We have hundreds of thousands of lines of ruby code spanning many services / monoliths. Even now I find it somewhat annoying to open a controller / component that is basically an empty class def but somehow executes a bunch of complex stuff via mixins, monkey patches etc, and you have to figure out how.
We are turning to https://sorbet.org/ to reign in the madness. I'm keen to know if others are doing the same, and how they are finding it (pros and cons)
I have used Sorbet in my web framework. The method signatures can be tedious to type out sometimes, but it helps a lot when refactoring code. I feel more confident that my changes will work. It's not as flexible as TypeScript, but it's pretty good and has saved me from mistakes many times. The language server helps a lot with autocompletion so I don't have to keep every little detail in my head all the time. Sometimes I have to structure the code a little bit different just to make Sorbet happy which is annoying, but I've also been able to replace huge parts of the codebase quite easily.
I think millions of years of natural selection are a better advisor than a stranger on the internet, or teachings of the status quo.
We have the innate capacity to love and hate, to feel attracted or repulsed etc.
If the capacity to be bitter has survived millions of years of natural selection, perhaps it serves a function, however hard we tell each other to look down on it.
Evolution has also produced fatal cancer in infants, among other miserable horrors. The existence of a property in evolved creatures does not imply that it is adaptive.
Clearly everyone possesses the capacity for bitterness, as they are able to agree on its meaning. Otherwise they couldn't possibly know what the word means.
Clearly natural selection has selected for this capacity.
You pretend to disprove the adaptive nature of a trait by trotting forth "fatal cancer in infants" which clearly natural selection would not systematically select for without good reason. Perhaps artificial human doctrines have the capacity to selectively advantage "fatal cancer in infants" but brutal natural selection wouldn't. Natural selection is the abacus of the grim reaper.
You may call it a dark calculation, but do you know whats worse than a "fatal infant cancer"?
Two or more cases of this "fatal infant cancer"!
I know almost no one who has "fatal infant cancer", yet I have never met a person without the capacity for bitterness.
So you then finally agree evolution removes fatal cancers in infants (at least to the point of rare events) instead of producing it as you claimed earlier.
unlike the statistics for "fatal cancer in infants" the capability to feel bitter is essentially universal, so clearly it serves some purpose.
Regardless of the myriads of contributing causes producing such cancers, natural selection eliminates these cancers, especially fatal childhood cancers.
> Your debate approach of declaring my position to be the opposite of what I say is no fun. I'm not going to continue.
The fact that I deduce a statement from your position which contradicts another of your positions is not a bad debate approach but simply an example of the principle of explosion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
That is what happens if you build a strawman: you pretend my argument relies merely on "the existence of a property" ignoring that occurence rates and probabilities actually span a spectrum, from marginally close to the impossible 0% to marginally close to a 100% certain. If the capability to emote bitterness is nearly universal among a species then it is a trait, not "existence of a property".
most renaissance and baroque works for plucked instruments (lutes, baroque guitars) were originally notated in tablature and such scores can certainly be found at IMSLP. If you think "guitar tabs" are a recent invention you're quite wrong.
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Currently, ammonia is synthesized through the Haber–Bosch process by converting hydrogen and nitrogen into ammonia. In this process, hydrogen is mainly produced via steam methane reforming. This fact makes the process of fossil-fuel-based ammonia synthesis very carbon dioxide intensive, accounting for ≈1% of the global carbon dioxide emissions.[11, 16] Yet more sustainable ammonia synthesis pathways are under development to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions in the ammonia industry.[11, 16] For instance, the electrically driven hybrid Haber–Bosch process (via replacing the steam methane reforming by water electrolysis to obtain green hydrogen and coupling with an ammonia synthesis reactor in the Haber–Bosch process) or direct electrosynthesis using renewable energy (via nitrogen reduction reaction) enables the production of green ammonia.[11, 16]
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I work at a company that is creating better electrolyzers for this process. Ammonia producers are clamoring for this technology. It works, and it is happening!
Could ammonia be used for stable seasonal storage of energy?
The abstract suggests that ammonia is much nicer to transport and store than hydrogen. If we can use it to store summer solar to run winter heat-pumps with a low roundtrip efficiency but even lower costs per kWH of capacity it could really help.
It could work theoretically. The only question is if it is economical to do so. And the answer to that is probably not. It ranks pretty low on the list of possible solutions in terms of cost and efficiencies.
Hydrogen and ammonia (you typically generate one to generate the other) are interesting as a fuel in some use cases (anywhere the weight of lithium ion batteries is a problem basically). Main use cases seem to be shipping, and maybe long haul aviation. Probably not for road transport (battery electric seems adequate there for most vehicle categories).
But as a battery/energy storage solution it makes less sense. The round trip from solar/wind energy to hydrogen to ammonia and back to electricity loses most of the energy in the process. It's doable but there are probably more efficient and cheaper ways to store the energy. You lose about half (at least, that's a super optimistic percentage) of the energy creating the hydrogen. Then some more creating the ammonia. And then some more converting that back to electricity. It's pretty easy to waste less energy than that.
For heat, simple thermal mass is very efficient, low tech, and has already been demonstrated to work for seasonal storage. Throwing away half the energy to create ammonia simply makes no sense. All you need for thermal mass is some basalt, sand, etc. with a lot of mass, a container to put it in, and some cheap way to insulate it (wool would do the job). Heat it up in the summer, extract heat in the winter. It scales. The raw materials are dirt cheap (because they are literally dirt), the complexity is low (pipes, plumbing, insulators, sand/rock).
Long term storage solutions are dominated by capital cost. You can use batteries to store electricity from day to night because you recoup part of your capital investment every day for ten years or so. But if you can only sell electricity once a year, then whatever profit you make it better be good, because you only get that 10 times in 10 years. The alternative is to have dirt cheap capital cost.
Pumped storage works where the lake and dam already exist, because the capital storage is essentially zero.
Everywhere else, nothing works. Batteries don't work, chemical storage (like ammonia or hydrogen) doesn't, compressed air, or molten salt, nothing works.
What will work is a way to "cheat". If you can mimic the day-night cycle of batteries and make a profit every day, you win. The way to do that is by long-distance transportation: you make ammonia in Australia, or Morocco, or Saudi Arabia and sell it in Japan, China or Europe. You may incur round trip losses of 80% or more, but if the price you pay for one kwh is one cent, and you sell for 10 cents, you can still make a profit.
Ammonia can indeed be used as a longish term energy storage. It's not as great as methane (that can be pumped into underground caverns), but it liquefies at room temperature at just around 9 atmospheres or at -33C at atmospheric pressure.
What's interesting is that H2 + N2 -> NH3 reaction is thermodynamically favorable, so in theory with a good enough catalyst it can be driven at mild conditions.
And this has actually been achieved back in early 2000-s! But the catalysts are very finicky and they get poisoned too quickly for industrial use. Additionally, it'd be nice to be able to use water instead of hydrogen directly.
And yet the creation of hydrogen through electrolysis of water is both well understood and potentially green if solar and wind electricity is used for electrolysis. This would also bypass either the capital intensive requirement to moderate solar and wind electricity with battery energy storage and/or the losses in transmitting solar and wind electricity over the grid.
Coffee naps have definitely helped me meet deadlines lol. The idea is to skull a cup of strong coffee, and have a nap for 15 mins... just enough time to clear the
adenosine, and for the caffeine to enter the bloodstream and block the receptors
I think theres an order to abstraction. Variables, functions, classes / modules, classlibs / pacckages, microservices etc... and with each bump up comes maintenance overhead, version management, integration testing, monitoring etc. so it has to be warranted. There are obviously very legitimate, and pragmatic cases for microservices, but just a monoliths are a magnet attracting all code to an ever growing codebase (i.e. its easier to just add it to the monolith), microservices tend to breed microservices.
Conways law is also a real thing. Sometimes, microservices are a practical choice given team structures and ownership, rather than product reasons.... likewise the monolith. Sometimes with a smaller team(s), the monolith is the most pragmatic option, as increasing product complexity due to all the above needs, reduces the capacity for other work.
Sometimes - its a good thing to embrace conways and run with it, as opposed to discovering it as a side affect.
Fear of change keeps you locked into misery. If at all possible take steps to get a new vision of your future and change careers, cos your current vision of your future is sounding pretty bleak (at least from your perspective).
If you need encouragement, try and find others stories of career change, and how they did it - there are plenty of them out there.... From https://www.ambisie.com/st/kerry-kitzelman :
"Some jobs can be like golden handcuffs. They pay well but you feel trapped by them. You are afraid to step out and make a change in case you wind up worse than before. Some jobs are like cardboard handcuffs, they pay nothing but you still allow yourself to be trapped by them because of fear of the unknown.
Making a decision to change may indeed result in your fears being realised, but facing that fear gives you the courage to overcome.
Since the day I decided to cut the umbilical cord to poorly paid employment, I have not been afraid to apply for any position I think I might enjoy and be rewarded for. It sometimes means steep learning curves and working harder than anyone else on your team, especially those that have the experience you don't. But the reward is that the world opens up to you. There is so much more opportunity than you could possibly have imagined."
Glad I didn’t read this on a Monday! I found this article to be a bit of a bleak outlook, or interpretation of life. At least Ecclesiastes offers a little bit more hope of finding meaning in the ritual than this article (thanks for posting).
‘This is what I have observed to be good: that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot.’
So I guess it acknowledges that we are in the pursuit of contentment / satisfaction - not money... at what ever level of ritual we are following
We are turning to https://sorbet.org/ to reign in the madness. I'm keen to know if others are doing the same, and how they are finding it (pros and cons)