People talk about filter bubbles, but there’s a nuance here: on Lemmy, you’re not being served up whatever the platform owners think you should see from an opaque algorithm. You’re going to, by default, see cesspool content. You have to choose to block it.

Yeah management is totally backwards there; it’s like the building manager on a construction project going “all electrical needs to be done in X weeks”, but realistically they have no direct control over that deadline being met by declaring an arbitrary deadline. The unfortunate difference is that if you do a shitty job wiring a building, you’ll fail inspection and have to spend more time and money fixing it. Software can often hobble along; there aren’t strict enforcements for quality that the business can legally ignore, so you’ll always have sad defeated devs go “okay boss, we’ll skip the things we need to get this done faster for you (I hate this job and don’t care about the product’s long term success)”. Having a steady supply of those people will slowly kill a software company.

In the past, I’ve dealt with estimate pushback not by explaining what necessary work can be removed like tests, documentation, or refactoring, but by talking through ways to divide the project more effectively to get more people involved (up to a point, a la mythical man month). That seems to go more proactively. Then we look at nixing optional requirements. But, I’ve also usually dealt with mostly competent engineering management.

The thing that frustrates me about developers who feel powerless over technical debt is…who is actually stopping them from dealing with it? They way I see it, as a software engineer, your customer is sales/marketing/product/etc. They don’t care about the details or maintenance, they just want the thing. And that’s okay. But you have to include the cost of managing technical debt into the line items the customer wants. That is, estimate based on doing the right things, not taking shortcuts. Your customer isn’t reading your commits. If they were, they wouldn’t need you.

It would be bizarre if your quote for getting your house siding redone included line items for changing the oil on the work truck, organizing the shop, or training new crew members. But those costs of business are already factored into what you pay at the end of the day.

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It doesn’t pass judgment. It just knows what “looks” correct. You need a trained person to discern that. It’s like describing symptoms to WebMD. If you had a junior doctor using WebMD, how comfortable would you be with their assessment?

Ew siloing

I buy a short $5 indie game. I give it away afterwards digitally to a friend. The next guy does the same thing. And the next guy.

Now the developer has to primarily make money by selling merch or ingame ads. No thanks. If the game is good, people will buy it.

You could argue people did this with physical media. But it was not nearly as impactful; I couldn’t click a few buttons in seconds and hand the game away.

They probably wanted to use Rust but got frustrated by its struct and impl paradigm.

It’s one of many things they could do just like how security is a layers thing.

They could inject random zero width non joiners to help detection too. Easy to defeat, but something a layperson would have to go through extra effort to filter out. Kinda like how some plagiarism cases have been won by pointing out identical misspelled words.

He’s just refactoring it

Well, you can always get archival M-DISC. https://www.mdisc.com/ Treated special materials to resist moisture and UV degradation. Should last 1000 years if not tampered with and stored properly. Idk what the read/write speeds are, but they offer a 100GB bluray disc option. You will be long, LONG gone before the storage is no longer intact. Obviously not “forever”, but pretty close to it practically speaking on human lifetime scale.

I mean, you could engrave onto stone and expect that to last pretty much forever if stored correctly. The read/write speed and storage capacity leave a lot to be desired though.

Doesn’t tape last a super, super long time? I thought that was of the reason for the resurgence of tape for archive storage.

Hated this in one past job. It gave me great joy to quit and work somewhere that wasn’t bean counting. But I can say that RescueTime with Toggl was pretty handy to track stuff. RescueTime would autotrack the time spent in different apps and tabs. Toggl allowed me to do a simple start/stop with a label for more focused work.

Sometimes I am happy about the increase in AI assisted coding specifically so junior devs won’t get as stuck without outside help. Very frustrating when they don’t reach out when they struggle, but at least they can privately copypaste into ChatGPT and get ideas. But, still requires a fine toothed comb when you’re doing the review to know if any toilet tier material sprayed out.

I don’t know if that headcount I listed includes contract employees. They typically get compensated far less, and anecdotally I’ve been told by a former Meta friend that there are more contracted developers than salaried there. And what’s the ratio of software developers compared to other personnel? HR, QA, marketing, sales, etc? Employees in other countries? I figured a more conservative estimate was reasonable for cost overall.

Well, about half of that is probably salary. There are apparently 17,000 Reality Labs employees. If you assume the average salary is 100K or more, which is reasonable for tech jobs in high COL areas, you’re already looking at a couple billion after benefits that the company has to spend on headcount. The other spend is probably third-party contracts, hardware, etc.

Which is faster, getting a squiggle instantly or discovering a silly bug at runtime later? So happy I could write code in Typescript and be confident it would do what I expected when it ran without digging out the debugger.

The language and its standard libraries lead developers towards common patterns. Javascript’s standard library is pretty sparse excluding browser-only web apis, so there are tons of external libraries to fill the gap for better or worse.

… what? They could have more art or variation on the exterior, but the glass lets in maximum light to occupants specifically so the building doesn’t feel confined and dark. You can typically see inside at ground level. The upper mirroring is to improve energy efficiency so it doesn’t act like a greenhouse.