Spolsky's fizzbuzz article is the standard reference, but the reason it got so popular is that it resonated with anyone who's ever tried hiring a developer.
It's not "tabs vs spaces"; there are just many people employed as software engineers who 1) cannot translate an English (or other human language) description into working code, and 2) have no idea how software actually works. They know enough about the mechanics of programming to copy and paste code from Stackoverflow/ChatGPT and use git, but if they encounter a novel problem they are totally lost. Hiring them is like hiring someone who only knows how to drive to be your car mechanic.
If you've been in the industry for 5+ years, think hard and I'm sure you can at least think of one example of a coworker you've had that fits this description.
If it is this one, encountering at least one example of a coworker over 5+ years is pretty far away from the numbers implied. “ 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can't write code at all.” I am very skeptical of this.
Whoops yes, got them mixed up. Same sentiment, though.
Keep in mind your coworkers are the ones who passed the interview. How much hiring have you done? 199/200 of applicants not being able to code is probably an underestimate these days; now that it's so easy to apply for jobs with one click on LinkedIn, Indeed, etc. any job you post will get flooded with resumes from people who are completely unqualified and have literally never held a programming job or have any computer-related education. Can't blame people for optimism, I suppose?
If we jump to the next level of the funnel, to people who have passed an initial resume screen and are doing a phone or in-person interview, I estimate at least 60% of those candidates are still unqualified to hold a position as an actual software developer solving actual technical problems with code, in my personal experience.
This article specifically seems reasonable. There's still some very smart people at Google. Unfortunate that the culture eroded so much over the past 5-10 years and may be unrecoverable, though.
Low overall skill level in the populace is not the same as isolated competence.
And in software, you really only need isolated competence. We've seen repeated examples in the West where a team of 10-20 highly competent engineers is able to run circles around 10,000 person orgs filled with bureaucrats, managers, and questionable hires.
NK sends a few people to China to train, or even just imports from China, and if they prove themselves capable, says, "We're going to make you part of our elite spy hacking force. We'll pay you $10 million/year." Suddenly the highly competent hacker is living like a king and NK has their spy force. Not so far-fetched.
Let's say LLMs work exactly as advertised in this case: you go into the LLM, say "find corruption in these financial reports", and it comes back with some info about the mayor spending millions on overpriced contracts with a company run by his brother. What then? You can post on Twitter, but unless you already have a following it's shouting into the void. You can go to your local newspapers, they'll probably ignore you; if they do pay attention, they'll write an article which gets a few hundred hits. If the mayor acknowledges it at all, they'll slam it as a political hit-piece, and that's the end of it. So your best chance is... hope really hard it goes viral, I guess?
This isn't meant to be overly negative, but exposing financial corruption is mostly about information control; I don't see how LLMs help much here. Even if/when you find slam-dunk evidence that corruption is occurring, it's generally very hard to provide evidence in a way that Joe Average can understand, and assuming you are a normal everyday citizen, it's extremely hard to get people to act.
As a prime example, this bit on the SF "alcohol rehab" program[0] went semi-viral earlier this week; there's no way to interpret $5 million/year spent on 55 clients as anything but "incompetence" at best and "grift and corruption" at worst. Yet there's no public outrage or people protesting on the streets of SF; it's already an afterthought in the minds of anyone who saw it. Is being able to query an LLM for this stuff going to make a difference?
Also, per the link, cheaper than emergency room visits and ambulance transports:
> But San Francisco public health officials found that the city saved $1.7 million over six months from the managed alcohol program in reduced calls to emergency services, including emergency room visits and other hospital stays. In the six months after clients entered the managed alcohol program, public health officials said visits to the city’s sobering center dropped 92%, emergency room visits dropped more than 70%, and EMS calls and hospital visits were both cut in half.
> Previously, the city reported that just five residents who struggled with alcohol use disorder had cost more than $4 million in ambulance transports over a five-year period, with as many as 2,000 ambulance transports over that time. [emphasis mine]
> The San Francisco Fire Department said in a statement that the managed alcohol program has “has proven to be an incredibly impactful intervention” at reducing emergency service use for a “small but highly vulnerable population.”
Beautifully stated. I can only speculate, but I'd say the reason it is this way is due to the collective apathy/cynicism toward government. We have collectively come to expect a certain level of corruption and influence peddling. We have a high tolerance for incompetence in carrying out government operations. Only the most egregious offenders are brought to the public's attention, and in an age of increasingly short attention spans, people have forgotten by the time elections roll around.
That is, if they vote in the first place - in that example I gave above of a corrupt mayor stealing millions (Tiffany Henyard of Dolton, IL), the voter turnout was only 15%.
Why would you report financial crimes to Twitter? If your LLM uncovers financial crimes you should contact regulators and prosecutors. They're both incentivized to do something about it.
Oh yeah. This. I live in a tiny community it our district school board has a $54 million budget right now, and all the audits are rubber stamps and wink and nudge from the State. When residents try to dig in and complain about waste and fraud we are shrugged off.
> The higher up you go in the corporate ladder, the easier your job is. Less stress, more respect, less hours. Decisions you make are hard to tie back to incompetence
Curious how far you've gotten and where because this doesn't track with my experience at all.
Was L7 at FAANG and ~250 employee startup CTO, you are basically on-call 24/7, no such thing as "not my job/responsibility" as everything below you bubbles up to you eventually. Constantly have to juggle priorities and make difficult decisions with limited data. If VP/director needs a report by Monday AM your weekend is gone. If production database goes down at 2am you're awake and have to facilitate communication between stressed engineers fixing the problem and angry upper management/customers.
You have lots of authority and get plenty of respect and compensation to match, but low-stress or fewer hours? that's reddit-brained /r/antiwork BS from a clueless 2x-year-old who watches TV and thinks CEOs just go golfing all day.
Worked at a high level at FAANG, meetings with L8+. Half of the directors/VPs are just there to keep a cool head and make a few decisions. Directly sat in management consulting meetings with C level at american express. They just made decisions by picking from one of three options on a slide deck.
Also L7 in faang is not that high level, you can still be an individual contributor.
> Another way to think about timbre is by comparing instruments. In an old stand-up bit, Steve Martin strummed the banjo and mused, “You just can’t sing a depressing song when you’re playing the banjo . . . You can’t just go, ‘Oh, death, and grief, and sorrow, and murder.’
Anyone who's played Outer Wilds should disagree with this.[0]
To say we can't describe timbre is a bit misleading, because there are concrete mathematical ways to analyze sounds; they exist in a three-dimensional space of frequency, amplitude and time. But that's helpful in the same way that describing programming languages as collections of 1s and 0s is.
What's lacking for describing timbre, I suppose, are the steps between "this sound is a sum of a particular arrangement of sine waves" and "this sound is a piano". There are common terms such as ADSR or "brightness" and "warmth" but those don't tell the full story.
The question is, how valuable is that intermediate step when you could just say "this is a piano, this is a banjo"?
A banjo is plinky-plonky: it has a sharp attack, but not a lot of sustain. It's not great for playing a melody with long, slow notes. It's better suited for rhythmical patterns, and faster tempos. It's possible that a banjo could have a part in an ensemble piece about death, grief, sorrow and murder, but as a solo work, the idea does seem dodgy.
It's not so much the timbre as the envelope. We have ways to talk about the not envelope. That is complex though, because different components of the sound can have different envelopes: e.g. high harmonics dying off before fundamentals. Envelope is not separable from timbre.
I don't know if I necessarily agree with that quote but your counter example does not give me emotions of death, grief, sorrow, or murder. It sounds very hopeful to me.
And that just goes to show you how context-sensitive and subjective the emotional quality of sounds and music is. Half the people watching that video get teary-eyed when hearing it :)
> Anyone who's played Outer Wilds should disagree with this.
Not exactly about death, but certainly grieving things like the emotional blunting of psychiatric medications, inability to accept love or forgiveness, and lines like:
> I'll pretend bein' with you doesn't feel like drowning
Sounds decidedly less hopeful to me than that track from Outer Wilds
Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see." Sometimes the fork will gain traction and become the de facto "true" version (see Hudson -> Jenkins). Sometimes the fork will flop and people will largely stick to the original despite whatever caused the schism (see Terraform -> OpenTofu).
Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them.
I agree. It has only been a few months since the split. I have noticed more and more uptake of OpenTofu amongst colleagues, and I've personally switched. The thing that makes the difference is what is running on people's laptops, because that's what people will eventually put into prod.
The point is that once they are no longer compatible, people would standardize on the one that they're familiar with which is most likely the one that's running on their machine.
But currently, people are equally comfortable with both; the CLI commands are exactly identical between the two, save for the name of the binary itself. In any org where both are in use, if people are forced to choose at some point, they will have to balance many other factors besides familiarity, such as features and confidence in the platform.
> The thing that makes the difference is what is running on people's laptops, because that's what people will eventually put into prod.
I disagree—I think support of deployment tooling (like Atlantis) is the bigger proof. If you are running terraform on your local machine it is likely a very small company.
Just to clarify, provider-defined functions are coming in OpenTofu 1.7, along with e2e state encryption. Generally, I recommend not comparing version numbers of Terraform and OpenTofu post-1.6.
Implementing the e2e state encryption was non-trivial, and we wanted to make sure we get it right, so that's why the release took us a while. We also got a slight additional delay due to needing to handle the C&D letter OpenTofu got from HashiCorp[0], but that's all sorted now.
The beta for 1.7 however is coming out this week, with the stable release planned in the next ~3 weeks.
In the very early days of Terraform, when it was 2 months or so old I helped a little. How many people did (so much more than me) with all these projects to be later betrayed by relicensing.
> git log --pretty=format:"%h %an %ad %s" --date=short | grep "Luke Chadwick"
dcd6449245 Luke Chadwick 2014-07-30 Add documentation for elb health_check
0eed0908df Luke Chadwick 2014-07-30 Add health_check to aws_elb resource
96c05c881a Luke Chadwick 2014-07-30 Update documentation to include the new user_data attribute on aws_launch_configuration
15bdf8b5f9 Luke Chadwick 2014-07-30 Add user_data to aws_launch_configuration
8d2e232602 Luke Chadwick 2014-07-29 Update documentation to reflect the addition of associate_public_ip_address to the aws_instance resource
974074fee9 Luke Chadwick 2014-07-29 Add associate_public_ip_address as an attribute of the aws_instance resource
> How many people did (so much more than me) with all these projects to be later betrayed by relicensing.
Were you betrayed? They did a thing you licensed them to do. That’s the whole point of non-copyleft free software licenses, after all! It’s kind of odd to specifically choose a license which allows others to use one’s code in proprietary software, then be upset when others use one’s code in proprietary software.
If one wishes one’s software and its users to remain free, the answer is to use a copyleft license.
They can and did use it in commercial software before relicensing. I don't have a problem with that. It's a betrayal to get a huge community together under one expectation and then decide you don't like that expectation any more. Had they used, even something like AGPL from the start it would not have been successful in the same way, would not have gotten the same levels of outside contributions, so yes it's a betrayal.
It's a limited betrayal, because that license also allows for OpenTofu to exist and fork, but the need to do that is just annoying.
> Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them.
I won't blame them for regretting their past actions, but I hope the lesson would be learned: if you want to put limitation on the use of your software, you shouldn't have licensed it in a way that doesn't allow such. You can't recall a gift because you don't like how the recipient is using it. Though you are more then welcome not to gift them ever again.
> Though you are more then welcome not to gift them ever again
That's actually an accurate description of what's happening with these re-licensing dramas. Redis versions from before the split are still BSD-licensed. They can't recall those gifts. The re-licensing only applies to newer versions.
Of course, it wasn't just people employed by Redis, Inc. who were providing the gifts. My (vague) understanding is that a lot of contributions came from people at AWS, etc. Technically, AWS was providing those "gift" contributions to Redis -- because Redis, Inc. maintains the copyright for community contributions -- and Redis was then re-gifting those contributions to the world, via the BSD license. That's all fine and dandy until the big contributors realized they're actually fiercely competing with each other for cloud customers, and it's not realistic for Redis, Inc. to compete with the largest cloud provider on Earth without any technical moat whatsoever. Hence the re-licensing.
I think the breakdown in trust for Redis, Inc. is overblown. By far the biggest contributor to valkey (madolson) is employed by AWS. Does the OSS community really think that's a better organization to back in the long term?
First of all, you can "recall a gift", if it is legal. I don't think I've seen people arguing that these re-licensing actions are not legal.
But if you mean that you can't recall a gift without making people mad, then yep, that's true! But keeping people from being mad is not the only thing that matters.
But the real problem I have with, "I hope the lesson will be learned" is that the lesson people are learning is "don't try to build ambitious software requiring a lot of work from a dedicated core team using an open source license; you're going to find yourself damned if you do and damned if you don't".
And I think that really sucks! And sadly the ship has already sailed here. I'm certain we're going to see way fewer products with open source licenses because of all of this. And I think it's unlikely we'll even see as many products with "source available" licenses because, how is it worth the hassle to release source when the community has shown more good will to projects that are entirely proprietary?
I really think I'm going to look back at the last 15 years or so in awe at how often I had the luxury of digging into the behavior of software I rely on, by reading the code.
We're living in a society, with certain systems baked into it.
Fighting to change those systems and norms is a Good Thing™, but I'm too pessimistic to act today as if the change is coming tomorrow. I'll both work to change those systems, AND act as if they're here to stay.
I'm not sure if this was a purposeful allusion or not, but I entirely agree that you "can't recall a gift" in exactly the same sense that you can't keep talking on a payphone for a long time when someone is clearly waiting; because, you know, we're living in a society!!
Unlike the payphone analogy, where there is metering rules, and as long as you abide by them, you can keep talking, even if it's impolite, there is a legal definition for gifts (it is, after all, a transfer of ownership, and such things are regulated), which, as far as I know, matches the social norm of not being able to claw those back.
Ha, except, to go full circle, then if you're using that legal definition of a "gift" requiring a transfer of ownership, it's clear that open source software is not actually a gift, because there is no transfer of ownership.
You can't have it both ways! If it's a "gift" in the colloquial sense of something freely given, then it breaks social convention to claw it back, but it is not illegal. If you want to use the legal definition of a "gift" - ie. for tax purposes, implying a transfer of ownership - then contributions to open source software are not at all a "gift" in that sense.
> And I think it's unlikely we'll even see as many products with "source available" licenses because, how is it worth the hassle to release source when the community has shown more good will to projects that are entirely proprietary?
This, thousand times. Looks like FOSS advocates feel so threatened by "source available" licenses that they will do everything possible to keep them from gaining momentum (see Commons Clause).
It's a shame really. It would be nice to have a standard and well known license that would both allow users to use software freely (for using and adapting) and still protect makers from their competitors (AWS comes to mind) undercutting them with their own product. Oh well.
EDIT: ...and here comes the first (anonymous) downvote. Proves my point about FOSS sentiment, I guess? Come on, it's a discussion, you can do better than that.
FOSS originalists insist on no limitations on use of the software.
The FSF prohibits such in what they call freedom 0:
> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
And OSI explicitly forbids it in their open source definition:
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
>
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a
> specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from
> being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
This rules out no-CSP licenses from those definition, as well as the original JSON license, as it used to read something like "this software shouldn't be used for evil". Those rules would also block banning software from being used for war crimes, human rights abuse, etc. And while I can understand the legal minefield with prohibiting some use, I'd really wish we had a good license that would indeed try to also curb using software for committing real atrocities (and not just possibly reducing shareholder value). But I digress.
Sure, I know, but I mean that's just their subjective line in the sand. (Their maximal-freedom in this kind of infinite dimensional space.)
After all wouldn't a user be more free if they were able to just do whatever they want with it, not just run it? Ie. free to copy/modify/sublicense it in any way? Why is program execution more important than other use of the intellectual property?
If they want to maximize freedom for all potential users, then they ought to think about sustainability of the software. (As in economic incentives and market share and whatnot.) To me it seems they have a static worldview, the only thing they care about is that current set-in-stone version of the work, but that's basically putting their head into the cool refreshing sand of ignorance.
(That said, I'm nowhere near FSF/OSI circles (duh! :P), so I have no idea what's their current thinking of this. Maybe they are fully aware of this, but ... based on HN chatter it seems that they realized it's a hard problem and picked an oversimplified worldview as workaround, and now it's institutionalized denial.)
> And while I can understand the legal minefield with prohibiting some use, I'd really wish we had a good license that would indeed try to also curb using software for committing real atrocities.
I'm very skeptical of the practicality of it (after all if there's one thing states in general are good at, it is waging large scale wars and appropriating everything required for it), but if adding naive sounding clauses to FOSS-ish projects can prevent at least a few drone attacks it will have worth it.
Also, if people want to somehow put these use-restrictions into "the right context at the right time" then they can add a clause for that.
Ie. add a clause listing categories of uses and/or users (military, law enforcement, surveillance, and any state, state-owned, significantly state-sponsored entity) that require express written authorization from a named organization/institution, and folks could simply pick this when they start a project. (From Apache2-NATO to AGPL-ChaosComputerClub and so on.)
> But the real problem I have with, "I hope the lesson will be learned" is that the lesson people are learning is "don't try to build ambitious software requiring a lot of work from a dedicated core team using an open source license; you're going to find yourself damned if you do and damned if you don't".
Yeah, for things running server-side that could be used by Amazon and Microsoft, they should use SSPL from the start. In this case everything is clear and everybody knows what to expect. For regular users, there is absolutely zero difference between SSPL and OSI-certified licenses.
Yes, they definitely should use something like that from the start, in my view. But I think they won't, because there is now a lot of evidence that this will result in a bunch of bad press, whereas just making it proprietary will go without comment.
the best strategy is still to start out with something that's press-positive (Apache2) and switch to BSL/SSPL after funding is secured. bad press will happen, but at least later, after the good press phase.
With the noise people make when you don't use an OSI open-source license, little wonder. But when Redis started I think we didn't yet boardly understand the limitations of OSI licenses in the era of big tech cloud computing.
To people starting projects today, you have no excuse, we know better. Don't use OSI open-source unless it's entirely a labor of love that you're giving away free.
OSI Open-source business models are dead. Don't make that mistake.
> That is, if I was still in charge, would I change license? But that's an impossible game to play, I'm away from the company for four years and I'm not facing the current issues with AWS impossible-to-compete-with scenario.
Not saying he would have decided any differently, just that cloud computing has changed open source situation for the worse.
It looks to me like people start with open source licenses because that's helpful to get them market-share (and in some cases community contributors and maintainers), and then they switch to a non-open-source license reserving certain rights to profit to them hoping to maintain the users that they wouldn't have gotten if they started with that license.
I am curious for examples of any projects now *starting( with one of these non-open-source rights-to-profit-reserved licenses, now that is clearly "understood". Are there any examples? Are they successfully attracting users? Contributors?
Wikipedia suggests it was initially apache, changed to BSL in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CockroachDB. But still perhaps an example of fairly quick switch to BSL before it had gotten wide market/mind share? I don't know the history.
"We’re adopting an extremely permissive version of the Business Source License (BSL). CockroachDB users can scale CockroachDB to any number of nodes. They can use CockroachDB or embed it in their applications (whether they ship those applications to customers or run them as a service). They can even run it as a service internally. The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license."
> Don't use OSI open-source unless it's entirely a labor of love that you're giving away free.
Well, know what your secret sauce is. I think performance is really the best differentiator. Make a fully behaviourally compatible (maybe not bug for bug) version available and then sell a proprietary faster version.
Think an compiler that doesn't due any optimisation and outputs naive code. You know have a useful OSI project, and a clear value add, and a clear boundary between the two.
This is really applicable for databases, and it still leaves you with something useful for learning small projects, and for developers to run locally on their own machines.
>I think performance is really the best differentiator.
I don't understand this at all. Most open source projects start out equally as a means to give back to and collaborate with the community as well as showcase one's skills. You're asking me to purposefully publish badly optimized software? I don't have it in me. That offends my sensibilities of craftsmanship. A 'slow' open source project will never get traction. Even if it did, I also don't know how an open source project wouldn't immediately have it's obvious performance bottlenecks fixed.
Far better to go the VSCode route. Release a useful project, then release paid extensions for it.
this is the open core model, it works well for things like GitLab (as far as I know)
and in effect GitLab is doing a BSL-like thing by after a few years they release features to the free tier
but it rarely works if you need to decline contribution from people who would eat into your profit margins. I think ElasticSearch had this problem (and the community basically ended up with a few forks, because people sent the patches for security features that were in the enterprise version, and to no one's surprise they did not get merged ...)
so, I guess it works if there's a huuuge scope with plenty of things to contribute, to shoot for the moon together, without hurting the business side too much.
You can probably set up a decent privately-funded venture to deal in OSI software. The problem comes (as it always does) when the founders think they're the reincarnation of Steve Jobs and deserve a nine-or-ten-figure net worth for making a few nice, but ultimately not earth-shattering, software tools. Then they have to enshittify to get ready for the IPO.
The hyperscalers weren't selling Terraform though, Hashicorp was losing to Terragrunt, Spacelift et al, who had decent to good offerings.
I'd say Elasticsearch is still the comparison to make here for a product that clouds just resold, then again, Redis the company didn't build Redis the software and their latest marketing smells more of VC hawkery than any reasonable pitch
> Hashicorp was losing to Terragrunt, Spacelift et al, who had decent to good offerings.
Would love some data in support of this statement. Not saying you're wrong necessarily, just it feels like a perception vs. reality comment potentially.
Don't have any data I must say, just a series of discussions here and elsewhere over the years, voicing either appreciation for the platforms above or displeasure with the logistics/price of TFcloud, e.g. with one I remember
The vast majority of projects that I've come across at work just had the tf CLI wrapped in a CI/CD pipeline + some bucket, but the managed competitors seemed to come up more often (compared to other tools/platforms) when people wanted to use/were using something as a service.
Perhaps it's really just a perception thing, I never checked their financials
edit: I think I went off-track from the point. The point was that the ones selling managed versions were not the hyperscalers, but people building wrappers and similar around it. The other commenter with the list of fork-backers illustrates that nicely.
> people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it
If it wasn't open-source it won't be as popular as it is in the first place, Redis is also using ton of open source software or libraries for free.
Not defending AWS/GCP/Azure, I actually got my software used when i was young by a large company for free (not even a mention- Still using it i think, 5M+ Play Store Downloads), but that is the spirit of open source
Open Source is, by and large, intended by the creator to donate their ideas to benefit humanity as a whole; many people feel that using their thing to help strengthen an (ethically questionable) monopoly is acting against that core goal.
I think it's less about strengthening a monopoly and more about zero sum business models.
If AWS/Azure/GCP/et al. ran a cloud version of X and the main company supporting the open source project was a going concern, I doubt many would have a problem with the entire scheme.
However, in reality, every enterprise support dollar that goes through a third party cloud-managed offering is one that doesn't go to the first party.
In which case, what dollars are left to pay the independent company that creates and supports the software?
Granted, there are a lot of nuances to the above, but I think it's generally fair to say that third-party cloud companies are making more off managed open source offerings than they're paying to contribute to them.
This is why the most viral AGPL license you can find is the only right license for Open Source. There is no downside: for honest, upstanding developers who want to use your code, there's no problem, because their code was going to be Open Source, too. For the soulless corporations, they'll either not use your code, or contribute back their modifications, a win-win for everyone.
The only losers are people who are engaging with the Open Source community in bad faith, viewing it as something to steal from, rather than participate in.
is there a stronger version of AGPL where if you run it as a SaaS you need to publish the source for the infra/management/self-service/payments machinery too?
When I fix a bug in OpenSSL, it benefits humanity regardless of who deploys it. Maybe slightly less beneficial if it fixes an evil service, but still... Better to have a successful TLS handshake and get on with the evil.
I don't think anything else open source I've done has been widely deployed, but if I save a bit of someone's time because they can use something I did, or save some users' cpu and bandwidth, it doesn't matter to me if that's a user of a free service or a propriatary one, I still helped their user.
Redis actually has very few external dependencies compared to most modern FOSS:
IIRC, it only need libc and OpenSSL (the latter only if you build TLS) on your system, and provide their forked copies of Jemalloc, LUA, fpconv, HiRedis, Linenoise and Hdr_Histogram.
I work for a large enterprise and we use terraform open source atm, but I can pretty much guarantee we move to OpenTofu once the dust settles a little more.
I remember when we had the libav fork. Turns out 10 bickering idiots pronouncing the freedom revolution were ultimately not half as productive as one Michael Niedermayer.
tbf, ffmpeg‘s api and thus libav is so obscure that it would be impossible to fork it and create a nice looking api, without bothering people.
I vaguely remember the news about the Microsoft guy that was called out on twitter and I’ve read the issue and looked at some cli/api parameters and was stunned. So much possible flags. I hope that I will never need to deal with it.
But still kudos for all the maintainers. It works and has probably support for all codes and all options of these codes.
> people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process
Then build that UI yourself and sell it and make millions of dollars per day yourself, noone is stopping them.
Ah but you see there are 2 problems: 1/ "UIs" are harder than people think, especially by those that use that term derisively like you did. There are PLENTY of popular products that are basically just UI on existing data.
2/ AWS/GCP/Azure aren't slapping UIs. They're offering "managed operations" for these products. What is it? And sure, Hackernews is likely to scoff at that - we know how this site feels about dropbox -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
But if it didn't offer value, people wouldn't pay for it. Redis engineers are good at building a key value storage. AWS/GCP/Azure engineers are good at building managed operations. Combine them together and you've got the best of both worlds.
AWS/GCP/Azure aren't making money off Redis, they're making money off their experience in operating cloud infrastructure. And the free market wants to pay them to do so.
>Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see."
They are generally a
good thing, save for the poor souls that will end up maintaining a project that was started with them while they were still active. The success of the fork doesn't matter so much as the direction it inevitably pulls the original project.
The io.js drama gave us a huge step forward with NPM once their hand was forced. Hopefully some good ideas come of this too.
I'm actually surprised by how well received Valkey is right now, given that they forked not too long ago. Below are GitHub engagement insights for the two projects:
Part of the bet is probably that since Terraform is almost necessarily going to run on a cloud service that is already being paid for, the user might not care that a bit gets added to the bill.
Redis? I'm not sure. Like you say, they don't want Big Tech to slap a UI on it and profit. And, really, once they start competing on price (which they might sooner rather than later to keep people from going back to on-prem) you can guess they might use something that's free so they don't have to pay the license on a per-server instance.
Important to note that the "people" in this case is the company that bought the rights to the Redis trademark from the original creator and then took on $350M in VC funding. The community that created and supported Redis since its inception was not involved in the decision, and isn't getting any of the benefit.
I'm using Gitea locally. I haven't come across forgejo before. It seems to be forked on the basis of providing a fully open source solution (it states that some Gitea enterprise features are not present).
Do you know what the main differences are and whether it is worth switching?
1. Gitea, Inc replaced the prior community leadership structure with one controlled by Gitea, Inc and have pivoted into being primarily about a hosted code SaaS they launched this year that didn't exist for the first 7 years of the project. They could do it because they had 2 of the 3 seats on the community stewardship organisation at the time to vote for it, but that wasn't always true. For a lot of people, Gitea's primary motivation was for the self-hosted and fully open use case, but now it's not clear that that will remain any more of a priority for Gitea Inc as it is for e.g. Gitlab
2. There were also some contributors who were interested for the sake of decentralising code forges (and not just git), and so were big into the forgefed project which was an activitypub based federation protocol. Gitea Inc were officially on board with that, but the contributors felt they weren't helpful enough to actually implementing that with missteps like letting grant funding from NLNet expire.
The contributors from groups 1 and 2, and Codeberg banded together to make Forgejo after the Gitea change.
Until the latest release (just last month) Forgejo was one way pulling all changes from Gitea, but they've diverged enough that they're now hard forks. Both have active development, but Forgejo's main unique focus is the federation stuff, while Gitea's was enhancing their CI offering. But while Gitea may have more development effort, being funded by a commercial organisation rather than volunteers and a non-profit, I think they have a long way to catch up to Gitlab in that front, so it feels like they've dropped their unique factor to try chase Gitlab.
At the moment forgejo does not have features I'm interested in as I'm not making my internal gitea instance public. However, I'd be interested in it if it provides support for things like hierarchical project grouping and organiation/group-wide project and issue tracking. So I'm going to keep an eye on the project to see how it evolves.
One thing that concerns me is Forgejo's statement that they will diverge further from Gitea without migration commitments. This would make it harder for me -- and others -- to switch after upgrading to Gitea 1.22 and later. A similar concern is the other way around: if I switch to Forgejo and want to move back to Gitea, I won't be able to if the projects have sufficiently changed (e.g. if they implement project grouping differently).
I think Hudson -> Jenkins is not really a fitting example here, because it was more of a rename caused by Oracle owning the Hudson trademark. While Oracle halfheartedly indicated to continue Hudson on its own, from what I remember it was pretty clear from the start that Jenkins was the new Hudson.
>> Generally my stance with these forks born from community drama is "wait and see."
Whats funny about this one is as follows:
1. The license: BSD? LGPL? Do both... nothing says that you cant make the product available under both licenses. You prevent another rug pull...
2. The platform: Do both, Run the thing on GitHub like it always has been and back it up to the other platform. If MS makes GitHub into the next source forge... then you're already half way out.
3. The name: Not a hill any one should die on. Pick three, ask amazon legal to clear them or FSF legal to clear them and vote. Redict and valkey are both fucking stupid names... Yea you might have to live with storage mcstoreface but that would be better than either of the current options.
As for FOSS drama... Lacking any clear leadership, peoples ability to self organize is limited. These sorts of things happen all the time (systemd, x vs waylaid, how many unix forks?) The winning side is almost always the one with clear leadership.
What AWS/GCP/Azure provide with managed Redis is much much more than just a UI. There are a lot of technical issues that come with running Redis reliably in the cloud. I’d say UI work is probably 5% of that at most.
Many of these recent forks are being done because people won't want AWS/GCP/Azure to slap a UI on top of their free open-source product and resell it, making tens of millions of dollars per day in the process. I can't really blame them.
I can.
Free software is, at its core, wage theft. It is truly unfortunate that so many people don't understand "big picture" economics, not the $2 for a loaf of bread economics, but the creation of value, it's consumption, and allocating resources to maximize creating the "right kind" of value. Most programmers "get" that writing code has value, hell tech companies will pay $5,000/week in total compensation just to do that, of course "coding for money" isn't the same as "coding on something you love", or are invested in, or does something you want. But here is the detail that so many miss, it is still $5,000/week "worth" of value. Whether or not someone is paying you to do it, there is still value there. And when you think about it is it all that surprising that putting that value into a thing doesn't make it something others might value too? Others who don't have the chops or the time to make it themselves? THAT is economics. And there are so many people who can see that value just sitting there and say, "Hmm, I bet I know someone who would value that, and I could get them to pay me some of that value in cash money in exchange for hooking them up." And it's game on buddy. And what is that game? Stealing the 'value' that would have been returned as a wages to a coder if they had been hired and keeping it for themselves.
You might as well decorate your front lawn with $100 bills and put up a sign that says, "These bills are decoration I forbid you from using them to go buy things for yourself." Sure some folks would respect that sign but a whole lot more would say, "Uh, good luck with that, and thanks for the cash."
If you write code for "free", no matter what license you try to put it under that "prevents" people from profiting off of it, they are gonna profit. You can either make it possible for them to profit and cut you in on some of that, or you can decide for yourself that you're okay with all of that value you created funding someone else's lifestyle.
Tangential to the article since that was a voluntary departure, but this is absolutely happening, yes.
My partner decided to get "into tech" in ~2018. Her reason more or less amounted to looking at me and determining "it's a cushy job that pays very well." For a while, I tried pointing her to various sources to start learning a bit about software development and programming; there's no barrier to installing PyCharm CE and Github, after all. But there was zero interest and zero natural curiosity. She just did some certificate coursework, passed, then started looking for a job, and nothing beyond that.
In a lot of ways, software developer has been brought down to earth as a more "normal" career. You don't really hear about lawyers working on passion law projects at night or mechanical engineers designing skyscrapers as a hobby; the path for that is just go to school -> get internship -> get fulltime job -> do your 9-5.
The thing is, my partner isn't alone. She represents the vast, vast majority of new software developers in the past 15 years. The industry has grown, the pay has exploded, people who worked retail could parlay a 6-week bootcamp into a six-figure salary. Obviously people would hop in even if they didn't know what a compiler was.
But in a post-ZIRP world companies are seriously reevaluating the value of the average software developer. In 2010, a software dev was far more likely to have at least some personal interest in software, or even just computers in general. Now, you have software developers who never touched an actual, non-phone/tablet computer before entering their university courses. They're not stupid--they can pass a leetcode interview just fine--they just don't care about technology beyond using it as a means to pay rent.
Even if we return to near-ZIRP, there's going to be less demand for massive software dev teams. Everyone hates him, but you have to begrudgingly admit that Elon successfully demonstrated you don't need massive dev teams to build and run software, even at Twitter's scale. (obviously it has other problems due to Elon's incompetence, but nothing more developers would solve.) Most companies could cut their dev team size by 50% and end up net-positive due to less overhead--the challenge is figuring out which 50% to cut.
So, yes. The tech downturn for this group of people--the non-passionate 9-to-5ers, particularly juniors--will last for many years, and that will lead to many jumping to other careers.
I think we have another problem looming, beyond the realization that many engineers are unnecessary:
Most of the business models in tech are unsustainable. The ad-revenue driven explosion of the Internet over the past ~15 years has long since reached saturation. The data mines are all tapped out, and what have we learned? Mostly, nothing. Following a person's habits can help you target ads and drive them towards (mostly) unnecessary consumption. Then what?
Without ZIRP we're going to run out of the easy credit fueling such consumption. The economic hamster wheel is going to have to slow down. Then the realization that the SnR on the data being collected is practically 0 will set in. An immense amount of investment dollars was thrown at companies that charge nothing to the end user but collect and sell data to third parties. Yet that data is almost completely worthless.
I personally think fee-for-service is eventually going to make a (bigger) comeback, though another round or two of ZIRP might stave it off for awhile. As it does return, it is going to put even more pressure on companies to run lean teams.
> Everyone hates him, but you have to begrudgingly admit that Elon successfully demonstrated you don't need massive dev teams to build and run software, even at Twitter's scale. (obviously it has other problems due to Elon's incompetence, but nothing more developers would solve.) Most companies could cut their dev team size by 50% and end up net-positive due to less overhead--the challenge is figuring out which 50% to cut.
What do you mean this revelation was recently demonstrated by Elon? The NATO Software Engineering Conference 1968 paper talks about the problems of having too many programmers of low skill. The 1969 paper talks about the same thing. Fred Brooks wrote the Mythical Man Month in 1975, covering this topic extensively. This has been talked about extensively for over half a century with regards to software, it wasn't just discovered by Elon in the last year.
Nothing you said contradicts GP, who didn't claim Elon discovered anything. Elon did recently demonstrate what has been known for a long time - but not widely believed.
If I remember correctly, he reduced the content moderation team, which led to an increase in hate speech, misinformation and CSAM. That's why big advertisers left and revenues crashed.
He then told those big advertisers to piss off and refocused his advertising business on smaller customers, which is why he doesn't need so many ad sales people any more.
Perhaps he should hire some developers and data scientists to better automate content moderation.
He also did fire a lot of sales and account managers in those first weeks. There were advertising customers in the news who were no longer purchasing ads because they literally didn't know who to contact any longer.
The first line is the narrative of the MSM that's in bed with government censors and hate that it's no longer controlled by political interests. It is also directly contradicted by independent studies commissioned by Twitter. But speaking of "misinformation", people tend to parrot what they hear whether it's true or not. Thankfully on Twitter that is less effective, thanks to community notes.
Advertisers leaving is a combination of instability caused by Musk's impulsive decision-making, uninformed bandwagoning based on the perception projected by aforementioned MSM and parrots (AKA peer pressure), and the state of the economy combined with the above forcing them to reevaluate their investments. Advertisement revenue has been dropping everywhere as it turns out.
So, you agree with the GP but also think it's a conspiracy that brands care about their brand perception?
You may ot even be wrong about "peer pressure", but that's how so much of the rest of the world works. Part of the downturn isnt based on economic logic but peer pressure: "BigCo is sizing down so we should too!". The aforementioned brand perception is the exact same way, but based on the consumers over the company. The Stock market as a whole is literally based on speculation.
As long as stuff is run by peoople, people will influence other people to make decisions based more on gut feelings than raw facts.
> So, yes. The tech downturn for this group of people--the non-passionate 9-to-5ers, particularly juniors--will last for many years, and that will lead to many jumping to other careers.
This happened after the dot-com burst in 2000. At that time there were a lot of people in Tech who would have otherwise gone into marketing, accounting or whatever.
A lot of these moved out of tech into other fields. Or they moved into less technical roles like project manager or management.
I think this is a good call out. There are many in tech who, if salaries fall, will go into other industries. Then there are those who will figure out how to do with less—because they couldn't imagine working in anything else.
>So, yes. The tech downturn for this group of people--the non-passionate 9-to-5ers, particularly juniors--will last for many years, and that will lead to many jumping to other careers.
1. I don't like the implication that junior = non-passionate. I'd even argue the opposite. Those new and hungry are most likely to be exploited and take whatever over the grizzled vet who's long had reality slap them in the face. There will always be non-passionate people but well: that falling passion seems to correlate quite well with the falling passion of companies to even pretend they want to better the world. Tit for tat.
2. The downturn is very much not correlated with passion. I've seen some 9-5'ers survive several rounds of layoffs and I've seen some of the hardest working engineers with almost a decade of experience slashed to the surprise of everyone. You look further in industry and you see some vets of even 15,20+ years cut. This isn't some calculated move to "drain the swamp". As usual, corporate is throwing darts on the board instead of seeing what each engineer brings to the table. If you're unlucky enough to be working on the wrong product at the wrong time (which at this point is just anything non-AI. Nothing is safe), it doesn't matter how talented you are.
The games industry is very much full of underpaid, underappreciated passion and is being hit just as hard as the rest of tech, so passion clearly isn't the answer to job security.
If the most valuable programmers have a personal interest in tech and use it as a hobby, then businesses will realize this and will look for people who do tech as a hobby or who go to hobbyist meetups, etc, and then people who just want the money will start going into the hobby spaces. I wonder how much more potent our industries could be if they were filled with only people who deeply cared, and everyone else just got a generous UBI?
> Apps are more transparent and equitable with how they expose profiles to other users. Don't bias toward highly liked people to increase perceived "quality" and shadow-hide show profiles that aren't liked often (and then ask them to pay lol). Show people more randomly, to better represent the true cross section of people on the app.
This won't work; if you do this, you'll expose that the average online dating user is... well, average.
There's a bit of kayfabe going on; users want to think the other users of online dating are 8+/10, sexy, flirty, fun, and desirable singles. Unfortunately, 69% of Americans are overweight and 36% are obese. If profiles users see weren't heavily weighted toward highly-rated ones, the perception of online dating would immediately change from "online dating is fine, a bunch of attractive people are using this" to "online dating is only for the ugly and desperate"; the article points out that this is the way Gen Z perceives online dating already.
Dating apps really struggle to keep the most desirable, because those are the ones least likely to need it. Yet they're also the most important for a dating app to have. As fewer desirable people use it, the less perceived legitimacy it has, which results in fewer people using it, particularly the desirable ones. I suspect dating apps are experiencing this death spiral now.
I see your point here - and I do agree, from experience, people sometimes express a desire for a bit of reality distortion in dating (we often heard that they want the experience to feel more like 'fate' or 'chance' than overly engineered).
That said, I don't fully agree with the idea that there's a uniform concept of x/10 scale for daters and that they uniformly will balk at those below that uniform rating and therefore the only way forward is boosting those based on their global like %. And some data backs this up.
The oft-cited OkCupid Dataclysm book talks about variance (e.g. lots of people like / lots of people dislike), explaining variance is meaningfully more important to messaging and engagement than raw like %.
Additionally, on the point of weight / body type, we found that a little under half of daters (and > 50% of women interested in men) do not report body type to be a significant factor in their decision making. So it is a meaningful factor, but for about 1/2 of daters it isn't.
The point I'm trying to drive here is, while there is for sure data and intuition that points to what you're describing, there are others that point to other ways that people perceive the quality and likelihood of finding a partner on an app that may work as well, if not better, while not relying on a need to as heavily hack perception.
> Body type is a significant factor for way more than 50%. People lie on surveys because they feel guilty for being superficial.
I think you are extrapolating your own view. You have no way of knowing what they feel and even for an educated guess you do not know which country/social class/occupation those users tend to be from in the app being discussed.
Revealed preferences are a thing, no matter the social class. What people self-report to want and what they actually want is rarely the same, especially in fields with high social pressure.
Of course but you can't just claim that because you feel like X then everyone feels like X even if they say Y. You gotta have something to back it up. Especially if you represent a minority of users in many categories...
First, I think you're making some big assumption by implying that GP's statement is him projecting his own beliefs/attitudes, rather than being generally cynical.
Second, I think "people are superficial and attracted to people who fit conventional beauty standards" is a fair null hypothesis. That's what conventional beauty standards mean. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that people's stated preferences there are biased towards making themselves look less superficial.
> "people are superficial and attracted to people who fit conventional beauty standards" is a fair null hypothesis
Most likely is that you are extrapolating from your experience. Average here is male middle class from US or EU. A real average person lives in an Asian country on 50 USD/month trying to make it in life.
The gene wants to carry on and in this world survivability is not up to the looks unless you are already middle class in a stable rich country. Perhaps you are not being cynical enough if you think the looks is what's important for >50% of users.
>Additionally, on the point of weight / body type, we found that a little under half of daters (and > 50% of women interested in men) do not report body type to be a significant factor in their decision making. So it is a meaningful factor, but for about 1/2 of daters it isn't.
According to the previous poster, 69% of Americans are overweight (36% obese). Assuming the dating app users are representative of Americans, then well over half of those daters are, themselves, overweight. So of course many of them won't report body type to be a significant factor! They're already overweight, and their expectations in a partner are probably realistic. What's disturbing is that only about 1/2 of daters said it wasn't a meaningful factor: this means that almost 20% of daters are both overweight AND (assumedly) expect to date fit people.
That's true. The sad reality about dating is that, for 99% percent of people, the partner that would be ideal for their tastes is "out of their league" so to speak. Humans have dealt with this reality of dating acting somewhat like a marketplace via mores of commitment, dating within social classes, condemnation of promiscuity, etc., but the human nature is still there. 10's want 10's, but 5's don't want other 5's, they also want 10's.
The strategy most dating apps use has been to keep people in a perpetual cycle of heightened seeming possibility. You see the young, cool, attractive people, and perhaps one out of 100 times you'll strike out, and the unlimited options keep you feeling that such an opportunity could happen infinitely. For average hetero dudes, this obsession will drive purchasing premium, paying for swipes and super likes, etc.
I know it's controversial but I do believe that robotic/AI partners is the "ideal world" solution to this. You get someone who fulfills all your physical needs so you don't have to play the roulette in real life, or string along someone in your league because you believe you could get someone out of it. I'm sure in the future we'll see them similar to how we see sex toys today.
Strange analysis. Considering that what people want from dating apps is sex and partners, and that both are easier to obtain from people of matching attractiveness. As a former dating app user, the possibility is something I never cared about: I cared about a date, there is a marketplace and- while I will try to find someone acceptable- certainly I'm not wasting my time chasing people out of my league. That produces just waste of time and money, rejection and frustration.
I would rather say something different: dating apps have zero interest in making you find a partner- this means for them simply losing a customer. They would rather keep you in a cycle with some intermittent reward but preferably without losing you.
Finally there is an huge difference between different classes of users: at the very minimum by gender, attractiveness and purpose. Casual sex is a totally different use case than looking for a partner; high attractiveness allows using the app intermittently for immediate reward, while average people need to put much more effort and entirely different mode of use. But despite all this complexity, apps have converged to a single hyper-simplistic model that optimizes maybe intake of new 20 year old users but works much worse than it could for most people.
> Considering that what people want from dating apps is sex and partners, and that both are easier to obtain from people of matching attractiveness.
But people don't have an accurate perception of matching attractiveness. The average person is a 5 who thinks they're an 8. And they've been looking at celebrities rather than average people, so if you match them with a 5 then they'll think that's a 3.
And yet the overwhelming majority of people of average attractiveness have mated and formed couples and married since forever. So that's possible. If an app is not able to match them, must be a failure of the app, not of nature.
Ages ago, people had very, very limited dating options: generally only the suitable partners in their village. They didn't have porn to distract them, and they weren't allowed to just stay single because of social pressure and (for women) economic need. It was rare that anyone stayed single, and they were generally considered weird or "unmarriageable".
So basically, people took what they could get, even if it meant someone they didn't care about or worse, someone who was downright abusive.
The higher rate of singledom these days isn't necessarily a bad thing. Centuries ago, these people would have gotten married, had terrible marriages, and produced kids (remember, no contraception back then) that were neglected and abused and grew up to be awful people.
You're defining attractiveness like boomers handing out grades where in real life that's not how the 10 scale is used, it follows video game review rules where 7 is middling.
And this is right to happen with humans same as video games. It's not centered at average it's centered where 5 is "not quite unattractive." And because the typical human is attractive the average sits at around 7.
Your dating standards are high if weight automatically makes someone a sub-5 in your eyes. I’m not saying that’s morally wrong—you like what you like. But recognize that it’s a high standard and will make dating more difficult.
I mean look you're attracted to what you're attracted to but this is such a sad comment. You're not like doing anything wrong but reading this it's not so surprising that 2/3 of women have disordered eating.
What if I stopped showering and women found me unattractive for it? And I started blaming them, saying it’s their fault I can’t bring myself to shower?
You're ignoring the magnitude. To make this a fair comparison it would have to be something like
"Women find men's musk so repulsive that men who struggle with controlling it due to their hormones, diet, or lifestyle are showering with so much chemical exfoliant to keep it under control that it's destroying their skin."
And in that world I think you have a case that women have to get over it.
You can be like "just lose weight" up to the point where it drives a super-majority of women have an unhealthy relationship with food and starve themselves to do it. It looks like the new weight loss drugs might finally just fix the problem in a way that satisfies everyone. I have an ED and I will be so happy if I live to see generation of women who don't ruin their mental health to chase the thinness expected of us -- but it still sucks that the solution is drugging women to lose weight and not growing to find "heavier" (i.e. women with a BMI higher than 20) women attractive.
It would not be a good thing for people to find indicators of poor health to be neutral or attractive. It would just perpetuate eating disorders generationally.
Astonishing mental gymnastics to think that others have to "grow" to find unhealthy, overweight women attractive rather than they themselves needing to improve themselves if they want to be found attractive. Prime example of externalizing blame.
Men and women alike have been achieving acceptable weight for thousands of years. You don't need drugs to be thin, those are a recent invention. Do you think I don't have to watch what I eat too? If I gave into all my cravings I'd also be fat and find myself gross. Others do not need to adapt to your failures.
Right we prefer our women unhealthy and underweight. Look at this point I don't know what else to tell you. There's clearly an experience gap we can't cross if you're equating disordered eating with watching what you eat. I wish you could see from a woman's perspective how horribly women treat their bodies to be thin -- it's not healthy.
By your own measure I'm incredibly successful. I'm not stupid and know how much better skinny women are treated in all aspects of life. I am of a socially acceptable weight for a woman in 2024 which means I get lightheaded if I don't eat for a few hours or stand up too fast, I'm always cold, I'm always tired, I can never eat to full, and sitting on hard chairs for too long hurts. So when I say grow I mean finding women at actually healthy weights attractive. There have been times in human history where it's happened.
Don't want to add fuel to this debate, but what you say sounds a bit strange to me. I am of thin build- slightly underweight- and never felt this gave me any problem. Granted, it's just how my body works so it's possible that if I had to make an effort to keep this weight this would come with some slight issues. On the other hand it's also not normal for a lot of people to be overweight, this has clearly to do with culture and food rather than innate needs. So it's strange that your body would give you negative symptoms for just keeping a natural weight.
So I think the dynamic here is that it's really common to consider women who are of a healthy natural weight to be overweight. I'm not out here defending women who are 5'7" and 200 lbs as healthy but what happens is that that 5'7" woman will be viewed overweight at 150, chubby at 140, and "normal" at 130. And may god help you if you're close to 160. Which is fine for folks who's natural resting weight is 130 but for everyone else it sucks, you end up fighting your body 24/7 to keep it that way and having to ignore/suppress your bodies natural signals.
It's no one person or group's fault that this happens but it's where we're at. I'm technically not underweight by the numbers but my body violently disagrees with that, I've learned to accept it. One of the most common experiences for women in late 20's early 30's is to ease off the constant dieting, gain 10-20 lbs because that's where their body always wanted them, and suddenly feel great -- more energy, less brain fog, regular periods, and suddenly it's not work to maintain it.
Yes, these numbers make the discussion a bit more concrete. But 5'7'' and 150 is definitely in the healthy weight range- girls can strive to be thinner than that but it's to fit some arbitrary idea of beauty rather than to, as you say, "be treated better in each aspect of life" (yes of course, attractive people in general are treated better- but it should be a negligible effect for the ranges we're talking about). In other words, I assumed that the user you were talking to was talking about much higher BMI indexes than these. Personally, as a male, I don't find the 5'7''/ 150 unattractive at all- though it also depends on how fit someone is.
The idea that real world couples necessary match attractiveness is kind of incels invention. And then they get angry whenever they see a couple with one person super attractive and other .. normal.
I find the whole argument, especially with the grades, silly. But it is true that usually partners match each other by attractiveness- also keeping in mind that attractiveness is not exclusively physical and means different things for different people. Attractiveness is not a scalar, it's a vector.
> I would rather say something different: dating apps have zero interest in making you find a partner- this means for them simply losing a customer. They would rather keep you in a cycle with some intermittent reward but preferably without losing you.
It sounds like you're agreeing with me. The apps benefit from people staying in the app, not partnered up stably. If the app only showed people they'd have the best longer-term prospects with, then it would likely show people in their attractiveness range as a rule.
> There's a bit of kayfabe going on; users want to think the other users of online dating are 8+/10, sexy, flirty, fun, and desirable singles.
I'd go a bit further than that, people are explicitly looking for that different reality when opening the app.
That's one of the reasons of getting the app to them, getting better matches than in the reality.
I don't think it's a solvable problem, online dating is just full of paradox, the paradox highlighted in the article is real but this is another one on top of that.
> "online dating is only for the ugly and desperate"; the article points out that this is the way Gen Z perceives online dating already.
The article notes that Gen Z usage of dating apps is down, but it's not clear to me it's because they think it's low status. (Polo is unpopular, but it's high status.) Do you have more info on why Gen Z isn't using dating apps? It being low status is certainly possible, but lower over all interest in romance is too; Gen Z is famously having less sex.
I followed the "failing to woo Generation Z" link, and just got this PDF, which didn't help much: https://www.generationlab.org/_files/ugd/b2ee84_c2430c8256ff... (College students are using dating apps less than post-college 20-somethings, but I think that's always been true.)
I think it's pretty simple - Gen Z are young and have better opportunity to date IRL. They are surrounded by many peers, have more free time and friend circles are still strong.
As people grow older, they have more obligations, they sometimes move away from where they were raised thus breaking away from friends, they generally hang out in less homogenous age bracket.
I believe the claim is that Gen Z uses dating apps less when controlling for age than their predecessors. (I don't have the data to tell whether that's true.)
When people say Gen Z are they talking about Gen Z in America or Gen Z on Earth? I notice many qualities ascribed to Gen Z seem to be completely alien to Gen Z where I live which makes me suspect that these qualities are simply random variation and correlation hunting, and not inherent to that cohort’s formative experiences (smartphones, covid, etc).
> And that creates a problem for the sellers of used cars that are actually good. These sellers are like, "What the heck?! I KNOW my car isn't a lemon! It's worth way more than what you're willing to pay!" And so they refuse to sell their used car and exit the market. The result is a market where lemons become more prevalent.
Lots of truth to this. These days, dating apps seem to be exclusively for the desperate, horny, and desperately horny; as the article says, the younger generation doesn't even use them.
Even if you're just a "normal" person not in that top ~20% of attractiveness/desirability, and have no chance of matching with those top 20%, that top 20% still needs to use your app. Otherwise, everyone else using it starts thinking that the app is made for the undesirable. Nobody wants to think of themselves as undesirable! And everyone wants to swipe right on a 10/10 girl or guy and hope they somehow get lucky.
When the only attractive people left on your platform are OnlyFans advertisement bots, your dating app is pretty much fucked, no matter how many genuine 6/10 romance-seekers you have.
It's not "tabs vs spaces"; there are just many people employed as software engineers who 1) cannot translate an English (or other human language) description into working code, and 2) have no idea how software actually works. They know enough about the mechanics of programming to copy and paste code from Stackoverflow/ChatGPT and use git, but if they encounter a novel problem they are totally lost. Hiring them is like hiring someone who only knows how to drive to be your car mechanic.
If you've been in the industry for 5+ years, think hard and I'm sure you can at least think of one example of a coworker you've had that fits this description.
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