If I understand this correctly, it takes Python code and makes it as fast as C by compiling Python code into binary like compiling C to binary.
I want something like this for JavaScript. Given how much stuff is written in JavaScript now, that would have a huge impact on the performance of so many apps.
As I understand it, JavaScript's JIT isn't quite as performant as binary compiled from a low level language like C. I'm presuming that Codon's performance is closer to that than the performance of JavaScript's JIT, but maybe that isn't correct?
Can confirm. I was one such member of this underclass working as a developer on Gmail in 2007. The pay was quite low by bay area developer job standards at $25/hr with no benefits. I loved the work, the product, the people, my boss, the atmosphere of the Google campus in Mountain View, the free meals, etc, but I only stayed for a month. Once I got a better offer that paid twice as much, I was gone.
To this day it's such a weird story to tell people.
"You worked at Google?"
"Yeah."
"For how long?"
"A month."
"Whoa, really? Why? What happened?"
"The pay was really low so I left for a higher paying job."
"Google's pay... was too low...?" They say with disbelief.
You didn't work at Google. You CONTRACTED for Google. There is a BIG difference. Whenever someone claims they worked a company, the implicit assumption is that they were a FTE. I bet if you would've told people that you contracted at Google, their reaction would certainly be different.
Because everyone knows about that situation with contract positions. He did work at Google, and if he added that it was through a contractor when explaining that the salary was too low, people would not be confused.
Meh, I think that varies quite a lot. If the only functional difference between your duties and that of the the rest of your team is your paperwork, then you worked there.
The only time I specify whether something on my resume was a particular type of arrangement like contracting is if it would be weirdly short.
There is a perception among the broader public that techies want to automate all the jobs away and don't really care what the people displaced do to earn a living afterward.
Bland, inadequate platitudes thrown out advising people to just go find a marketable skill in the new economy ignore the fact that the number of potential occupations that you can make a decent living doing has been shrinking for decades.
If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked. And of course the whole point of a marketable skill is that it's only marketable because other people don't have it.
At some point we're going to have to go through the stages of grief as a society and accept that it's unsustainable to deny a middle class lifestyle to anyone who doesn't possess rare skills, especially when the list of skills considered rare shrinks decade after decade thanks to automation.
A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously.
There are many possible answers. Universal basic income gets thrown around a lot. I like that idea, but I think it needs to be paired with wage subsidies for low wage jobs too. If basically every job is on the path to becoming low wage some day, we have to regard that as the market failure that it is and stop letting the market near-unilaterally decide the price of labor.
> If you're not a programmer, a doctor, or possess some other rare skill, you're fucked.
it's coming for these too
> A continuously growing underclass with continuously declining prospects is a recipe for violence and revolution if we don't start taking this problem more seriously.
the complete breakup of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and Amazon will be on the political agenda in 2028
failing a political solution: violence will follow
there was a post yesterday that wished GPT-4 was never invented... it's one of Nick Bostrom's black marbles
It’s ridiculous to spin being able to spend less labor in total for the same amount of goods as a bad thing for society. It is a Pareto improvement. If it leads to people being overall worse off, you should blame the governance, not “techies”.
The governance is certainly the main issue, but bad governance is easier to sustain when those who aren't impacted are more likely to go around denying the problem.
They are famous because they're rare. There's only so much room in the economy for that kind of purity. Try getting a tech job almost anywhere and insist on a pure GNU stack running on hardware that has no nonfree firmware and see how far that gets ya.
I think history shows those who seek a very high level of moral purity have had to forge their own paths, rather than get any old job/occupation which corrupts their beliefs. Rare, but inspiring. Such reaching also involves much sacrifice, it must be lonely.
But equally, I think dismissing their concerns as a pursuit of ideological purity undermines them.
Like, I work for a FAANG, I have for a long time. But I also do good within and outside that FAANG. I do habitat restoration, I get involved with political organizations that align with my views (mutual aid, socialism, etc.)
One doesn't have to care 100% or 0%, one can live with the understanding that we are in a system where you gotta pay your bills and have problematic favorites, while still trying to make things better where you can.
This is amazing news. I've been arguing this is needed since the day the App Store launched in 2008, most of the time to people who judged me as arguing for what they perceived to be a fringe view they judged to be absurd on its face. If this finally happens, it will be both a big win for user freedom and also personally quite vindicating that I called it long before it was cool to be skeptical of some of the scarier decisions that big tech companies make.
I hope the antitrust regulators successfully bully Apple into finally doing the right thing. It's long overdue.
Twitterrific no longer working might be the last straw for me with Twitter. I can't continue to use it if there's no way to get a non-algorithmic timeline where I can read every tweet starting from the oldest not yet seen allowing me to scroll up to the most recent.
I've seen other non-algorithmic clients but none have the simple, elegant interface of Twitterrific. It was the only way I could see everything from accounts I follow. Without being able to do that easily, the service is useless to me.
I use the Feedbro RSS reader which can subscribe to twitter accounts as RSS feeds. It gives you what you want: Every unread post highlighted for each account, and you don't even need a twitter account.
The Nitter fronted supports RSS feeds directly so you can use any RSS reader, and never need to even connect to twitter.com. For example this is Carmack's RSS feed: https://nitter.net/ID_AA_Carmack/rss
Thanks for the recommendation. I just tried it out.
Nitter + an RSS app like Vienna is a neat solution for replacing Twitterrific on desktop.
The UX isn't as good, particularly with quote tweets just showing up as links instead of embedded in context.
Also I had to write a quick browser hack so if I open a tweet from the RSS reader to Nitter it will make it so there is a link to the original Tweet from Nitter so I can actually interact with the tweet (like, reply, etc).
But it works, it lets me see things chronologically, and it tracks which are read and unread. Thanks!
Have you run into problems with nitter.net rate-limiting you? I added about 60 subscriptions and they frequently don't load. I suspect I'm probably overusing the service...
RSS is awesome to take back control. I used RSS in facebook and youtube to get unfiltered timeline views. I used RSS with IFTTT to scrape sites to create feeds.
Works great, but the time to add each RSS was the only downside. Was easier to write a loop script to feed it a list and have it grab rss feeds for each user.
For anyone interested in a really nice Mac client for Mastodon, the best one I've found so far is this specific fork of Mastonaut https://github.com/chucker/Mastonaut (the original is unmaintained).
Since Paul wrote that, people have made so many more things part of their identity, including JavaScript which he points out in the essay was not a particularly identity-charged topic in 2009. With the rise of the frameworks, it has become an identity-charged topic with JS devs now segregated into tribes that insist on using their preferred framework for every webapp they build. It's not about assessing the right tool for the job based on evidence or metrics, it's about a belief system that the tribe's preferred framework is always the right tool for the job.
Ultimately I think Paul was right and I think about this essay a lot. The best solution is to make as few things part of your identity as possible. For JS devs, that means you should be more willing to use a different framework from time to time or no framework at all. Decide what to use based on an objective assessment of what the right tool for the job is, not what's trendy in your tribe.
JavaScript is just wrong example. It very early has become uber-tool, when appear first specification of ECMA-script (essentially same gramma, but was universal language not tied to eny platform or specifics).
But if talk about business, I remember Ford's phrase: "develop product, which will fit expectations of 80% of your clients; 10% will just change mind; 10% will pay additional money for customization".
I think there's an industry trend or career pressure towards being a member of a JS "tribe". Companies don't believe in people learning new technologies, instead they only want people with lots of experience in their specific framework and nothing more.
I've used React, Vue, Elm, Vanilla JS, and some legacy JQuery in production over my last three years of work (along with Next, Nuxt, Gatsby, Hugo, and many others).
I thought that would make me a well rounded candidate with an understanding of different trade offs and an ability to pick up new things. Now that I'm looking for a new job though it seems like most places are looking to hire someone 100% React dev, and my history of framework diversity has become more of a liability than an asset somehow.
In tech, people ascribe you an identity as much as you claim one yourself.
When I am not around, I have been described to people as "A DevOps guy" or "A Network Guy". People then treat me accordingly. But, being human (or an approximation thereof), I am not just one thing.
I often skip the fact that i work in tech in certain circles in the beginning.
Instead i'm just a business consultant, or working with project management.
Probably a bit cowardlike but people really love to put other people in boxes and for a lot of people working in tech means "oh so you're one of those super nerdy people that is naively optimistic about technology, is socially stunted, loves infantile pop culture and has zero sense of aesthetics" as an example.
And not that there is anything wrong with being that type of person (i also have some of those traits) there is very limited elasticity in peoples image of you after you've told what you work with, at least in Scandinavia where "you are your career".
I have a friend who works on movie productions and everyone always seem to find it amazing and extrapolate all kinds of positive stuff about him, while the opposite can happen with tech and unless i also make some weird underhanded disclaimers like "I'm actually also really into x genre of music and have played since i was a kid" or "well i actually love reading obscure literature", "i actually really like travelling, that's why this career was so great for me" people will just assume i do nothing besides program 24/7 - hyperbole yes but still.
> "oh so you're one of those super nerdy people that is naively optimistic about technology, is socially stunted, loves infantile pop culture and has zero sense of aesthetics"
> "oh so you're one of those super nerdy people that is naively optimistic about technology, is socially stunted, loves infantile pop culture and has zero sense of aesthetics" as an example.
for once I'm glad to be the opposite to the usual trope.. but I feel you it is tiring to be interrogated over the location of my non-existent funko-pop cache just because I write code. Even saying "I swear I don't write Js" doesn't protect you these days.
Come on, the dentist is also the dentist... taking those titles to personally imo is a too big identitiy to start with. We know you are all individuals ;)
I've always tried to go with (or steer toward) something like "a problem solver".
I just like to solve problems. Sometimes it's builds and deploys, sometimes it's the network, and sometimes it's the car in the driveway. Give me a few, I'll figure something out.
If I take a nap, I’m solving the problem of being tired. If I go grocery shopping, I’m solving the problem of not having food in my house. If I drink water, I’m solving the problem of being thirsty. If I play a video game, I’m solving the problem of being bored. All human activity is problem solving.
> In tech, people ascribe you an identity as much as you claim one yourself.
Indeed that is true of most kinds of identity. People will ascribe you racial and gender identities which may or may not match the ones you wish to claim for example.
I think with JS frameworks, it's more a case of moving house using the hatchback parked in your driveway, instead of going out and buying a brand new truck. Or hammering tent pegs with the side of a rock instead of bringing a hammer with you. There's a cost to buying and learning new tools.
That would be an easier argument to accept if people were more honest about it. Or honest with themselves about it and more self-aware that that's really what it's about: not wanting to learn new things or the perception (real or otherwise) of lacking the time to. But too often instead it seems like people rationalize the desire to avoid learning new things by making pseudo arguments that the thing they already like is the best option when in reality it's mostly just a post hoc justification of a preconceived notion.
[0] https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina...