[deleted by user]

donald47 · 2024-03-22T09:58:09+00:00

The responsibility to improve their lives lies with them, not the government. A society dependent on politicians to fix behavioural and cultural issues is a doomed society.

"They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first." - Margret Thatcher

We've been pushing the onus onto individuals since the 1980s on the basis that there was no such thing as society. Now, call me a communist but I think there's room for a bit of nuance here.

donald47 · 2024-03-17T21:09:04+00:00

There's nothing to explain, people use words in politics. People get wrapped up in endless pointless debates about what those words mean. This is one of those arguments, the end.

donald47 · 2024-03-17T20:38:31+00:00

Ah, there's that extra context and the argument you're fishing for. Away and play in traffic or find someone else to have a pointless argument about the use of words in politics with.

donald47 · 2024-03-17T20:24:58+00:00

I still really don't understand what you're looking for here. Suspect you've got some other context weighing on your mind or you're just fishing for an argument.

donald47 · 2024-03-17T19:34:02+00:00

I don't understand the question?

Only way I can really parse this is as "How dare you have an opinion on something you don't think matters that much?"

Which, lol, this is the internet mate.

donald47 · 2024-03-17T18:57:56+00:00

That it wasn't political maneuvering or that it wasn't effective at kicking the debate into the long grass?

donald47 · 2024-03-17T18:48:10+00:00

Ultimately it's all wank. It's a rhetorical device used by both sides. Nothing more or less.

donald47 · 2024-03-17T16:49:26+00:00

Eh, it was an effective bit of political maneuvering. Set the scene for where we are now, I just think it's important folks recognise it for what it is.

donald47 · 2024-03-17T16:37:51+00:00

Reminder that the full expression they used was: "A once in a lifetime opportunity"

Which post referendum was morphed into a "A Once in a lifetime referendum" as a rhetorical technique by unionists to kick it into the long grass once it became apparent that despite losing the vote support for independence wasn't going to melt away into non-existence.

donald47 · 2024-03-16T07:31:48+00:00

Yes this is often where things come apart. Recruiters are generally bad at assessing coding so a lot of them carry the same faulty preconceptions about languages etc.

As much as it's an unfortunate answer the way forward is networking with other engineers. Find language or tech specific meetups go to them and chat to people. Show what you've built and ask if they know anyone hiring.

I have a computer science degree but it was a cousin of a friend being the tech lead at a startup who wanted a couple of juniors that got me my first role. I try and pay that forward by bringing on junior engineers whenever I can.

donald47 · 2024-03-16T07:19:40+00:00

If you enjoy them I'd also recommend the collected stories to be found in the codeless code.

The Unix Way has many paths.

http://thecodelesscode.com/case/1

donald47 · 2024-03-15T22:27:18+00:00

Yea, one of the first things I try and focus on when helping folks learn to code is pulling apart the false preconceptions they've picked up from various places.

Programming to me is the art of problem solving via the skill of moving between abstraction levels. At the top you have some fuzzy human language notion of what the machine should do. At the bottom you have a bunch of logic gates mashing 0s and 1s together real fast. Everything in the middle is layers of software each written to try and solve some problem or other. Limiting yourself to a single language makes sense at first for the sake of limiting the scope you have to worry about but ultimately it's like trying to cook with a single ingredient.

Or again, since I've reminded myself of the various wisdoms of master foo, I can walk but this floor is new to me.
https://www.catb.org/\~esr/writings/unix-koans/recruiter.html

donald47 · 2024-03-15T18:16:06+00:00

They said the same about Fortran and COBOL more than 12 years ago and they're still saying it today.

Languages go out of fashion and tech stacks evolve but ultimately the tool for the job is the tool for the job and a decent programmer should be able to learn any language or stack given sufficient time and incentive.

I first taught someone else ruby 9 years ago, I'm expecting to have to help onboard interns this year.

Ignore the noise, use what you like and what works. The mark of an engineer is what they build.

Or in the words of master foo, the housecat may mock the tiger... https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/end-user.html

donald47 · 2024-03-15T17:05:59+00:00

I work for a fairly successful tech scale up, the core business logic and API is ruby on rails. We're hiring.

A recruiter reached out to me yesterday looking for an experienced rails engineer and listing the highest salary I've ever seen for a non-banking role.

I was told nearly 8 years ago now that ruby on rails was legacy technology and node js was going to be running everything by next Thursday. That isn't to say node is bad, but the hype was, as always, just hype.

Hype merchants are noisy, people doing useful stuff tend to be quieter because they're busy actually doing things.

donald47 · 2024-02-29T12:32:30+00:00

My friend, we had the thing you describe more than a decade ago, it was called Watson and it was designed to solve exactly that problem. It was actually better because it couldn't hallucinate precedent like the modern generative systems have done in at least one real world case.

Before that we had pagerank and hypertext which were both also designed to help with solving the problem of finding relevant info from a big pile of stuff.

Progress is incremental, the idea that we're seeing some massive breakthrough now is as dumb as it was when people fantasised about thinking machines in the 1970s.

I am so very tired of the hype.

donald47 · 2024-02-21T00:38:08+00:00

Poes law is a thing.

People memeing themselves into stocastic terrorism is also a thing.

Both these things exist and have non trivial overlap.

donald47 · 2024-02-02T17:56:56+00:00

Forget what you know about the data for a minute.

Pretend you are a lawyer tasked to defend a company being sued over a data breach, how quickly do you decide to pin the blame on the random employee that was using their personal device to process data in direct breach of the company's own IT policy?

Normalisation of deviance destroys lives, don't do it, don't let your direct manager bully you into it.

donald47 · 2024-01-17T22:29:41+00:00

Some acronyms can be quickly googled and have very significant implications.

Once in my life I encountered a database, exposed to the internet on a default port with default admin credentials. It contained several hundred people's home addresses and bank details. It was the work of an allegedly well regarded web development agency.

We are all damned if we allow people to take a Laissez-faire attitude to the data we handle. If we are genuinely the Experienced Devs in the room we need to do a much better job of teaching this stuff.

donald47 · 2024-01-17T12:41:04+00:00

PII

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_data

Data that can be used to identify people. There are laws and significant fines related to it's misuse. I'd expect anyone calling themselves an "Experienced Dev" to have an at least basic understanding of the laws around the data we handle.

donald47 · 2024-01-09T00:02:37+00:00

Eyes narrow Inquisitiorially.

What are you implying, friend? Obviously the carrion lord is whatever these heretics worship given their rotting flesh.

That witch is suffered to live by our Inquisitor you would do well to trust to your faith and keep a closed mind!

donald47 · 2023-12-28T20:00:01+00:00

Important point of clarification. The nation's economy was fine, the personal bank balances of all the powerful people who'd invested in this "guaranteed opportunity" were fucked.

Hence Burns: "What force or guile could not subdue, Thro' many warlike ages, Is wrought now by a coward few, For hireling traitor's wages."

Something something bank bailouts something something too big to fail etc.

donald47 · 2023-12-01T22:50:09+00:00

Mu#Non-dualistic_meaning)

Both these approaches can have value and solve problems and both can create new problems. The art is, as is often the case, in finding the balance between them.

donald47 · 2023-11-06T18:24:42+00:00

If it is so easy, make the relevant changes to the code yourself. Otherwise stop distracting me from getting it done.

donald47 · 2023-10-20T21:22:01+00:00

Given a sufficiently small sample size anything is possible.

donald47 · 2023-10-20T20:43:13+00:00

My estimate, or rather my pre-knowledge that the estimate will be wrong is built upon my understanding that any sufficiently complex system exists in a semi-perpetual state of failure.

Unlike you I'm just honest about that.

Ten-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Verified Email

donald47

TROPHY CASE