the entitlement people have towards free, open source software, is incredible.
this isn’t even a “new” problem. if you were around in the early 00s or before you probably worked with a BOfH sys admin that didn’t let you update system packages. that person cared deeply about system integrity and enforced it with policies around package managers.
having outsourced all of that stuff over the years to the cloud, it seems like people forgot this reality existed and can still exist.
the mob freak out is really a projection of a skill issue and it’s sad.
github hasn't absorbed agentic coding, though. agentic coding has absorbed it, and as a result it's quality is suffering.
the thing about github that is so maddening is linus gave us the secret with git itself. then we reinvented centralized source control using git and called it github, and here we are.
Decentralized version control only works if there is some way to find and access those distributed repositories. For many reasons and no matter the tech there is always a drift towards having a centralized registry so that the degrees of separation for individual actors is minimised. Be that a search engine or code forge or social network.
For *most* users, fully distributed and disconnected is a bug not a feature.
my father made reading The Agony and The Ecstasy a requirement to go to Italy when I was a sophomore in high school. It's a thick tome, but a great read if you're a curious kid.
as the others said Michelangelo hated doing that painting. He's a very tragic, albeit heroic to me, man. I'd recommend that book if you're at all fascinated by him.
I know you were joking, but responding in seriousness - while in general it's worthwhile asking "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", in this particular case, I don't see any issue with Down Detector detecting the Down Detector Down Detector. Assuming they are in different availability zones, using different code, with a different deployment cadence, this approach works quite well in practice.
haha — this is the exact comment i was hoping to see! indeed, i was joking. The Watchmen graphic novel is very important to me as it opened my eyes to the concept of “who watches the watchmen” which I was ultimately eluding to here, albeit extremely facetiously.
"To serve the Emperor. To protect His domains. To judge and stand guard over His subjects. To carry the Emperor's law to all worlds under His blessed protection. To pursue and punish those who trespassed against His word."
i came back to rails after a very long hiatus to help a company bring a 10+ year old rails project to Rails 8.x.x from Rails 5. It took a bit to get back in the saddle, but every new project I’ve started since that’s a SaaS/CRUD app of some kind it’s in Rails.
I’m finally at the age where productivity is infinitely more important than anything else.
A few weeks ago because there were 2 HN comment sections shitting on NextJS endlessly, I decided to go back to Rails.
I have ported a chunk of my likely last full stack JS project over to Rails with AI vibe coding everything as a reference for me to redo it again with AI but not vibe coding.
Absolutely amazing work. About 40% of that NextJS app was vibe coded and the process of undoing the excessive and verbose code was depressing me.
The Ruby and Rails code is simple and understandable and a fraction of the lines of code.
Last sentence exactly. I am using IntertiaJS for some of the frontend and I finally don’t dislike JS any more. React is amazing when it’s only a view library.
are you dabbling at all in the “no build js” stuff that Rails 8 supports? i did it for that corporate project and their deploy time went from 30 minutes to 5 minutes. it’s also such a headache reliever but removing most of the confusing aspects of the JS ecosystem for me.
this is also the insight that the bwa developer had, to use the burrows-wheeler transform which is part of bzip2 due to it's compression properties being particularly good for genomic sequences.
I once had the distinct pleasure of hosting the author of BWA (R. Durbin) at Google, and pointing out "That's Mike Burrows, over there, next to Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat". That led to an interesting discussion between Durbin and Dean on DNA sequence compression. It's not the first time I've been in a room with a bunch of geniuses and simply kept my mouth shut so nobody would know I'm an idiot.
fwiw Heng Li was "the author." He was a postdoc under Durbin's professorship. I was around when bwa was developed and was working in a collaboration with Heng Li (I was working on SOLiD R&D). Any development emails were between Heng and our team, we never spoke with Durbin.
this isn’t even a “new” problem. if you were around in the early 00s or before you probably worked with a BOfH sys admin that didn’t let you update system packages. that person cared deeply about system integrity and enforced it with policies around package managers.
having outsourced all of that stuff over the years to the cloud, it seems like people forgot this reality existed and can still exist.
the mob freak out is really a projection of a skill issue and it’s sad.
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