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It depends on what layer you look at I think, shoulders of giants and all that..

I hear this sentiment a lot but it doesn’t ring true for me.

What is an idea really and what’s your definition of new?

If i get a LLM to spit out, I dunno, a deployment system written in haskell that uses bittorrent or something, none of those bits are new, but certainly there will be unique challenges to solve in the code and it’s a new system.

Where is the line for new? Is it in combining old ideas? If not then does any software have “new” ideas? It’s all combinations of processor instructions after all…


25 years doing distributed systems and best i can offer anyone is

<marquee><h1><blink> welcome to cyberpunk’s j33t website!!!

:) :)


Fun thing about that:

> Netscape has stipulated removal of the <marquee> element from the Internet Explorer during an HTML ERB meeting in February 1996, as a condition to removing the <blink> element from the Netscape

It's like nuclear disarmament treaties, but for annoying things.


No data stored on european servers either, see microsoft’s comments in french court to this effect.

The only solution is no american companies in the loop at all.


TBF I also sorta just think Microsoft is generally stupid.

> Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts...

After thinking about this for 90 seconds, Microsoft could license Azure tech to Hetzner or something. Keep the servers under EU control, but unless they share source code it’s still a blackbox.

Honestly everything used for anything serious should be open source and regularly audited. We need check each others homework.


AWS Outpost might be a reasonable compromise in some situations.

They could even finally be a source for good if they’d actually use some of the billions they collect.

Has anyone actually directly encountered a single vatican sponsored charity or program in the wild? It seems quite a morally bankrupt organisation to me, and i’m not sure what if anything it really has to do with Christianity or Christians anyore.


From the Wikipedia page on the Catholic Church: "By means of Catholic charities and beyond, the Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world."

Just yesterday I went to see a presentation of a priest appointed to a massive parish in the rural area of South Sudan, setting up schools and bringing in aid.


> the Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world.

Hm. In germany Catholic day care is funded by the state ie taxes by over 90%. Military chaplains 100%. Would be surprised if the difference is bigger in schools and hospitals. I heard that in France there is an actual separation of church and state and as a result the church is rather poor.


Germany is the only country that does that.

In the rest of the world the church is poorer but is still a leading provider of education and healthcare, especially in poor countries.


Tithes to the church are collected via taxes in Germany (Kirchensteuer), so you could argue the church itself is funded by taxes.

Government collects the tax for the churches from their members only, so the government here is merely an intermediary between church members and the respective organisations.

I don't know enough about the current Vatican affairs. But as an anecdotal experience, I was born at a catholic hospital at a small town in Southeast Asia. And they're the best managed hospitals in the area. I'm not even religious or catholic but I respect what they did here

Ah yes, these priests killed and tortured around the world just to burn charity money.

I think it’s just fear, I sure know that after 25 years as a developer with a great salary and throughout all that time never even considering the chance of ever being unemployable I’m feeling it too.

I think some of us come to terms with it in different ways.


I used to sometimes get stuck on a problem for weeks and then get a budget pulled or get put on another project. Sometimes those issues never did get solved. Or have to tell someone sorry I don't have capacity to solve a problem for you. Now a lot of that anxiety has been replaced with a more can do attitude. Like wouldn't being able to pull off results create more opportunity?

It fails far less often than I do at the cookie cutter parts of my job, and it’s much faster and cheaper than I am.

Being honest; I probably have to write some properly clever code or do some actual design as a dev lead like… 2% of my time? At most? The rest of the code related work I do, it’s outperforming me.

Now, maybe you’re somehow different to me, but I find it hard to believe that the majority of devs out there are balancing binary trees and coming up with shithot unique algorithms all day rather than mangling some formatting and dealing with improving db performance, picking the right pattern for some backend and so on style tasks day to day.


Doesn’t anyone use debuggers anymore?

When I have a codebase I dont know or didn’t touch in some time and there’s a bug, first step is reproduce it an then set a breakpoint early on somewhere, crab some coffee and spend some time to step through it looking at state until I know what’s happening and from there its usually kind of obvious.

Why would one need a graph view to learn a codebase when you can just slap a red dot next to the route and step a few times?


I have found that interactive visualizations are a great way to understand code and systems in general. Now you can have an AI make one in under a minute it's a very useful tool.

https://heyes-jones.com/externalsort/treeofwinners.html

Take this example. I can step through the algorithm, view the data structure and see a narration of each step.

A debugger is useful for debugging edge cases but it is very difficult to learn a complex system by stepping through it.


Which is a real shame as if you actually spend some time with both you’ll probably eventually realise erlang is the nicer language.

Elixir just feels… Like it’s a load of pre-compile macros. There’s not even a debugger.


Do you have other examples of how it's nicer? I've only ever heard of Elixir being the nicer alternative.

This is gonna rankle folks who like one or the other, but they're basically the same language. When it comes to languages that run on the same VM, Erlang and Elixir are very close together. They aren't nearly as far apart as say, Java and Clojure.

Elixir adds a few things (a lisp-style macro system, protocols, UTF-8 as the default string type, a builtin build tool, streams) but Elixir is not a huge departure from Erlang in the way that Clojure is a huge departure from Java.

By far the biggest things you're going to learn when you learn either one are going to be the BEAM runtime itself and the OTP libraries, which both Elixir and Erlang have in common.


I’ve been using blink on ios for years it’s opensource and works pretty well for me.

I actually kinda like working on my ipad this way (ssh’d into dev box) it’s not really distracting somehow and not having full jetbrains etc makes for a different kinda session.

shrug


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