Translation is a killer feature. All https//bitecode.dev is in english, but I'm French.
When I needed some complicated translation, deepl and google translate were rarely up to the task. They has about the same level of proficiency than me with auto-correct, sometimes less.
For single rare or technical words, I used Wikipedia a lot: you chose your topic in your language, you look for the article in English, and voila.
For slang and cultural references, urbandictionary.com is unmatched.
But for translating jokes or expressions, there is no good tool.
Until chatgpt. It also finds typo, suggest alternative, offer rhymes and synonymous. It does everything, in a single flexible interface.
Yes, the 4 doc model is flawed, but if everybody followed it, we would still get on average 10 times better doc. When that happen, we can worry about improving, but most people are just terrible at explaining things.
Also, how to guide are not more and more covered by chatgpt.
But I don't think it should be a good reason to stop writing them.
For example, I wrote an article on "Parameters, options and flags for Python scripts":
This is typically the type of things you get great ROI with chatgpt.
Yet:
- it's still faster to copy the summary of the article
- you need to understand the output of chatgpt so the article is useful to beginners
- you need to be able to use the right words to ask chatgpt what you want, which again, implies you understand the problem
- good practices and conventions are contextual, so the doc still helps
On the other hand, it's hard to find a lone article on the net, most people will find it faster with chatgpt.
But for your particular documentation of your particular product, that's still important to produce it. Because your best users will get familiar about your docs.
They concentrate power to those who already have it, because you can make more ads if you have more money. The local burger joint cannot compete against macdonals on advertising, the local soda against coca cola.
It's ugly, eat attention, and interrupt.
It creates business models with terrible incentives, which leads to censorship in medias, quantity over quality, attention driven content, etc.
It encourages mass surveillance, and is used to influence society in the worse ways, making it dangerous to democracy.
Finally, if you remove ads, suddenly you get a much better filter for things: if people don't think it's worth even a little bit of money, let it die. It was not worth it.
Besides, even if you pay, you still see ads. You see submarine articles in paid newspaper, ads before your movies in the theater, ads in your bus ride...
Can you imagine, all this ads money, now free to be invested in something else?
I don’t think so. I think business wants us to feel that way, while the average person would choose to not hear/watch/see ads given the choice. I’m not necessarily against advertising, and regardless it’s a fact that advertising drives our economy and as a whole we generally don’t know how to create and conduct business without advertising. But I am against the notion that not wanting ads is a radical stance. I think we do need to prevent that notion from being normalized. Business doesn’t get to expect me to watch ads or make me feel guilty or like a freak for not wanting them. They have to work for it.
I say this as someone who has run a business and had to do advertising, and as someone who has never worked for a company or organization that doesn’t advertise.
Is it really though? I could believe that advertising does incentivize people to buy things that they otherwise might not. But OTOH, if there were no advertising, people would still spend money, just differently. It's not as though people are going to start lighting money on fire in the absence of advertising.
I think so, in part. To be clear I’m not claiming it’s the only driver, nor the largest, but it’s undeniably large nonetheless. Consider that Google’s entire search existence is funded by ads, and there’s loads of competition. Basically all of TV and a lot of online streaming is ad funded. Magazines and radio and print media all get large portions of revenue via ads.
I agree people would still spend money in a world without ads, but we don’t currently have that world, right?
The things you mention are media, and that world is heavily loaded with advertising.
Other industries have it but it isn’t attention whoring trash, it’s more subtle. The free coffee at a conference, the rep dropping by to say hello. The brand name on the pens.
The strong views against advertising are a very logical reaction to the obnoxious methods used.
Yep totally agree. This is part of why I’m not against all advertising, and you’re also highlighting reasons why we shouldn’t allow being against the invasive media ads to be framed as or considered to be a radical stance.
I think big companies do constantly need to remind people of their brand with ads to preserve it. That's why you see Coca-Cola ads everywhere, despite everyone already knowing who they are and what they sell.
If you remove the ads, suddenly, it evens the playing field. They have to compete with the product, not the brand. With what they bring to people, not the image they can create with money. With producing for society, not rent seeking.
Plenty of businesses would die without ads, they would be naturally selected out of people lives because without the brain washing, they are just not that important enough.
>If you remove the ads, suddenly, it evens the playing field. They have to compete with the product, not the brand.
Well, you at least levelled one of the playing fields (while also removing a huge eyesore, which I really like!). I think the business deals in the background play a very large role too, if not bigger than the advertisements themselves. By business deals I mean that many restaurants exclusively serve the coke or pepsi family of drinks. This won't change if we remove the ads, only strengthen, and the larger players have a bigger weight, so the field is still very tilted.
That plenty of businesses would die without ads, I completely agree. There's an entire business model of running a bunch of ads, selling a bunch of crap, then disappearing. I would say good riddance to these.
I think you're right, ads can be the opposite! For example the way Facebook does its targeting, smaller businesses seem to have a real chance to target their niche. So it's not all just like a sporting event, where the big dogs will buy up all available ad space.
But most businesses are not niche, that's why it's called a niche.
People sell food, clothes, accommodations, services.
You can't fight wall-mart on general food or nike on shoes, or any big player on phones.
If you create a new tech product, your only chance is to go reddit, HN, etc, like the pine phone. Because you can't advertise it like apple with the iphone.
You can't buy product placement in movies and video games, you can't be at every bus stop.
So sure, if you sell biodegradable bamboo socks, your ads can do something.
But that's not 99% of what are sold in the world.
What is really sold is transparent to people, because they are so used to it. They don't realize they have maybe 3 choices of providers because all those brands belong to the same big super company. And each of them have their own dedicated marketing department.
Yeah but B listers can make a very good living, often times with more steady work than A listers since they don’t have to manage their reputation as much. They’re the session musicians, or the AAA dev working on his indie project on the side of film/TV. Still they’re also a minority but if you show up and do your work for enough years it’s an achievable track.
Many people only play free phone games. It tracks. I know people on the internet constantly discount it, but mobile is much too big a platform to ignore in discussions like these
I think the market is confusing gambling with gaming.
The two markets don't overlap (or not directly, I'm sure there are people who enjoy both). We pretend they do, but the only thing they share is the technical aspects in producing something.
Diablo Immortal clearly highlighted this.
It's equivalent to saying that soccer and basketball are the same game because played both with a ball.
"core gamers" (the gamers that play videogames) are actually "videogamers".
Mobile gamers are gamblers.
Of course there are also some videogames in the mobile world, so you can find some core gamers playing videogames on mobile
Only went as a novelty maybe a few times before having kids. This drive-in was a godsend since having kids ~5 years ago, and have been going regularly since. Extremely handy during COVID too.
Hmmm.... So is bull fighting but most of us refuse for various ethical and moral reasons...
Maybe we should treat a giant parking lot that goes unused for 99% of the time, and requires people to use polluting transportation when they could use public transit to go to a theatre, as the giant unethical mess it is, eh?
To be fair, most movie theaters in the US have a giant, 99% unused parking lot attached to them anyways. Plus anywhere with a drive-in probably doesn’t have transit.
That's a pros, not a con. Once something is merged, intermediary steps to get that new thing are no longer interesting. In fact, most rebase workflows squash anyway.
In the rare case you have 3 steps in that PR of 23 commits you want to keep, squash it in 3 pieces and merge them.
Keeping the commit as the unit of change allows you to orchestrate with a single PR. The commit is the change, the PR is the go button.
> In the rare case you have 3 steps in that PR of 23 commits
I'd have 3 commits in this case.
It's not rare at all when you have code, charts, terrform, and scripts housed in a single repo. But even if you're just touching code some changes make sense to go out at the same time.
Personally, I feel that the use case for squash is when there are many WIP commits. Those could be avoided with the use of --amend, or --fixup, or cherry picking without a commit, etc.
The catch is, does it have to be functional at every step? It may be hard to find checkpoints inside a PR where the changes still produce a useful (testable) product without breaking anything.
If it doesn't have to be testable in three pieces, then why break it down? For clarity when reviewing the changes perhaps.
The best reason to have it broken up is for posterity to be able to annotate the changes. If there is a 100 line refactor followed by the 10 line actual functional change, then it's a blessing to be able to look at that in isolation when something has gone wrong with it 5 or 10 years later.
Every time this is mentioned, the person is heavily downvoted.
But if you were here in the 2000, that's exactly what happened.
In fact, this very article starts with "JavaScript, the undisputed king of web development, is being sabotaged — not by a rival language or a revolutionary new technology, but by its own baggage from the past.". That's the first sentence.
Nobody wanted to work with JS, it was used to make snowflakes on your home page on Xmas at best.
Then things like gmail happened (using GWT!), and the web became the most awesome platform in the world. By then it was too late, JS was the de facto language of the coolest tech of human history.
It was such a trap Google spent billions and hired the best minds out there to make chrome, with a VM that could execute it fast enough, so the company could make its vision happen.
At the time, JS was a nuisance and an embarrassment, something we had to deal with. The "good parts" was the bible because it's a language you could only use if you ignore half of it.
Case in point, the most popular JS techs created after that existed precisely to avoid writing ES5. Like coffeescript, babel, webpack, etc.
JS is a decent language now, because the community invested so much into it. Provided you use tooling. A lot of it.
But that's not how it started. We were forced to use it, and had to spend considerable resources to make up for how bad it was.
I've yet to met anybody who knows Python/Ruby/C#/Java/Rujst/Go and JS to chose JS outside of the web. Because there, we have the choice.
Electron, unfortunately, might take a chunk of that choice, because once again, the browser platform is that great.
> I've yet to met anybody who knows Python/Ruby/C#/Java/Rujst/Go and JS to chose JS outside of the web. Because there, we have the choice.
Pleased to meet you! Isomorphic code bases are a case to use a single language, which before WASM, is Javascript & Typescript. I may prefer to use something different with WASM, which has even more interoperability than JS, becoming a bigger part of the ecosystem, but so far it would be Assemblyscript to more easily migrate my existing codebase. Assemblyscript has a Garbage Collector, so I may choose Rust or Zig if I don't want the GC. Rust probably has the most momentum, so despite the complexities, verbosity, & loss of productivity working with Rust, that may be a better choice when working with WASM. I would prefer Zig over Rust & Assemblyscript over both in cases of app development...but breadth & depth of the ecosystem matters.
I wouldn't touch PHP, Python, Ruby if I had a between using Typescript...as PHP, Python, & Ruby lack a decent static type system.
> Nobody wanted to work with JS, it was used to make snowflakes on your home page on Xmas at best.
I disagree. Javascript is a prototype based language, which provided opportunities for composition over inheritance. JS supported closures from it's beginning while other popular languages did not (well Ruby had limited support for closures). Inheritance & other OO concepts now considered harmful were prevalent with Java, C#, Ruby, Python, etc.
Sure, we could have used LISP instead, but for some reason LISP did not gain traction. JS was the closest programming to LISP which had popular appeal.
I suggest that JS changed the general programming ecosystem in profoundly positive ways & I, for one, preferred developing in JS over the other popular alternatives when I could.
To further bolster the case for JS, Typescript was built as an extension on top of JS, proving you can have the dynamic prototype based runtime with a powerful static type system.
I'd willing work on it nowadays, Node is really fast. Deno is really fast too, and TypeScript makes it pretty amazing to work with.
I think the ecosystem needs love again, because outside of Fastify I feel like server side JavaScript that isn't targeting a Lambda or Cloudflare worker type environment is a little spare of good options.
That said, Fastify is pretty amazing, and if you use graphql the main GQL servers are usually Apollo (JS based) or GraphQL Yoga (Also JS based), and they're really good.
One area that intensive JavaScript needs work on though is Machine Learning / Scientific computing. `number`, `BigInt` and `Math` aren't enough here. We need more built-ins added to the language around this (particularly around `Math`) IMO
> But if you were here in the 2000, that's exactly what happened.
That was 23 years ago.
It's an entire generation. A baby born after that point could now be working as a fully fledged adult.
> I've yet to met anybody who knows Python/Ruby/C#/Java/Rujst/Go and JS to chose JS outside of the web. Because there, we have the choice.
I would. Typescript is easily the best language for anything from app development to small projects and has been for years now. If you're bringing up Go/Rust, then TS has been incredibly good in that timeframe. Before that there was Pythong+Django and Ruby/RoR back when we did SSR, and Java applets or flash before that.
>> But if you were here in the 2000, that's exactly what happened.
> That was 23 years ago.
> It's an entire generation. A baby born after that point could now be working as a fully fledged adult.
And yet, it's no less true.
Regarding typescript, that's just, like, your opinion man. I mean, I think typescript is pretty good, especially given that its tied to the design choices of javascript, but objectively the best language. That's way too far.
> I've yet to met anybody who knows Python/Ruby/C#/Java/Rujst/Go and JS to chose JS outside of the web. Because there, we have the choice.
You probably haven't met many people. For backend you can choose any language, yet a lot of people (with knowledge of many languages) choose JS/TS. I'm one of those.
When I needed some complicated translation, deepl and google translate were rarely up to the task. They has about the same level of proficiency than me with auto-correct, sometimes less.
For single rare or technical words, I used Wikipedia a lot: you chose your topic in your language, you look for the article in English, and voila.
For slang and cultural references, urbandictionary.com is unmatched.
But for translating jokes or expressions, there is no good tool.
Until chatgpt. It also finds typo, suggest alternative, offer rhymes and synonymous. It does everything, in a single flexible interface.
Just for that it's worth the price.