So disappointed by the irrational and hyperbolic comments from my fellow nerds. Why are folks reading into this so much!? Clearly folks aren’t actually reading the content and just reacting based on a headline. Read, contemplate, compose. This really shouldn’t be an inflammatory exec order - from what I can tell this is precisely within the purview of a POTUS and precisely in line with historical exec orders. Why the cray cray reactions? Just cause Trump I guess. For shame. Be nerds. Look stuff up. Stop with the hyperbolic “fascist” “coup” business. If you disagree with strategy, fine!! But at least recognize that these ideas aren’t new - nor fascistic - they’re inherently American and we’re in the midst of an adjustment cycle where these old ideals will be expressed in new modalities that we don’t all agree with. Doesn’t make it “fascist”. Ugh. So juvenile.
Rather than gesturing generally at all of these "irrational" and "hyperbolic" comments, why not take the time to thoughtfully rebut any specific comment that you believe is engaging in irrationality and hyperbole?
I would also cool it with the dismissive tone and avoid saying things like "cray cray" before accusing anyone else of being juvenile.
Kushner said it best. "Noone goes as low as Trump." So you also get to deal with what politics looks like when it reaches its lowest, nastiest form.
Trump's a hero to the right, but on the left there's a pretty reasonable sense that Trump's actions have already amounted to literal treason if you consider him to have an obligation to uphold the oaths he has taken.
He attempted to get Zelensky to go on US TV and execute a political attack on Democrats as a condition of the US helping Ukraine.
He attempted to get the 2020 election flipped by making mafia-don style calls to Georgia asking them to "find" precisely the number of votes which would have made him win that election. He next asked Pence to change the result for him. All of these were acts of open treason against the People of the United States, so long as you count the People of the United States as including people who didn't vote for him.
To make it crystal f**ing clear: him changing the policy of the US isn't treason. Cozying up to Russia or trying to reduce the size of the government are his prerogative as elected leader in a way that trying to change the result of an election is not. Ohh yeah and I forgot that he tried to get everyone to stop counting the votes while he was ahead! That also goes in the treason most foul bucket.
Progressives are using words like Nazi and fascist, purely as a slur against a political rival, without really understanding what those words mean nor the attrocities they represent.
What the Nazi's did was horrifici, and it's incredibly insensitive, inappropriate, and, yes, juvenile, to water that down by using it for political point scoring.
I guarantee you’ll still be seeing people doing this long after Trump is dead. The point isn’t that there is an actual line. The point is that there IS NO actual line. The goalposts will shift forever.
They’re literally erasing transgender people from all federal websites. Even going so far as removing the T from all LGBT references. If that’s not information control and erasure of humanity from these individuals I don’t know at what point you will draw the line.
Not only progressives are calling it fascism or proto-fascism, do you understand the steps fascism takes to fully take hold? Don't you see any parallels? Have you read any books on the subject?
It seems like you get butthurt from reading people calling moves very similar to fascism done by politicians you support, fascism takes many flavours, Italian fascism was different from German fascism. The way it's going the past month looks like to be shaping an American flavour of fascism.
There's no watering down, you are seeing with your own eyes a movement happening where the leader of the executive is attempting to snatch power, it never happens at once, it's always through salami slicing. What will be the breaking point for you, specifically? What signs do you expect so it can be called fascism?
You are all around this forum whining about "progressives" trying to heed a call about a dark path being traced. You never seem to acknowledge there are very worrying moves happening, for some reason you do not want to hear it, you want to shut off the discussion at every turn by using progressives as a slur, and anything said by that out-group as wrong or hysterical a priori. Can't you see how stupid it is? You are always attempting to throw a wrench into these discussions with vitriol, as a non-American I really ask you to inform and educate yourself better, to learn about the process of fascism before coming with knee-jerk reactions because you don't like "progressives".
Go read "Hitler's Beneficiaries", read any book on historical recounts of the process of fascism unravelling from the 1920s to the 1930s, you are behaving exactly as the citizens enabling Mussolini and Hitler. American Fascism will not be Nazi or Italia Fascista, it has its own shape and form (such as not being anti-semitic, completely different to Nazis) but even though the topography differs, the core principles are pretty much the same.
Don't be an enabler, you won't like to be on the wrong side of history.
Few days ago, in Poland died a journalist, historian and former Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner. He was known for speaking every year there. His last speech was - remain vigilant.
I think that speaks for itself and I need not to comment on this.
Americans, why? Why are you so keen on dabbling with a homegrown fascism of yours? Why are you so keen on setting the world aflame?
> What signs do you expect so it can be called fascism?
I think some people just know a few images from the Nazis at the height of their power. Or the death camps, that were only discovered because the Nazis lost the war (the plan was to erase all traces, after all). No concept of the 1920s, not even "Mein Kampf", nothing.
That's been my impression too, seems like people (even more Americans) are extremely uneducated about the whole process of fascism. Instead they end up with this cartoonesque picture of what it looks like: SS officers standing guard over concentration camps, Hitler's speeches to huge crowds wearing swastika armbands, war.
No, that's the fucking end point of it, after all is done and the wheels have been far gone from the wagon, the process itself is much more nuanced and step-wise but the uneducated ones never ever heard of it. Feels like they live in a world where someone turned on a switch and everything changed at once...
Worst: it's coming from people who have lived through a pandemic, watched the social strife and divisions unfolding right in front of their faces, how can those same people not see that massive social movements aren't ever clear-cut? It's all just so stupid and ignorant.
As an American, I'm not surprised, unfortunately. When we learn about history in grade school, we don't really learn about the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 30s. If we do, little time is spent on it. Most of the time is spent on WWII itself, with of course a bunch of self-congratulatory stuff about how the world would have burned if the US hadn't joined in (conveniently ignoring how long it took for the US to join in).
Most Americans couldn't tell you much about how Hitler came into power. (Or Mussolini? Forget it.) The majority of what Americans know about it all are exactly what you said: black-and-white scenes of SS officers, Hilter giving speeches, and swastika armbands.
There's no lingering WWII war damage in the US. We don't have monuments dedicating places where major battles were fought. The war wasn't fought here. We don't see reminders of what all that was like.
When I was born, WWII was only 35 years behind us. Many of the people who were involved in it at the time (politicians, soldiers, etc.) were not only alive, but still active in public discourse in major ways. But today, WWII ended 80 years ago. Most everyone who experienced it is dead. Awareness of all of it is still present in Europe because it was all literally close to home. Not so in the US.
This honestly shouldn't be all that surprising. History repeats and rhymes, over and over throughout the decades and centuries. All it takes is a couple generations to forget its lessons.
I see comments in these threads from people who lived through the forming of dictatorships in their countries. I wish more people would listen to them.
> "Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"
> "Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.
> "Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.
> "We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."
Fascism is a reaction to a capitalist crisis, Nazis weren't socialists by any definition except for using populist agendas like sharing of profits and welfare to rally their base.
Nazis never nationalised any industry and rather used corporatism to take hold of them while those were still private entities, same in Italy, industry and fascist regimes walked hand-in-hand.
Saying those are equivalent to socialism just due to populist rhetoric is misleading and historically wrong...
Saying they are free market capitalists is misleading and historically wrong.
This complaint is also like saying communists weren’t authentic because the government withheld power from the Soviet’s and used the Soviet narrative to gain popular support.
We compare ideologies on a political spectrum. It’s harder to compare implementations because they all look like corruption. Hitler is one person in a political movement. He did write the platform I linked to though.
They did actually implement many of these things, such as universal healthcare (for their race).
We aren't in agreement that the continuum has only two opposite ends: socialism-free market where anything not free market is immediately socialism, definitely not.
Ok. But the nazi platform is labor unions, universal healthcare, retirement programs, profit redistribution, etc. your quote doesn’t contradict this.
If you have some specialized definition of socialism that this doesn’t meet. That’s fine. But this is nothing like the libertarianism or small government conservatism.
> If you have some specialized definition of socialism that this doesn’t meet.
I don't know that “when the working class democratically (either via democratic control of the state, through democratic control at the level of individual firms or industries, or otherwise) control the means of production” is actually a “specialized” definition of socialism.
Socialism is not centrally about the state providing goods, Its about who controls the means of production. Provision of public goods by the state is an expected outcome of the kind of socialism where a democratic state is the vehicle of proletarian control of the means of production, but it is not the production and delivery of those goods, independent of the nature of the state and who is empowered to control the means of production through it, that makes the system “socialist”
Führerprinzip is about as opposed to socialism as any element of any real or hypothetical system can be.
Stated platform can be an absolute lie, have you fucking read what I mentioned about how the Nazi government almost literally erased all forms of labour unions? Did you check anything about the German Labour Front instituted by them? Have you read any of the history about how labour unions were treated by the Nazis?
Seriously, why would you believe the stated goals instead of their actions? Do you trust Nazis?
That doesn't actually argue anything, though. One group can be wrong about something, and another group can be right about a similar thing in a different context and different time.
(For the record, I don't agree with GP, and do believe that we'll have free and fair elections in 2028.)
The red line for Trump's people unfortunately isn't doing anything bad. He could shoot a man on fifth avenue and not lose them. It would take him doing something which shows actual human decency and actually helps people. If he attempted to create "Trump-care" providing unconditional healthcare for all he would be impeached and out on his ass. God forbid if he were to recognize LGBTQ rights and acknowledge their legitimacy, that action would literally kill people from shock.
Exactly, the one area where he would lose the crowd is if he goes against the conservative "christians". ie: if he openly embraces LGBTQ, fully supports abortion rights, taxes churches etc. Only then would these people revolt.
> Nor any techie lose their minds when someone without a security clearance gets access to sensitive national networks.
There's something peculiar about how liberals are now so offended by "security" when the federal government has showed complete incompetence over the past decade or even more.
All the security clearance data was leaked from federal servers. What else do we have to lose. Never mind that countless federal employees see your social security info. It's regularly fraudulently submitted by illegal foreigners too.
None of the criticisms I've seen from you or others are alarming.
What was alarming was watching Biden for 4 years completely non compos mentis and a media filled with liberals who would censor and ridicule ANY mention of this obvious fact. That's the GRAVEST national security threat, everything else PALES in comparison, and not a peep from the people who lit their entire political capital on fire over the ridiculous patently-false charades to never admit fault.
I guarantee this will be the case, as it's been the case every election since forever including 2020 when liberals were fear-mongering (like they always do) when they were out of power.
Funny that just a few hours after this post, Trump starts referring to himself as "the King" on social media. I wonder if it’s a hint of something, like the time he said people won’t need to vote in 4 years.
The article is purely a marketing piece. As we know with all tech, it’s how you hold it. Yes, you can certainly graph all the entities, activities & relationships - but there is the human tendency towards laziness, least path of resistance and the desire to show “look what I can do” that inevitably leads towards using using weak/garbage data without verification - often in the form of purchases/collected metadata.
Concrete example with a less scary outcome; I was involved in a project for real-estate marketing that used “quality” metadata to infer potential buyers/sellers/properties to target for a given marketing campaign and/or what marketing techniques/campaigns might influence a targeted entity. It was cool. For sure. But, due to the lack of integrity in the data, even with well known & trusted data (direct from the MLS) the result was a graph that made many very weak/inaccurate connections and resulted in a great deal of wasted marketing efforts/cost, targeting the wrong message to the wrong entity at the wrong time. Because it was still a major improvement over other tools in the space, it became the preferred path even with inaccuracies galore.
Now, imagine if the cost of inaccuracies is human freedom - vs wasted cents. Scary stuff.
Well said. Much of work is "look what I can do" without much regard to the quality of the results. Those who spend time taking a deeper look at correctness often just get chastized by bad management. The sectors where correctness is valued in software are few and far between.
This stuff pre-dates .NET and quite honestly I think that’s what m$ was going for in those early days. VBScript was pretty annoying and dealing with COM objects sucked badly. Back in the day we’d build in a local VB interop with JavaScript so we could make system calls and interact with native Windows stuffs. This predates JSON so at the time we’d use XmlHttpRpc to talk to remote/hosted services.
I’ll double down on the urge to drop TypeScript. That pile of nonsense came from the classic OOP folks - “But where are my TYPEs!? How do I know what type that variable is!?” (first the Java/C++ folks then the .NET folks “solved” the brain fuzz around functional programming and dynamic types by giving you TypeScript)
Having been out of the m$ ecosystem for some time, I’m kinda surprised HTAs are still around, I’m guessing to avoid breaking things. Once .NET started taking off - I always assumed that would replace the VBScript side of things and let you build proper, elegant system interfaces for your JavaScript app. I really imagined the goal was to drop Windows forms/object controls - but I always imagined BATTLES at m$ over being able to create Windows “apps” that didn’t conform to native UI controls, couldn’t be controlled through Windows theming engines, etc. kinduva brand control battle. I always imagined some team going “NOOO, just build a web app, you’re breaking all the UI rules!!!”
> “But where are my TYPEs!? How do I know what type that variable is!?”
Someone clearly hasn’t worked in any sort of sizable code base. Come back when you are writing something spanning hundreds of JS files and where it takes you three times the time to verify that any small change isn’t a typo or wrong type off from a runtime error. TS heavily speeds up the development cycle by bringing an entire class of errors from runtime to compile time and that has nothing to do with OO and inheritance.
Simply put, TS is an infinitely better and safer language to develop in and it took the web world by storm for a reason. People didn’t decide to switch en masse for shits and giggles and you should realize that just because you have a different view does not mean that everyone else around you is wrong.
> m$
Seriously? It’s 2024, and we’re all adults. This does nothing but water down your point.
Been doing this since 1999. The only thing novel I see here is the transpilers - but you know… you don’t need that. You can build HTAs with native JavaScript, CSS and HTML - and with a little VBScript mixin, directly work with Windows libs. Back in ‘99 and early 00’s I was delivering “thin-client” control panels & management tools for server farms, sensitive accounting data, among a variety of other things. It was (and likely still is) a great way to provide a web interface as a desktop app for scenarios where exposing the management interface to the open web is undesirable.
Nifty project, but IMHO the world is better off using native JavaScript without all the BS that comes with TypeScript, etc. JavaScript is so powerful and amazing, it’s a bummer to hamstring your app by using TypeScript and classic OO inheritance models that preclude the beauty and dynamics of JavaScript as a functional, prototypal language.
> TS has overtaken JS for the majority of web development
Has it? Or is that "just like your opinion, man"? Any citation? There's some sources that say it's more popular based on things like social mentions, etc, but that's a vanity metric. Perhaps the statement is true if you mean "web development" to be a very limited scope (like SPA using a build step), but I'm not even sure that's true then.
For new, modern projects, yes. Very much so. There is practically no reason to choose JS over TS, even for high performance projects where every byte counts and you may want stricter control over the transpilation. The ecosystem has grown to the point where other optimizations like tree shaking do far more, and the improvement in the local dev cycle is insurmountable between the two.
Obviously this doesn't apply to existing projects; you're grandfathered into the language barring a pretty big undertaking to move over, but if you go to any competent company doing modern web development on relatively new codebases, they will use TS over JS.
And if they don't, as an engineer, you should ask hard questions as to why not. Because if the answer is someone stuck in the early 2000s complaining about OO and strong typing not being needed, then that's completely missing what TS does (and especially what it did when it was released, which was pre-ES5) and how big of an impact it has to speeding up development.
I don’t think your comment could be interpreted as anything other than snarky and rhetorical.
Nevertheless, it is of course very well known that efficient code in JavaScript will never run as fast as in a language such as C, but choice of language is a trade off, and in whatever language you choose you may also choose to be as “high performance” as possible within it even if it’s still not as performant than if you’d chosen a different language.
> JavaScript is so powerful and amazing, it’s a bummer to hamstring your app by using TypeScript and classic OO inheritance models that preclude the beauty and dynamics of JavaScript as a functional, prototypal language.
The idea that Microsoft was attempting to turn JS into an object oriented C# clone was a very common objection in the early days of TS (especially since one of the lead developers on the project is also the primary architect of C#). That objection ended up being completely false. TS aims to type check the full gamut of existing JS, and embraces all of the language's quirks and idioms. There are people doing serious functional programming in TS with libraries like fp-ts and effect (which is basically the TS version of Scala's Zio). If this is your primary objection I would give TS a second look.
The problem i see is basicLly, youre doing forced TDD, and thats a inherent cost in quickly developing and deploying apps at the small scale where JS excels.
Ita clearly great for large orgs and interchangeable devs.
I actually use TS as a way to avoid bothering with TDD. Many of the proponents of TDD are using dynamically typed languages, and need tests to verify every tiny little assertion about their code. I remember Eric Elliot had a bunch of posts on Medium years ago denouncing TS and claiming that TDD (and testing in general) obviates the need for types.
I'll accept that there are some intelligent developers out there that are more productive without static type checking, but I personally don't understand it. If you don't have a tool analyzing your program's types, then your brain becomes the type checker. I personally would much rather focus on higher level problems. I don't even see type checking and code formatting as human level concerns anymore, and would rather have my computer do it for me, but I guess it's just a preference. Do whatever works for you.
> it’s a bummer to hamstring your app by using TypeScript and classic OO inheritance models that preclude the beauty and dynamics of JavaScript as a functional, prototypal language.
I think you have outdated view of TypeScript. Using generics and conditional types you can model the "beauty and dynamics" pretty well, without any OO pattern (if you wish so).
TS compiles down to JS, so there's no hamstringing involved. Beyond that, you don't have to use Class at all with TS, you can stay functional and the inheritance models are exactly the same as TS runs in a JS engine.
Firstly, it’s functional with closures… From there prototypal - so you can express whatever you want… the key is being functional. This was a key to the advent of JSON, but is also one of the most elegant and powerful bits of JS
You're wrong. The prototypical model of JS was inspired by the Self programming language[0], itself a descendant of Smalltalk. It is a very crude implementation for sure, but it is object programming nevertheless. Closures being present sours the purity a bit, but closures are poor man's objects[1] anyway.
Also, Smalltalk was heavily inspired by LISP[0]. The line between functional and object-oriented is quite blurry. Especially in a pure OO language like Smalltalk. The dynamic and prototypical model of JS is definitely another example of the subtle harmony of functional and OO.
Ugh. Well if you will start spouting nonsense about JavaScript being better without Typescript then you can hardly be surprised when people correct you can you?
Would you complain about "airbag warriors" or "gps warriors" if you were making comments about how driving a car without them was so much better and GPS and airbags are BS?
> without all the BS that comes with TypeScript, etc. JavaScript is so powerful and amazing, it’s a bummer to hamstring your app by using TypeScript and classic OO inheritance models
Typescript is no more OO than JS is. Typescript is simply a way to document, and optionally compile time enforce, what fields objects have and what objects methods/functions take in and return.
That is all TS does. It documents what is already there so you don't make typos on field names.
Lately I'm writing a project w/o typescript and I spent an hour finding a bug the boiled down to "tilewidth" vs "tileWidth". (The code didn't explode until much later when a computed value didn't exist)
That is the type of bug TS prevents from ever happening.
> using native JavaScript without all the BS that comes with TypeScript
do you think javascript was just too easy and people had to invent some bs to make it more interesting for no reason? You don't even know what you're talking about when you make the connection from ts to oop.
My experience comming into javascript is that it's a garbage language and the web stack was a joke, everything was hard for the wrong reason (css centering things kinda stuff)
All these modern tooling, though complicated, is not new in NORMAL programming and makes sense, so you cow boys learn to deal with it.
I think, based on many battles, a lot of folks in the early days that came from Java/C++ absolutely struggled with the key concepts of JavaScript, couldn’t find “features” (like strong typing) they claimed were critical for writing good software and invented ways to make the language fit their paradigm, rather than really deep dive into the language and embrace it. There were constant battles back then - and I’m sure the battles continue.
JS was certainly never a “garbage” language but the elegance is unappealing/unappreciated by entire classes of developers. I totally get the perspective, but it’s all based on a worldview that just doesn’t get functional programming
I've enjoyed vanilla JS since forever, and currently work in a TS shop, and FWIW I think you're waaaay off base. There may have been times and places where TS was heavily OO, but all the TS I come into contact with is heavily functional, class-averse, immutable by default, etc.
(In face, the Java/C++/OO-types I know strongly dislike TS because it's structurally typed. TS doesn't care a jot who extends what - as long as they have the same properties it's happy. Hard to get more un-java than that.)
The real reason that TS won is simply that large teams (e.g. hundreds) cannot effectively work together on untyped JS. If you're doing a solo project, fill your boots - use JSDoc comments, sprinkle asserts around, whatever. But the webdev world at large doesn't care about Java or OO concepts, it settled on TS because huge teams can work effectively with it.
There it is… that’s the classic argument. Large teams/codebase. I totally get the appeal, but the idea this can’t be done effectively without it is nonsense. Long before TS, we had JS apps with teams of 50-100+ working across hundreds of not up to a couple thousand files - in CVS/SVN repos (ugh). I will concede that TS does help in the larger teams/codebases but - I will contend it is not necessary if your team is composed of folks that have depth of experience working without.
Certainly we had large teams using JS before TS - back in ye olde days before modules, when everyone picked or built a smallish abstraction (e.g. jquery) and built smallish unconnected things on top of it. But now that modules are mature and thousands of files can all reference each other, types are just necessary. They don't have to be declared in TS - you can get by to various extents with JSDocs or inference - but there's no benefit to doing those things, so large teams don't.
What I am saying is, across several comments you seem to be arguing that you think TS's massive popularity is partly due to its proponents liking Java or classical inheritance, or not understanding FP or closures, or something. And that's just wildly not true. And it's also not even true that the TS world particularly favors OO. If you weren't saying those things and I misunderstood, my bad!
It’s fair that there are proponents & value props beyond those early folks that came from the Java type world.
I guess I’m tainted/jaded by the early proponents and initial rationale that was absolutely tied to - “ewwww dynamic types!?! Gross, where are my strong/static types!?”. I’ve just fought that too many times - and that was a very strong argument at the inception of TS. There certainly are value props that go beyond and more to be discovered I’m sure.
I feel like MANY if not most of the devs I work with today simply use TS cause “that’s what you do these days” - but they have no clue what the “why” is and are baffled by native JS typing - and still consider JS “garbage” as a result. Bummer. In the Scala community I hear so much hate for NodeJS because it enables JS for server-side, “where it doesn’t belong” for many of these same old reasonings about typing (even with TS!?).
So yah, there’s value there, but you don’t NEED it to write large, good software. I’m clearly just jaded by the religious debates that have gone on and on - so despite their utility, I can come across very anti to the “solutions” to IMHO shitty arguments.
I've worked adjacent to TS since it was a thing and I've never heard of anyone associating it with Java or classic OO or the other stuff you've brought up. Maybe it's seen that way by some other community somewhere, but not by TS users.
I mean - it's literally just JS with types! It still has closures, and still has everything about JS one can call functional. It's not some dramatically different language - it's JS, with a large category of runtime errors changed into linter errors. (And that's why people use it - not because they think "eww gross!" about something, which is a frankly silly thing to claim.)
I love functional languages but I'm not sure how JavaScript could be considered as a functional language (at least if functional means something like haskell, or elm). Functions-as-values isn't enough, otherwise Python could be called a functional language.
Classic example of comments I've heard since the 90s.
I’d strongly encourage doing a deeper dive here. Functions in JS are objects and can have their own methods/props + scope. They’re a first class citizen.
people are stupid only you, some javascript coder of all people, knows the secret of programming, spit it out in clear terms instead of making non-argument.
no one said any thing about functional vs oop. Why does every vanilla js "veteran" think types === OOP and the reason we do typescript is for OOP? How about basic things like not even have a module system (before nodejs) for Christ's sake? How about doing functional programing properly, with types?
This was originally planned in conjunction with the San Onofre nuclear power plant, which gave all of SoCal amazing power and offered the infrastructure for performing desalination in conjunction with ocean water used for cooling parts of the reactor. Sadly, some hippie in Sacramento decided to kill our power plant so now energy prices have soared and we’ve lost the potential for desalinated water in San Diego, Orange and LA counties. My buddy has been working the decommission for a decade now. Given a few beers, the rants are quite illuminating and disappointing
FYI, San Diego has a desalination plant that cost about a billion dollars to build and provides water equivalent to that used by 400,000 homes [1]. The lack of the San Onofre plant doesn't seem to be a limiting factor.
Yup! If memory serves, some of the design was borrowed from the San Onofre plans. Certainly only limiting in terms of volume of desalinated water for Orange County. I believe that was the original intent as San Onofre is nicely situated to serve both counties
Taking a decision to build a nuclear power plant on a fault line always is.
Better plan would probably be to build a nuclear plant in Arizona and export the power to California. Use some of it for desalination. Then export water to Arizona.
But nowadays calling people hippies or conservitards is what passes for analysis, civic discourse, and problem solving.
When hyperbolic reactions rule the day, particularly when they are contradictory to one’s stated goals (provide clean, low prices energy and potable water) - dismissive labels are readily handed out. Both sides of the aisle are guilty so these labels go along with the hand waving dismissal of basic common sense & standing local rulings. The analysis, civic discourse and problem solving was performed, but disregarded for performative ideals - that continue to be a direct contradiction to the research & solutions presented. It just sucks. Especially when the state can leverage authority from Sacramento, overruling local resolutions and ordinances that were based on the research, analysis and civic discourse.
Well, Japan has a lot of them that don't have issues. And since California doesn't get tsunamis, it is perfectly fine to build a nuclear power plant on a fault line. Less riskier than Japan.
Having recently participated in a of review GitHub Copilot to determine if we might allow it at work, I can say it appears that most of the utility is in tab-completion of what you were roughly intending to express, in very short form: variable completion, expression completion and function/method/class/object/value signature completion.
I personally didn’t see suggestions that would have significant impact on code quality - simply helping one more quickly express initial concepts including all the language necessities. Intellisense++ish.
I have only seen it assist developers who were going down a bad path get there more quickly. I have not observed anything that would encourage/discourage any design pattern or developer choice.
My gut tells me that the fact that devs can more quickly deliver a “solution” (bad/good) means that they deliver their fat PR and … well … it’s fat - so it’s not scrutinized as well as it might have been had the dev taken some time and another set of eyes hit their branch before they got too far along. It’s often much harder to get the proper attention and review on a large-ish PR than it is to peek in along the way.
I personally couldn’t find anything that I feel would inherently lead to lower quality code. I do see how devs could more quickly deliver their low quality code and it can be a challenge to deny that code.
I’m left on the fence. I’ve found it valuable for autocompletion of what I’m about to express, but I also have no illusion that it’s going to tell me that what I’m about to express is stupid and/or of low quality.
Those things about quality are also quite language specific. Not so much about guessing what you might be about to type for tab-completion.
Also note - it’s about efficiency - as GitHub has stated. Duh. Notice copy/paste declined? Tab-completion. How many jr devs have you seen that won’t just write out a function declaration, they copy paste an entire function, gut it, and write their code. Odd to me, super slow and lame, but even I have seen the utility of tab-completing empty function blocks that are 90% of what I wanted.
Sooo. I’m inclined to say it’s interesting - but in no way at all diagnostic, deterministic or a very good study when it comes to writing conclusions. These are hyperbolic statements. Nearly link-bait.
As a volunteer Greyshirt with Team Rubicon, I cannot relate.
One of our cultural principles is, literally, “Get shit done”.
Another is, “Your mom’s a donor”.
In your position, I might recommend associating with other volunteer based non-profits and gather some good, concrete concepts around how they plan, their guiding values, how they organize and conduct activities, how they source supplies and execute logistics to support their volunteers, etc.
These relationships and ideas may give you some concrete feedback and examples to share; and offer a conduit for your leadership to engage other leaders and learn from them the lessons & challenges ahead.
Doubling down on my comments about ShapeUp (et al) as I reflect.
Engineering management, in my experience, has an allergy to agility. They can and do take any methodology, turn it into a process with a rigor (they love that) and strip agility from the mix. They are addicted to well defined requirements, some degree of estimation and being able to predict/project things like delivery, velocity, contributor performance, etc.
We engineers love the principles of agility, so engineering management tries over and over to find that happy medium where they have a well defined process that gives them what they want but imposes the least friction against the agility your engineers crave.
Custom solutions win the day. I have lived through all of the above. I remember when Agile was introduced, do you? Do you recall how violently reactive engineering managers were to this concept? It goes against everything they are supposed to do - manage. Agility inherently means they lose some degree of management ability. It means they lose their precious waterfall where things are meticulously (ridiculously, inaccurately, elegantly, uselessly) pre-planned on paper.
IMHO this is why we see every methodology that supports being Agile - bastardized to the point of confusion, academic arguments based on (not having actually learned, practiced, or gotten good at anything) gut feelings of “how we should do it here”.
Leading, managing work, organizing resources and getting shit done is a skillset that encompassing multiple disciplines. All are documented and practicable - we apparently don’t have the discipline to actually read and practice. We’re like a bunch of yokels on YouTube commenting on who’s a better MMA fighter, telling Joe Rogan he’s wrong - but only a select handful of us actually speak from authority. Only a small handful will actually take on the RISK of trying to understand the literature and practice a methodology like a beginner - without questioning the teacher or the teachings.
All that said. I have seen both Kanban and Scrum be wildly successful. The key ingredient in each of these was a shared humility and curiosity between engineers and managers and an environment that celebrated learnings and put no penalty on getting it wrong. The lack of hubris was absolutely the ticket to an agile environment where shit just got done, engineers had a GOOD TIME, we built meaningful product and we weren’t worried about blasting time in meetings because it never impeded our ability to get shit done. Once the engineering org can demonstrate its key metric (getting shit done) the battles with product cease!!! Product can trust that engineering will get shit done - without handwringing on “when” - and they can properly focus on “what” shit to get done.
When engineering is flailing around on their methodology, process or agility - they lose trust. That’s when product starts thrashing. That’s when you start to see initiatives/projects start and never finish, along with shifting priorities.
ShapeUp does an excellent job of giving product a tool to direct what work we’re doing - hopefully making sure we’re working on the right thing. However, if you’re trying to bastardize ShapeUp to fit your engineering org structure - it’s VERY difficult to demonstrate and project “well get this done”. Further, if you think you’re gonna keep your teams intact and do pitches per team - you’re already broken, committing to more than the org can deliver, creating conflict between teams on how to do the work, leading you right back to waterfall. Rather than building the right team of resources for the pitch/cycle - you now force all your teams to produce design docs, plans, backlogs - which have to go through review, get picked apart by other engineers, only to find your assumptions were wrong and the deliverable looks quite different than the design (shocker!!)
I’ll conclude to say we’re likely all doing some degree of waterfall++, branded as some form of “agile” methodology.
If you wish to see that change, encourage your peers and your managers to start with your team, pick a methodology, go exactly by the book, get “good” at it with practice over an extended period, collectively enjoy and DOCUMENT the many “aha!” moments along the way, the proliferate that out to the rest of the org. High performing teams are hard to ignore and at some point the org will ask why - simply be prepared with HOW you adopted and your learnings.
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