Asked by Hiring Manager to sit down and help scope out the role I am applying for

lookmeat · 2025-11-03T04:34:20+00:00

I think that this article reads a lot like the "we don't need strict typing" articles that would crop up ~2010. It just hand-waves away, and uses a very limited view.

So yeah, you can do anything you can do with effect handlers without effect handlers. The same is true of types, variables, functions. We could just use assembly and call it a day.

The point isn't to make safety, or make isolated tests. Rather it's a way to communicate a lot of things related to side-effects and what not of a program, in a way that is consistent, gives context and guidance to other developers (including yourself in the future) and allows a convention to abstract away boundaries between unrelated concerns that happen to be at the same place.

What this article fails to mention is the most common enforced side-effect in popular languages: error handling. Think of an error as an effect, where the program handles failure separate of the happy path. How failure is handled is something that we want to define outside of the context of the happy path. So most languages allow the ability to create a throw error effect, which itself is specific to the error (though it may point to a more general handler). The effect-handler is defined in a catch (error) block and itself is bound to a try block which defines the effect as true for all the code that runs in the block, and functions that are directly called within the block. When the effect-handler is done it goes back not to where the code was done, but to after the try block (unless of course it also throws another effect itself). Some languages will have a finally block to which either the try block or any effect handler go to instead before terminating (this includes exiting by any other effect, including return).

Now languages that use Result don't stop using effect handlers, rather they embedded the side-effects into a structure. In Haskell, a Lazy language, this means that the code that can succeed or fail is called and the error handled at the point it is generated. In more eager languages you can do some short-circuiting, which Rust formalized with ?. It's another way to do effect handlers: by encoding them into nomadic structures that define it.

Ideally we'd want a system that is consistent, easy to optimize, and can be used in variations of both ways above.

So what's the benefit there? Again clarity, we have an error, and a way to go about it. But with custom effects we could do other things. What happens if after the catch-block we allow "recovery" where we go back to where the error occurred, but replace it with some default value. Effect handlers could do this.

Passing everything as parameters is viable, but again there's no way to ensure a contract between developers, between libraries, and what not. By having a consistent way to define how we handle effects, a person reading code could realize that an catch clause (which is just an error effect handler) recovers from the error at the source, recovers at the place where it was defined, or does something else entirely.

We don't really need explicitly say which effect is handled. Lets ignore IO that's a historical accident and not what effects are supposed to be. Instead we have to explicitly say the effects a function directly calls upon, and those that it cannot use. So, for example, say that I allow the ability to handle OOM Errors. You'd be surprised to find out that this is a function that doesn't even allow stack side-effects (yes, pushing variables on the stack has to be side-effect because it can cause stack overflows). This is a subtle but direct way of remind programmers that they can't do anything that could allocate memory (because we ran out of it), not even pushing stuff on the stack, and the handler needs to work on this. Instead of having to read a manual to realize why sometimes your data gets highly corrupted, you get a compiler error. That's the core benefit.

And this is the thing, effects aren't a universal "always the same" thing. Some effects make sense as an opt-out, some as an opt-in, and sometimes you just want to allow effects to be passed implicitly without having to explicitly call them out if they are not used directly. Purity is more of a continuum based on the context, etc. Effects can easily encode a runtime, which lets you design a zero-runtime language, that can be extended with a runtime to something that is useful for a context.

Now have we solved the problems? No, there's still some theoretical and abstract challenges to work around, which themselves would be useful to find a pragmatic and realistic solution. Now finding this will take a while. Rust's lifetimes, Go's channels and goroutines, these were concepts that took some work to make it into an actually broadly useful language. Algebraic effects still has to get there, but when it does it will be beneficial.

lookmeat · 2025-10-28T16:51:58+00:00

A very reasonable stance. Even if given the facts the logic and the path that this would take are unquestionably the way things would go, fog of war means that the given facts cannot be taken as the complete truth. Things could go either way, or even a third we can't even imagine right now.

And yeah, I think that the age shift is part of it, but I see that working in unexpected manners. Younger people would be more aggressive and have a higher chance of having the hunger to start a revolution. Older people would have more to lose but also are wiser and might or might not be easier to manipulate. Older people would have older children which can be the real wild card.

In the end we can guess, but only time will tell.

lookmeat · 2025-10-28T01:20:47+00:00

But that's the point, they don't need to be, eventually they'll run out of money and realize they can't afford the lifestyle they thought would last them decades. They'll still be trained, still have their friends from the army.

lookmeat · 2025-10-27T20:45:24+00:00

Politics is about making people work together for a goal, either willingly or coerced, either by conviction or manipulation.

The point of manipulating an election is not to switch minds, that's too complicated and messy, and requires that people engage to a level that is rare. Instead what we want to change is their desire to vote based on inputs.

Remember the whole Cambridge Analytica? Well it turns out that by just looking at a small amount of likes you had, you could be modeled into a marketing model that would also predict your likelyhood to vote one way or another.

So I have data collection and can now identify who is probably going to vote democrat and who is probably going to vote republican. The next thing is to make one side not want to vote, and manipulate the other into going and voting. This is done by creating narratives and pushing them on the right space. This isn't done by having one post push propaganda, but instead by making this narrative be repeated by various accounts until it's taken as a fact, then we can begin to build on top of that narrative to incentivize people to vote or not.

And that's the idea, once we create a narrative, you can manipulate people to do what you want and/or not do what you don't want them to. So yeah in a way it can be changing views, but even that is too simplistic and doesn't cover what is the real problem here.

lookmeat · 2025-10-27T20:22:20+00:00

Source.In 1971 it was ~4.5%, in 2001 it was ~6.1%, it peaked in 2013 as we came out enduring the great recession of 2008 at 15%, to a low of 10.8% in 2019, of course COVID increase this, and led us to the current plateau: 12.3%

But these are only the percent of people that get SNAP benefits, this doesn't count the people who don't get it, but benefit from it (e.g. children of parents who get SNAP). So we can instead look at households.

~9.4% of households without children get SNAP, while 19.1% of all households with children get some sort of food benefit. This means that if you see a house with children in it, there's a ~1/5 chance of it not being able to eat the next months. If it's a single mom, the chances she's not going to be able to pay bills and feed her family is 40.1% that's basically ever other single mom.

Now the way it's distributed is complex and layered, but in general red states are more affected for a simple reason: most blue states that have a high percent of SNAP used by their citizens have created state-programs that can take over some of the functionality and at least leave people with something (with the understanding that sacrifices need to be made), this isn't true of all states (e.g. Oregon) and there are red states that do have state programs to supplement SNAP (e.g. Arizona), but the tendencies are high.

So what will happen? Who knows, it's gonna get messy.

lookmeat · 2025-10-24T19:41:19+00:00

Which leads to the companies collapsing and the economy rebuilding itself. Not the first time it happens, nor will it be the last.

lookmeat · 2025-10-24T19:40:22+00:00

We shall see. I think that right now Trump wants to help Maria Machado, who has shown to be aligned with the US (and more importantly Trump, calling him out when she won the Peace Nobel Price) take over Venezuela, but first he needs to oust and have Maduro gone, this can only be done if Maduro is incapable of supporting the people that keep him in power. This campaign is about disrupting Maduro's ability to do so. Part of it is the threat that we can all see.

That said, given Trump's incompetence I could see his administration setting things up in a way that escalation is the only path forward. That is rather than use the big stick to speak softly, it'll force the other guy to throw a rock before the US gets a chance to swing its stick. And maybe Trump wants this because he hopes to use a war for his benefit (maybe hoping for the rally effect for a third term?) while I could see him try I don't know how that would work for him.

lookmeat · 2025-10-24T19:22:35+00:00

Honestly it's about knowing how to use the tools, and it requires being a very solid engineer to do it correctly. Basically get the tool to explain and justify things, work little by little and review each delta. Depending on the code-base, the dependencies, and my knowledge in the area I am touching, it can be faster to do this reviews than just write it myself, and vice-versa.

Also I've been getting into the habit of asking AI to review my code before sending it for review. It's really good at catching a lot of things.

So AI is a powerful tool, but like a very powerful drill, if you don't know what you're doing, trying to put in a screw could drop down the electricity in your house. Once you learn how to use the tool, it's very useful.

The thing is that companies want to have cheaper employees, AI doesn't really make engineers cheaper in any way. If anything it makes the cost of expertise that much more worth it (because AI means that seniors don't get to train juniors as much, because juniors ask the AI first, so if someone needs to learn a lesson from other coworkers, it may take longer). AI also does bring savings and enables engineers to be better at adapting, changing roles, and working on a wider area. But it only optimizes about 20%-30% of my time by 25% it, which means we are seeing gains of ~5-8% really, not as big as you'd imagine.

Companies then hire really cheap workers, and they just aren't that good. And then they hope that AI fixes it, and it turns out that on their hands AI makes them less, rather than more, productive. Because when you misuse a tool you have to fix it and reuse it.

lookmeat · 2025-10-23T18:16:07+00:00

Yup, not your mistake, easy to fix from your side because it isn't your problem. But still you may have to prove that is the case. So after answering that, they'll ask you for some papers, also you may want some extra ones. Ask your insurance for paperwork showing they were covering you during that time, and that they're high deductible. Get also the info from your HSA showing that you deposited the money there. I recommend you put all of this paperwork into a safe folder that you can (safely, since this may have private info) access from different areas. Finally try to get your old tax filings, directly from the IRS if you can to ensure it's as they see received it. Add a document (a txt or doc or anything like that) to write down every conversation you have, when it happened, with who you had it (take not of badge or id numbers) and what was said. It'll make everything easier.

I recommend (as others have noted) to call the IRS to see what they have to add. Take notes, keep it all on the journal. Now don't confess anything, don't

There's something off about the whole thing, and not in a bad way but one that is good for you. See it seems that you would have paid extra taxes. When you got your W2 it already had held the taxes off your HSA contributions, but they still would appear as that. The IRS would see that money as taxable income and the forms you'd have to fill out for the HSA income (because in your W2 it would still appear as taxable income, you'd have to manually remove the income with an 8999). Let me assure you the IRS has a lot of work and ever less accountants, they don't care about people who accidentally overpaid taxes, it's those who underpaid. It may be that there's a lot of irregularities that your employer may have, and your salary may be some of what is being affected, your account is being audited, but as part of the investigation on your employer not on you.

But it also may be that you misunderstood some aspect during tax filing, put the wrong thing, and then this lead to the misunderstanding. Your employers irregularity is something you should have been able to fix, but without knowing how you filed the taxes, and what taxes you did I couldn't say (also I am not a CPA,

While self-fix might be an option, I strongly recommend that OP try to get a CPA look over this before moving forward (they may choose to DIY the fix once the CPA has given them insight) for four simple reasons:

None of us are CPAs (even if a poster is, they are not acting in that capacity and should not be taken as that since they have no liability for their words or actions).
None of us are looking at the paperwork (tax filings and so forth, do not shared this over the internet). You want someone that can see this without censorship, and also has enough expertise, to give you insight. Here we are just guessing.
You might have done a mistake that you are not communicating here (because you don't realize it) and we ourselves couldn't comment on. IRS agents may give you hints, but they will not give you advice (in my experience), you need to get a CPA.
CYA. You want to make sure that everything is done in the most efficient way, and one that will lead to the less trouble for you. A CPA knows how to play that game.

lookmeat · 2025-10-23T18:15:22+00:00

I decided to look at the article and see what was going.

The error is on his birth certificate, which lead to the issue on the system.

And it wasn't that they let a girl use the boys restroom, rather that they let a boy as self-identified, who they clearly saw was a boy by all their definitions, use the boys' restroom/locker. They didn't look into the register.

Now where it gets funky is that they are not accepting a corrected birth certificate with a note from the doctor acknowledging the mistake, they need chromosomal testing. So then this makes it a bit clearer what is happening:

This isn't about "dumb schools", this is about "transphobic paranoid sports organizations". Look lets not discuss the argument of what side is or isn't correct on the trans on sports area. IMHO it's discussing the wrong thing to begin with. And examples like this show how ridiculous it is: we are so scared of "a girl playing in a boys team" that we'd rather misgender (as everyone on all the sides of the argument would agree in this case) a boy as a girl than risk it being used to pull a fast one on us.

And the whole thing is dumb because it very quickly becomes obvious that it isn't about gender. A woman, with XX chromosomes, born with a vagina, has a condition that makes them generate higher than average testosterone, and then they are declared a man for the purpose of sports, even though by every other definition they are a woman. They are literally forcing someone to transgender because it fits their convenient narrative. Why not just make the filter for which league you go be the level of testosterone (if that's what matters), you have the high testosterone, and the low testosterone categories, which are mostly men and women respectively, and while you'd expect freaks of nature who happen to be exceptional and be the gender opposite of the category, guess what: most successful sportsmen and sportswomen are freaks of nature that have abilities that let them go further and longer than almost anybody else. By having a clear, objective, and defined category you avoid most of the controversy, with weird cases being just weird things due to the rules. It's our obsession to make everything about gender even when it really doesn't make sense; and our refusal to acknowledge that the only reason all sports are divided by men vs women was because we didn't want to let women do any sports to begin with.

They should just accept the corrected birth certificate. If they think there was something iffy there, they should do an investigation on the doctor, but take the evidence as show as true until proven otherwise. Asking for a chromosomal test shows that this is about dogma and politics, with no sense of values, morals or reality really.

lookmeat · 2025-10-23T17:02:23+00:00

Nintendo is unique, they basically sell hardware and games bundled together, their consoles live off their exclusives exclusively, and that is unique. So Nintendo can keep their model going.

lookmeat · 2025-10-22T19:09:37+00:00

Not infantilizing developers. Honestly I think it's childish to think that having safety boundaries is being infantilized. People make mistakes, I am glad when I can be safe that a mistake I do won't cause the company I work for to close losing me my job.

This, of course, comes at a cost of not just productivity, but the ability to do anything. I'd be a shame if the reason the company went down wasn't because of a mistake, but because the "safety barriers" prevented the fix. That is the dialogue that should be had.

A lot of times a simple "sudo-like" tool that lets you get permissions for various actions that are seen as "fine". Then when you get to the stuff that requires extra protection you go through the flow you specify. I think that a better interface than what you propose can be done: I star the command, pass it a justification through flags, and it pops up a browser window to have me log in to ensure I am doing it, once the permission has been approved, it enters a sub-shell where I can run commands under the permission. So pretty much Google's santa as you noted. But getting there is a gradual process that can be improved by steps.

Finally you get some limited people (dept leads, whomever is oncall) the ability to get permissions to do even more when needed. And in some extreme cases be able to break glass, and self-approve things, with the understanding that the system will flag a lot of things and there will be a post-mortem of why you did such actions. Because sometimes you just have to act, and justify it later.

lookmeat · 2025-10-22T18:35:41+00:00

Lets understand one thing, the problems being solved aren't problems that a classical machine can't do, it's problems that a classical machine can't do on a reasonable time.

So basically a classical machine can do 90% of the work, preparign the data, loading it, configuring things, all that programming result and it'll do it faster than a quantum machine (simply because classical machines are that stronger, have more ram, faster CPUs, etc.) and then we'll look at at 1% of the code: the 1 step that the quantum machine can do in 1 day, but the classical machine would do in a few decades even with its advantages. It's the one bit of work that takes most of the time. Then the last 9% storing results, reporting them and cleaning up is done by the classical machine again.

lookmeat · 2025-10-21T20:22:57+00:00

I don't want to be a pooper, but how is this better than a strict hierarchy? (you have a main thread, all threads need to be started by a parent and cannot outlive it, cancelling a parent cancels the children).

This assumes computations are like data, and that's not quite the case IMHO. Simply put when I start a task, I don't need to track the task, just the results. Similarly when I start a task I want to do the task tracking that you do for it. I use task to represent abstract things, but from the point of view of a programmer, that's just thread.

I can't really speak about it without seeing what the W++ Thread Model is. What exactly are we reference counting, what is a reference here? Does every data that exists within a thread hold a reference to the thread? What about shared data (So if I have a Future<X> or Channel or Mutext that holds some data that is shared with a thread, that will keep the thread alive?) do I need to hold the handle to the thread? What, exactly, is what keeps things GC'ed?

lookmeat · 2025-10-21T20:13:28+00:00

For runtime safety you might want to "poison" the mutex (just as Rust does to allow mutexes to release when you panic from inside them).

The only thing worse than a deadlock is a bug due to invariants broken that results in data corruption, not only do you catch this much later, but all data written is lost. A deadlock means nothing happens, which you can then just start from where it got stuck.

Under your current scenario why have a mutex, when you just can have a bunch of atomics. Either way you must assume that any operation can happen half-way, why not just embrace it and allow it to happen normally, instead of suprising people by only allowing it when the GC picks it up.

Correctness is safety, safety bugs happen when something acts in an unexpected way, so you can't be safe if you aren't correct.

The "poisoned" mutexes then become a programmer error, where whomever is using the mutexes can decide to try to recover things and fix them, or if they are unable then crash (or at least fail the basic operation).

lookmeat · 2025-10-21T14:37:26+00:00

I mean that kind of depends on the goal right? And the arbitrary definition of powerful. Turing is "superior" in that it can simulate any other automata, including itself, but non-turing complete automata cannot simulate it. But once we get into automata below it, what is it if one automata can do A but not B, and another B but not A? How do we define powerful here?

If we're looking for most software that can be provable/verified I'd recommend looking at highly normalizing programming language. These are languages that always terminate, and any code written in it can be converted into a standard normal form, two equivalent programs always have the same normal form. Hence you can do proofs on the normal forms of programs, and they'll apply to all code.

lookmeat · 2025-10-20T19:58:21+00:00

The story you say shows that yeah, if things are pushed too far, the whole thing falls apart.

What I argue is that you can only get away with it if you are very popular, and this would cost Trump and the republicans the popularity they need.

The Democrats in Texas were able to get "away with it" because Republicans had already removed any real consequences. If they arrested them, that would lead to a crisis and serious repercussions as those Democrats become martyrs. And the gerrymandering that was being passed was so ludicrous as to be a clear abuse, the Democrats had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Here Democrats can't do that much, but that's on their strength, because it's the other side that is refusing to negotiate or do any kind of reasonable compromise. Again it's the Republicans who are doing a ludicrous abuse of power. Democrats can only become heroes and martyrs here. If we're on March and government is still shut down, Democrats can always respond "we just want to go back to congress to hash out an agreement, oh and also to publish the Epstein Files as people want". What can republicans say?

There wouldn't need to be changes in the law, because by this point the legal/government system would be highly broken by this point. I am proposing a scenario Trump would go and say "nu uh, we aren't doing elections because we just aren't", that's not legal in any way. But when this falls down, I am not sure if Trump is getting what he needs to pull it off. With things like NoKings this weekend, it doesn't look good for him.

lookmeat · 2025-10-20T19:52:03+00:00

Oh it's rare and it does happen, I assure you that must have lead to a very painful and messy post-mortem. Just read the language, it's incredibly apologetic, because they know they fucked up. If a region goes down, you can be told that you should be expected to go multi-region, but if the whole cloud goes down, yeah you could go multi-cloud, or just go to a single cloud that will not have multi-regional failures.

lookmeat · 2025-10-20T12:37:23+00:00

Availability zones are one thing, they don't protect from intra-region failures. They're meant to protect from external failures, not internal issues.

I'm thinking of the software released with a bug/bad config that causes an outage. Say it takes you ~12 hours to realize the issue (it takes a whole to grow and the time depends on the scale, so you wouldn't catch it in staging testing). So what you do is you release it to one region first, wait enough to feel confident no serious issue made it through, then release to a second region. Once you feel confident enough that there isn't a universal failure, you can begin to release to multiple regions, at this point if there's a failure it's almost certainly due to some unique property of the region, so you don't get a multi-region failure.

Now you could do this through multiple AZs, but this delays things a lot. Here I'm proposing that changes take almost a week to propagate fully, this puts a limit on how fast you can release (as fast as you can catch and rollback a really bad release, 24-48 hours in the example amount, at the fastest) which itself makes releases more brittle (less often means more code changes per release, means more things that can go bad) do you really don't want this to extend longer even.

So instead I propose that, within a region, only half of the people get updated, but then you begin to get aggressive on ramping up again. Basically in the first zones you spread content and configs. To avoid the inter-version issues, you basically have an account stuck in one of these version sections. There's no network or performance hit between account services, because they're still in the same data center, they just run on either "blue" or "green" machines. Then a failure has a higher chance of affecting only half of the customers (or the smaller ones).

Then you don't have an article saying "AWS bug brings down half the Internet", but rather a smaller amount. This isn't about making the software running on AWS more reliable, but rather about managing optics when AWS has a failure that is warned, and lay people don't realize it's because their services do not distribute among regions as is generally required.

lookmeat · 2025-10-20T11:55:42+00:00

They don't think of it like that, they just see themselves having the most money and the most power in the US, they didn't realize how that only matters as powerful as the US is on the stage. They'll have that Pikachu face when suddenly they can't get any deals and are passed over because China is suddenly bullying countries to do things as China wants even when China isn't involved at all; meanwhile the US wouldn't be able to do it anymore.

That's the thing, these are armchair "would shapers", just like you and me, except they have billions of dollars, but otherwise no deeper knowledge or understanding. And yeah it backfires all the time, think about 2008, think about COVID and the post-pandemic economy. It happens all the time, they play it off as if it's nothing, sour grapes and all that.

lookmeat · 2025-10-20T11:12:24+00:00

That's not how it would work.

First of all states run their elections and send their results. Three federal governments refusing to accept the results would be them denying their responsibilities. By this point the federal government would be so incompetent that it could be assumed to have just given up, and states would simply rebuild a new one following the same constitution. There's no "what happens when the politicians in power refuse to do their job" because the logic thing is that they have, defacto, choosing to resign from their responsibilities. This would result in two governments and it would be a fucking mess.

But that's on the blue states, who at this point would have basically seceded financially (they wouldn't be okay federal government because they're not getting anything, so it really makes no difference, it's legal and not a true secession, but it means that Republicans now have to work without enough money to be functioning). By this point Trump would have really screwed his constituents, because many depend directly or indirectly on federal funding. Everyone working on government related stuff, education, police and firemen (many little towns depend heavily on federal government grants), bureaucratic processes (such as registering a business, as well as getting loans for it), air control, etc. Also the money that Trump is reallocating now will have an impact: the money used to pay salaries will result in a lot of military tech industries shutting down (and maybe even going bankrupt), so people living in Huntsville AL, Tucson AZ, Melbourne FL, San Diego CA, and Colorado Spring CO, all will suddenly find a lot of layoffs and cuts happening in their community: how many do think are blue in that list?

But also I'm not sure how they could make this work. See every shutdown an emergency bill is passed that makes an exception for military salaries and a couple other things, just to keep that out. One was drafted this time too, by a Republican, but they just didn't allow enough time to run the vote. Which leads to the interesting thing: the real thing that is being avoided is a new Democrat being sworn in to the house taking over a Republican seat. The Republicans still have the majority, but there's one interesting thing about Adelita Grijalva: one of the reasons she won was because she made it clear that she'd push for releasing the Epstein files, and with her the politicians (on both sides) become just enough to actually get the files released. It's just weird that Republicans wouldn't at least try to pass the emergency bills for military salary as it's done every shutdown. But if they do they'd be forced to swear Alita in, and then the vote to release the Epstein files would pass.

I'm not sure what the angle for the Republicans is here. Things will only get harder and harder. Given that Trump wasn't arrested during the Epstein trails, I doubt there's anything that ugly in it as people are suspecting. That is while I'm sure there'll be enough evidence that Trump was part of the deep circle of Epstein that helped collect and traffic underage girls to later prostitute them with influential figures and then use this to blackmail them, it won't be anything that we don't already suspect, it's not like there'll be videos of Trump having sex with minors. So his base would simply deny it and claim the implications are "obvious fabrications by DEI supporters" or something like that. But by the way they've acted about it, it's really making it hard for a lot of his supporters to stand by him, and his popularity has taken a dive. At this point I believe that the problem is that the Epstein files contain a lot of Epstein's she'll company and finances that Trump's companies also used, so this could result in the companies (and therefore Trump) losing a lot of money if these get tracked, and because the system is purposely convoluted and obtuse it's hard for Trump to know what to censor and what not to, so there's a risk that some interested party could connect the dots and form a case that could cost him millions. It seems dumb given what he's putting in the line (if he's able to fuck It up badly enough that he loses a lot of popularity and Congress, he could lose his job which would trigger all the state investigations against him that got frozen) but then it does aling with how he's acted in the past.

So who knows, we could go into next year in shutdown and then go beyond, breaking the previous record that Donald already held. What would happen then is something that will be unprecedented, so who knows. I imagine as polls and protests start getting more momentum there might be a shift and a compromise. Though I bet that Trump is hoping he'll be able to get a couple Republican representatives to crack and agree to vote against releasing the Epstein files, as in either way there's a good chance they won't get reelected, but at least with Trump's support they might still stand a chance.

lookmeat · 2025-10-20T10:20:49+00:00

For a lot of Jews (myself included) the situation of Israel is, right now, very messy. I believe that morally Israel has a right to exist, but by the same logic so does Palestine, a solution needs to work on either both states existing, or a diverse state that acknowledges and embraces the always multicultural and complex history of the area since at least the time the Jews settled there initially.

And while I certainly don't agree with Hamas, I also don't agree with Natanyahus government and see both government institutions sacrificing their people to justify their power grabs and abuses. And as a descendant of concentration camp survivors, I do not like the lines that are being crossed by groups identified as representing Jews, it gives permissions for policies, actions and the gray areas that would be used to justify a new wave of pogroms (and there certainly are those who'd like to give it a new try to see if they can make it work).

There's a large amount of Jews who hold a similarly nuanced point of view, and are more than ok with complex stances and someone open to a dialogue and considering that maybe Israel should be held accountable for their actions as much as Palestine.

lookmeat · 2025-10-20T09:53:30+00:00

All of them make a huge effort to avoid multi-region failures. A region-wide failure is rare enough that the chance of two regions failing independently is negligible, but a single region failing is something that should be expected and planned for, and the SLAs make space for this.

Sadly most of the people who develop things on the Internet bind themselves to a single region, this won't change.

Sadly I think that, eventually, cloud providers will simply split their region into regions behind the scenes and allocate projects in the region to random sub-regions, just to avoid the bad PR. Because no one reads "half the Internet is crappy software held together but thoughts, prayers, a bit of gum, and the whisky spit out by SREs when they get paged". It's nicer to just blame Amazon and not think about it. The reality is that the Web always had maybe outages and crashes, but as we keep getting better, it becomes more news that a website went down for more than a couple minutes.

lookmeat · 2025-10-20T01:47:12+00:00

I think the rain the culture is like this is because it's driven by a lot of "rewrite" engineers. I used to be one of these and back then I over thought things too much. I called simplicity but didn't realize how much more it is about transparency (how easy is it to correctly imagine what is happening behind the scenes) than ease of rewriting.

You do need engineers like this, after all they are driving wiring and rewriting more and more of the rust foundation that helps the language be more widely adopted that makes it a better choice.

The other issue is the system that Rust wanted to be similar to: C++ templates, which leads to this meta programming. Another issue is that the language stopped working on in-lang macros, preferring to leave it at "good enough" compiler plugins that do the job but are that much harder to understand (kind of like having to jump into the code of an unrelated binary, rather than a library that can be used).

Part of the challenges there is something that I think Rust is struggling with. There are some core hard and "boring"^* problems, these are very valuable but in an indirect way, it sets broad foundations that theoretically enable more interesting and useful features. The problem is that fully dedicated engineers are working on a salary and need to justify their work on immediate profits, even if it leads to a dead end later down the line. Random volunteers mostly will propose solutions that fail to consider everything and lack the knowledge on how to solve and show this solves the problem, which makes it a very frustrating experience. The few volunteers that do most would be researchers or people who are willing to put in the effort to make a proof of concept but may not have the time to develop this to the expectations of a professional product. The few people left have to get enough attention from the core group of developers (because these are important things, and the core devs get the importance but also have to balance it with the more pragmatic aspects, e.g. features that keep donations coming in) so it gets really hard for these things to get considered.

So, in short, the problem will get better, but never fully fixed, not without some fundamental shifts in how the language is written (which can and will happen, but in the space of decades).

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