if it’s not used anywhere.
> You will never get the chance of "customers requesting changes" if you never ship.
Why does good code imply never shipping?
Managers and Developers have different thresholds for “good enough to release”. The former are not the one on call for bugs or the one that get blamed for outage, but they are the ones that get praised when projects are completed quickly. Anything that’s past demo level is good for them.
I'm not saying they're mutually exclusive. I'm just saying that we can't expect them to come as a packaged deal.
For example:
Company A - janky code, ships quick
Company B - great code, ships quick
Company C - great code, ships slow
Company D - janky code. Ships slow
The average survival rate will be in the following order:
B > A > C > D
My point is company A will capture the market and iterate quicker than company C.
Company B is what you're probably thinking of , and what many people think they are building.
Company D is what most people are actually building.
Company C will win out in the long run over company B if they have capital and network.
I like this. It has a lot to do with the company building journey too. Some companies that I feel are probably the B types had a super clear product vision that quickly resonated with users. So the original architecture that fit their vision was probably easy to scale for the features that came as a natural progression of the product. Meanwhile, a company that builds a product and tries to pivot or found the original vision only partially what customers wanted, well these situations put you in the position where it’s probably easier to just force what you have to work for the basis of your iteration. Starting from zero is usually not as easy as it sounds. It’s more like you make a Hail Mary football pass, usually ugly and risky but can get quick results.
The last 20 years or so I have a strict “no printers in the house” rule. Annoys family but an occasional trip to the fedex store is well worth avoiding all the hassle that comes with printers.
Stories like this are what make people not want to use Linux. We have a printer, and it just works with our Macs. It's been about 10 years since "printers don't work" has applied in my house. The only hard part is remembering the magic buttons in iOS, but that's more of a UX problem than a printer problem.
My stance encompasses more than software issues. Ink, jams, and software issues are my gripes. We find we only print about once a quarter so it’s not worth the hassle. I can run into FedEx and be out in less than 5 minutes. If we found a need of more frequent printing, maybe when my kid is older/doing homework, then I may adjust my opinion for that time span.
Pretty much any motor having this symptom I swap a new capacitor in just to check before even calling a technician. I always just keep a spare on hand for my hvac and pool equipment.
This is a real thought process people are contending with. There's also just the simple fact that kids are liabilities more so than assets. That's not been the case through most of human civilization.
I wouldn't limit it to economics either. Socially children are restricting. If you want to be free to travel, move, leave the house on a whim, etc. then kids will interrupt your plans/logistics.
You bring up assets. I think per-industrial economies the majority of couples have no ability to gain modern assets. Things like land and infrastructure was locked down. Unless you wanted to try to take stuff by force you were SOL. So only thing you could do is have a lot of children whose value was performing labor. Only encouraged by a high childhood mortality rate.
Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.
I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.
Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.
I read those before but will read them again. That narrative influenced my thinking about this. There is confusion I think because peoples attitudes tend to be stubborn over time. But they tend to match the milieu they were raised under.
An example of that is the plots in this essay. Attitudes don't change much plotted by age cohort over time.
Summarize that we've thrown a bunch of historical peasants into an industrial society and they're reacting astutely to the new incentives. But the big change comes from those that grew up in it.
Example Bangladesh fertility rate went from 7 in 1975 to 4 in one generation and dropped to 2 one generation later.
I've found having children the most rewarding thing to have done with my life. And even so, you are right about the costs. "Million dollar baby" is not just a catch-phrase.
Same. I contended with having children at all because I enjoyed my freedom. As much as I enjoy it and find it inspiring and rewarding, there’s a part of me that’s counting down to independence again. I was fortunate enough economically it doesn’t require sacrifices but I still see the tally and it’s enormous. When I see median numbers on common stats like home prices, incomes, groceries, etc. there’s no way I would have taken it on if that was my reality.
I disagree on some cases. If I want my child to have roots, same community, same friends, same school, etc. then I can’t move around. That’s not an economic decision.
Likewise, sure things like nannies can be hired to increase my flexibility. But, there’s a noneconomic factor of me just not wanting my kids to be raised by nannies. This requires my presence and engagement.
These are part of a noneconomic value system. In fact, many values like these are at odds with economics. Parents choose to place their values over economics. This might look like passing on a job/promotion that would require a relocation. If you are self aware enough to realize you have these values, you can estimate how becoming a parent will impact your life and choose how important creating a family is to you and if you want to ensure the consequences.
Complexity doesn’t matter. Nobody jumps on the App Store and thinks, “I’m going to install something complex today.”
Presumably complex problems are lacking solutions and if that requires a complexity to solve, people will discover it. Not because it’s complex, because prior solutions were lacking.
reply