• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • I think I’m just sensitive because I’m pro-choice but constantly get painted as heartless and uncaring by my pro-life family. Viable or not, I feel something for these unborn things, just like my family - the only difference is that I don’t prioritize my feelings over the rights of other people, nor do I shy away from the fact that abortions can be necessary and merciful. I am an ally in this fight, but if you’re dismissing the miracle of life as nothing more than a medical condition, you’re not helping the cause - to some extent you’re a liability to those of us trying to actually win people over.




  • Private insurance used to offer flood insurance like 100 years ago, but to stay in business they had to raise premiums to a point where no one could realistically afford it (which is to say that living in a flood zone is not financially feasible for most people). The government had to step in with their own flood insurance program, which was tied to regulation intending to minimize the risk of flooding in at-risk zones so that premiums could remain affordable. Even these measures haven’t been sufficient to keep the program from running out of money, and we’ve been subsidizing it with taxpayer bailouts to keep it afloat.

    All this is to say that private insurance is literally incapable of insuring against flood damage, so you can’t blame them for any of this. If you want to blame someone, blame Trump for rolling back standards that would have allowed FEMA to consider climate change in their risk models.








    • Cloud providers have financial incentive to push microservice architectures
    • Cloud providers give corporate consultants statistics like “microservice architectures are proven to be X% more likely to succeed than monolithic architectures”
    • Cloud providers offer subscription-based tools and seminars to help companies transition to microservice architectures
    • Companies invest in these tools and seminars and mandate that all new projects adopt microservice architectures

    This is how it went down with Agile at my company 10 years ago, and some process certifications and database technologies before that. Based on what I’m hearing from upper management microservice are probably next.


  • From my perspective the corporate obsession with microservices is a natural evolution from their ongoing obsession with Agile. One of the biggest consequences of Agile adoption I’ve seen has been the expectation of working prototypes within the first few months of development, even for large projects. For architects this could mean honing in on solutions in weeks that we would have had months to settle on in the past. Microservices are attractive in this context because they buy us flexibility without holding up development. Once we’ve identified the services that we’ll need, we can get scrum teams off and running on those services while working alongside them to figure out how they all fit together. Few other architectures give us that kind of flexibility.

    All this is to say that if your current silver bullet introduces a unique set of problems, you shouldn’t be surprised if the solutions to those problems start to also look like silver bullets.


  • I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the unconditional support that the US has shown to Israel during this crisis. I understand why we must stand with our friends and allies. I understand that Israel has immense strategic value as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the Middle East. I understand our desire to support democracies in the region. I understand that they have a right to defend their people. I understand that our support is necessary to keep things from cascading further out of hand. But what I don’t understand is how we can provide all this support and still have no leverage to ease the suffering of innocent Palestinians. Are we even capable of applying diplomatic pressure on Israel, or has our support become something more akin to an entitlement?




  • It’s certainly possible that Meta has a plan to destroy the fediverse with Threads, but I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that they’re just doing this because they can. If their plan was to take over the fediverse from within, and that plan hinged on instances not defederating out of caution, then it’s off to a poor start. I might just be totally naive but this feels more like them testing the water by opening their doors to the fediverse - I don’t know if they know what happens next.


  • Remember when they snuck off on some escape ship to go get help for their crew in imminent danger and then decided to dick around on some horse racing casino planet? It’s like they completely forgot why they were there. I thought TLJ had some neat ideas but I don’t know how anyone can overlook that weird loss of urgency in the middle of the film. It’s like your house is on fire and your family is trapped upstairs, so you run over to a neighbor’s house to call the fire department, but you discover that they got some dog fighting thing going on in the backyard so you decide to go deal with that first, then you call the fire department but it turns out the dispatcher was in cahoots with the arsonist who started it in the first place, and then you return home with your tail between your legs and your mom didn’t even know you had left. The whole second act could have been a dream sequence and it wouldn’t have changed a thing.


  • If there is an opportunity to change the culture from within, you should consider that first. I’ve done some recruiting and I’ll admit the short stints don’t look great on a resume. It makes you seem like someone who is more willing to run from a problem than to try to fix it. Keep in mind that you may not need permission to do some of the things you want to do. Dress down a little - see if anyone cares enough to call you out. Set aside a few hours for innovative work. If you can’t get anywhere with that, then I’d agree - time to look for another job, and best to be honest about why you’re leaving. If you can speak to some of your efforts to improve the situation before bailing, that could definitely help to quell some concerns about your commitment.