briansteffens

There are some things that I think become more fun, like dealing with anything you don't actually find interesting. I recently made a quick little web app and I hand-coded the core logic since I find that part fun. But I vibe-coded the front-end, especially the CSS, because I just don't find that stuff very interesting and I'm less picky about the visuals. Letting the AI just do the boring parts for me made the overall project more fun I think.

Maybe it's time for me to stop using this website

Is there anything that couldn't be justified with this style of thinking? Would this person support legalizing murder since more murders might raise awareness of how bad murder is?

I believe the technical term is The Joey Special.

> WE ALL HAVE THE OPTION TO FIND A BETTER JOB!

For now most of us in this industry do. This is not a long term solution to anything.

> Unions promote individual rights at the expense of the customer, product, and company.

Individual rights? It's collective bargaining of workers, no?

> where lowercase letters operate on bang, uppercase letters operate each frame.

Anyone know what a 'bang' means in this context? Not sure if it's an Orca-specific thing or more general.

As is tradition, we managed to get all the downsides of both shutting down and not shutting down, with none of the benefits of either.

How much and what kind of experience do you think someone should have with a language before beginning to form an opinion?

Ah, but you left out the first paragraph which clarifies the second entirely!

>riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

And you'll just have to read to the end of the book to find out how the sentence begins.

Joking aside, I actually love this style of writing even though I get virtually no narrative from it. I read it almost like some sort of abstract poetry, letting my mind wander as the words go by.

Also, I find it reads a lot better out loud than silently: easier to notice some of the strange dream-like word mixes. Like `venissoon` kind of sounds like `very soon`. I only saw `venison` until I read it out loud.

> That feels like a leadership failure to me. In that case you'd look at the Chief, the union rep, the Mayor and any other folks who can change the culture but don't.

Yeah, I agree 100%, and this is why the "few bad apples" angle falls apart. This is a widespread problem with the culture of many police departments. It's not enough to fire the murderers themselves, we also need to ask:

- Who hired them?

- Who trained them?

- Who supervised them?

- Who looked into the previous excessive force complaints and decided they weren't a problem?

Erlang/OTP is really cool and I found the Elixir language pretty reasonable and even nice but:

1. Elixir is still a pretty leaky abstraction over Erlang. In my experience it's not enough to learn just Elixir, I regularly had to dive into Erlang library source code to debug or answer questions. This somewhat negates the benefit of a small, stripped down syntax when you often have to learn another one in conjunction.

2. Maturity of ecosystem. This should improve over time but I've had challenges finding high quality libraries, especially for things like database connection drivers or making network requests. It's often hard to tell how well-supported or complete a library is and regressions were a regular occurrence.

3. Documentation. In practice I rarely found official documentation complete or even helpful (outside of big projects like Phoenix / Ecto). Even core Erlang libraries had surprising chunks missing. It's been awhile but I remember it being very hard to figure out what options were supported in Erlang's TLS wrapper. I ended up stitching together pieces from the OpenSSL documentation, Erlang source code, and lots of trial and error.

4. OTP overlap with other scheduling systems. This isn't a design flaw as much as a potential footgun depending on how you deploy Elixir code, but there is a lot of overlap between the cluster management support in Erlang/OTP and, for example, container orchestration in Kubernetes. Both support scheduling some concept of tasks, configuring redundant copies of tasks, detecting problems, and restarting tasks according to policy. Deploying an OTP application on top of Kubernetes (on top of Linux) results in 3 layers of OS-like task scheduling to learn, teach, maintain, and debug through, all with distinct tooling, terminology, and limitations.

All in all, I found Erlang/OTP to be a pretty interesting and compelling platform, especially for certain special purpose applications. If I ever use it again I'll probably skip the extra layer of Elixir syntax and write straight Erlang.

They still ship to the US at least, I've ordered from them recently.

SF weather is unusually consistent and most days it's on the cooler side but not super cold, often a bit cloudy/overcast. If you like that (I do), the weather is great. If not, the weather will be bad almost every day.