jarvuschris

The thing is, there really is no such thing as a "free market" as most who are in love with the term envision

ALL markets are BORN of regulations. A market is what emerges when you lay some shared ground rules: here's what a pound is, here's a standard currency, here's some laws about commerce, here's a court system for mediating disputes.

So the question isn't ever really about free or not free—it's what are the rules and who sets them

99 out of 100 times the people spending money pushing the virtue of a "free market" really just want to be the ones setting the rules and steering them in their favor

Replace "free market" with "competitive market"—what most people actually want when they talk about free markets—and suddenly a lot of what Bezos is going to argue for stops making sense

Such an over-engineered API and then you use 1 and 0 instead of boolean for the fundamentally boolean thing that's the whole fking point lol, I'm out

^ This right here. This article is pretty hogwash IMO

Points 1 and 3 aren't relevant if they aren't recording the data. Companies in other jurisdictions have no magic invulnerability you can trust to their data getting out (legally or illegally) if they're storing it.

Points 2 and 5 are equally true of any open source project unless you run it yourself from source. There are _plenty_ of examples of users getting phished by maliciously built/hosted open source tools

Point 4 is obviously not malicious tracking and a mistake any project could make

At the end of the day though, unless you're going to run everything yourself (which most people aren't) you have to pick who to trust -- some random person running a server somewhere, or a company with hundreds of employees recruited under the premise of working on a privacy-centric search engine who could all turn whistleblower

You can use it to load or compute derivatives of environmental configuration once

Chef's Habitat is a really powerful nix-like system that I find to be a bit more practical. Like nix though it suffers from being a complete paradigm shift that people coming in from the imperative OS world struggle trying to map their existing patterns into

It's kind of sad because it's a far better way to manage deployments and environments...but it takes 1-2 years of practice to really get proficient at

> you wouldn't learn all the meta of a language like C++ in a couple of months.

I think this reinforces OP' point though: what we really need are descriptions more specific than "software developer" but less specific than "$language developer"

> some languages force you to learn so much other "stuff" before you can be professionally productive in it

And it's exactly that stuff that should be the focus of describing the role. e.g. you're looking for a low-level network software developer with proficiency in memory management. If you were recruiting someone to help you with a Go or Rust codebase in that domain, you wouldn't pass over someone with a ton of relevant experience via C++ who hadn't spent much time with Rust/Go yet.

Focusing on the language rather than the skills/application (even when there's a heavy correlation between the language and associated skills) excludes good candidates and includes irrelevant ones

I hope the team is thinking of dusting of GitBook Editor too

I've switched from GitBook mostly to mkdocs-material for technical docs

Chef Habitat might be more what you're looking for in that regard, it very much feels like an intellectual derivative of NixOS and focuses on the cloud native story

> Agreed. The only place where software that the OP wants to create can reside is in the hobbyist community or free, open source community. In the real world this isn’t cost effective or viable.

You're talking about a world though where only large enterprises are served well by tailored software. Malleable systems don't make sense in large enterprises and global-scale solutions

But what about all the spaces currently underserved by current "best practices"? Smaller organizations, closer to the ground, where things are inherently less scalable.

Think of all the places it makes sense to use WordPress, but where information/workflow tools being having a website are needed

WordPress is an excellent example of a malleable system

Proper software engineers will poo-poo all day on WordPress' bad architecture and the messes users make with it

But also, it has empowered millions to create and by some estimates it powers ~30% of the internet

These facts are not unrelated. Sometimes it's OK to let people make messes, sometimes "good engineering" isn't as important as creative liberty

Good recommendation, thanks!

The antidote to today's rampant centralization of technical infrastructure isn't rampant decentralization though

The PC revolution happened when people become empowered to work together fluidly in a pyramid of specialization and cost sharing

Where we need to focus is opportunistic clustering, both of development and operations