Recently, the last CP addict idiot basically killed us. We always remove those posts when we get a report (we can't see them by our-self, that's the point), but we were swamped by other things, and we didn't catch this one in time. It's a free volunteer project after all.
Our host took down our server and our backup server. We didn't have an offline backup because it makes taking down bad content more work.
We are still struggling to go back up.
This is why you can't have nice things.
(and also, don't host your backup server with the same host)
Internet progress seems to resoundingly be going backwards. Remember when pastebin used to be super active? Hell, remember when google had informative search results?
Internet, computing, etc.. As time goes on and attestation catches on general purpose computing will die for the most part.
But maybe we'll see a renaissance of sorts? When the only sites that work on Firefox are fediverse and a few hobbyist sites and people need to go out of their way to find computers that they actually control we might undo the eternal September of the web as a whole.
All is part of the capitalization of the internet. People seek to make money and how they do it is not always morally or ethically sound.
The view of “the global village” with betterment for human society has become another rent seeker “getting my own” hustle culture. It’s the way people are I guess on the whole.
It's not as simple as capitalization, we had a long period of time where people were making fortunes but the tools actually worked.
Theres something deeper thats causing things like Google search refusing to show more than 12 or so results and them being lower quality. Causing YouTubes algorithm to recommend things you've already watched or just recommending a video over and over for weeks until you watch it to get rid of it.
I guess the thing is that the push is on for ever higher extraction and yields for managers/stakeholders/CEOs and to show it to shareholders and investors and the like. And with higher interest rates where money costs its only amplified I reckon.
I promote a video ad campaign for a client and its insane how much it is being shown for a few clicks. Ad revenue is probably going down in relative terms (or more effort for same results)
> Theres something deeper thats causing things like Google search refusing to show more than 12 or so results and them being lower quality.
That something is - wait for it - capitalization.
Google, YouTube and the rest of the Internet are drowning in low-quality, automated, yet monetized dreck. The signal-to-noise ration on the web has never been lower, and it's getting lower still.
Would love to see examples for Rust, Go, NodeJS, C# and Java so that I can add them to my GitHub stars. I could find a few results for XDG support in Go, Rust, and NodeJS, but none of the aforementioned languages supported standards across all of macOS/Windows/Linux. Hopefully it's just my Google-fu failing me and people can correct me in the comments?
C and C++ still have strong roll-your-own culture, with the exception that C++ now has a decent filesystem module in the standard library but still no standard config file parser AFAIK, everyone usually imports nlohmann's JSON library.
Many of the programs complained about are written in C. I'm sure that there are libraries for c that abstract this, but there isn't one that is common enough that most c programs can depend on it.
Indeed, but this general wisdom is too vague to be useful on its own.
When I was young, I heard it many times, and couldn't make anything from it.
What's the audience exactly? How do I know them? Once I know them, what am I suppose to do? And all that stuff is contextual, so what are we talking about really?
When learning to negociate, knowing your audience is a very different thing than when trying to teach. Very few people are able to pull it off accross fields.
So I decided to write an article that targets a specific case with a concrete application and examples.
Lot of comments here are replying the nature of the solution matters.
E.G:
"Sure you are being paid for a solution. But you are also probably being paid for a quality solution"
or
"Code can be the solution. Good code even more so"
or
"when you pay to get your car fixed, there's an implicit expectation that it will be fixed well enough that it doesnt break the same way again"
But the article does address this:
> Now, of course, this is a tad more subtle.
> Different types of problems have different types of costs, consequences, and constraints. And solutions to those problems as well also have them.
> When code is the solution, it has a cost, at the very minimum in time and man-hours. And constraints, such as licenses, NDA, platforms, versions, formats, resource limits... And of course, consequences, such as technical debt, electricity consumption, user experience and hiring difficulties.
> While the clients don't care about the code, they care very much about those.
> And so, as IT professionals, we must communicate talking about that. Not about the code.
Of course the quality of the solution matters, but it any good thing has a price. Therefore you have to present it with the price, and then your opinion on the whether it's worth it.
It's one thing knowing the language, it's another being productive with the ecosystem.
One takes between a few days and a few months. The other is a few years, unless you get pro training.
I guarantee most people starting with Python from another language will be productive quickly. But they will curse the packaging ecosystem because they will follow a lot of tutorials that don't follow this:
Yeah I learned Ruby on Rails very quickly a long time ago, it's probably one of the most accessible frameworks to learn, but it took me years to master all the weird quirks, dev environment stuff, debugging, production deployment etc. Plus from all the years doing it I'm familiar with all the old libraries so when you join a company with a large legacy code base, which at this point is very common for rails, I don't have to spend forever learning the details of some 7yr old implentation no one uses anymore.
Working with senior devs who have only been doing it for 1-2yrs is where you see the small productivity differences that aren't simply being a newbie programmer.
You're seriously arguing that someone with general knowledge of programming is going to get hard-stuck not knowing specifics of a language you and thousands of others have blogposted about for years, while linking your own posts?
Let's be real here. What percentage of companies are in dire need of 'experienced [language] programmers' who know these specifics that haven't already been set by previous devs or have another developer present to make the decisions? That's a tiny, tiny percentage of the entire job market, with much of the demand coming from companies with incredibly shaky foundations.
Almost the entirety of this is a luxury problem put on the individual. The moment the job market says they can't demand it anymore, they won't.
Last week I talked with a guy who was pitching to rewrite their entire product in another language because he never heard of python GIS ecoshst and was doing spatial calculations by hand. Would cost hundred of thousand euros.
I don’t agree at all. I was productive within a month in a completely new language and stack at my current job for example. Once you know a few inside out, it’s just pattern matching with some Googling of “what’s X in Y language”.
Extremely deep knowledge of a language is very rarely needed, even when it is as long as you can somewhat vocalize the problem it’s just debugging
Recently, the last CP addict idiot basically killed us. We always remove those posts when we get a report (we can't see them by our-self, that's the point), but we were swamped by other things, and we didn't catch this one in time. It's a free volunteer project after all.
Our host took down our server and our backup server. We didn't have an offline backup because it makes taking down bad content more work.
We are still struggling to go back up.
This is why you can't have nice things.
(and also, don't host your backup server with the same host)