I doubt the people engaging in this behavior have stopped to consider the commons and the tragedies thereof that this kind of aggregate behavior might induce. Just because it works, doesn't mean it's not stupid.
This is the endgame of rent-seeking and an abundance of (concentrated) capital, in a country that is largely comfortable letting everyone fend for themselves. Who needs to build cars when you can tickle Sam Altman's Markov chain generator for $45,000 a month? I mean, I don't blame anyone, and I need money as much as the next husk of a man, but I really wish hustle culture would stop permeating every last open space of our lives. I'm depressed about it, too, and I don't see it getting better any time soon.
Which country are you referring to? You will find a lot of hope if you study a little history and see how this has always been the case. I would guess that in terms of rent seeking and of hustle and useless products things are improving and much better than they used to be. It’s too easy to forget the vast array of useless and even harmful crap people have been selling for centuries if you didn’t live through it and/or don’t know about it. How many civilizations in history had despotic kings that controlled all housing and income, and nobody was allowed to earn their own money? The existence of someone making a decent living on products you don’t appreciate isn’t evidence of rent seeking, it’s evidence that we have more freedom than ever before, and that people have a wide range of tastes and the ability to spend a few bucks on little things they enjoy or save them small amounts of time, no?
What a weird take, as if someone building cars is prevented by them also selling supposed pet rocks online. Lots of people, Musk included, made enough money from throwaway startups to then work on the bigger problems, as they're actually financially secure to do so at that point, the Maslow's hiararchy of needs in action. If you don't like someone's product, don't buy it, but if other people find them useful, good for them and good for the creator.
I was bullied fairly relentlessly in school. Not sure cameras would've helped (don't even remember if we had them in classrooms), especially the verbal stuff, but I also don't like the idea of always being watched. Honestly, I would rather have the administration be less afraid of lawsuits and covering its own ass with comfortable lies like zero tolerance. Being bullied and then having the vice principal tell you "they were only joking" was the ACTUAL travesty, not any lack of surveillance. Fix the broken authority figures before instituting the Panopticon.
Couldn't agree more. There seems to be some fundamental human dynamic at play here that I don't fully understand. Teachers and school administrators know exactly who they bullies are, yet they will tolerate and even actively enable them. They will punish any victim of bullying who dares to fight back with alacrity.
My personal and unproven theory is that most school staff are bullies/cowards themselves (two sides of the same coin). They have a instinctive fear of punishing bullies and dealing with the blowback from their parents because the odds are good that bully parents will raise bully kids. Victims are often socially awkward and an easy target to punish without much risk to the teacher.
> There seems to be some fundamental human dynamic at play here that I don't fully understand.
The dynamic is laws and standards of evidence in court that make expulsion of problematic kids too costly, for example IDEA 2004.
Video and audio evidence is the only lawsuit proof mechanism to prove the problem child needs to be punished. And this applies in the adult world too, see cops and body/smartphone cameras.
And with these kind of settlement amounts, everyone is going to look to minimize their liability and maximize their plausible deniability, including teachers, taxpayers, admin staff, and the school district itself:
The body cam analogy is a little tricky here though. Bullying is generally a pattern borne out over many months or years, often with the intensity of individual instances only ever rising to the level of minor annoyance.
Someone getting jumped? Video helps a lot. Someone being subtly poked and prodded for months on end who then turns around and punches a bully in the face… who is now expellable at the bully’s parents’ whim even though every individual in the school knows what happened?
> even though every individual in the school knows what happened?
And let's be real here, this includes the teachers. I, and most of my peers, thought our teachers were ignorant to most of the drama in school. I went back a couple of years after I graduated, and learned that teachers generally know exactly what's going on, who is in what relationships, what fights are going on, and yes, who is a bully.
> My personal and unproven theory is that most school staff are bullies/cowards themselves
There’s some wisdom here. What I’ve heard before is that teachers enjoy the feeling of school popularity and the power that comes from it. Perhaps the fact that teachers in Japan also engage in bullying validates this theory.
IMO administrators tend to be craven bureaucrats who fail to back up their frontline workers (teachers, security, or custodial staff) in almost any difficult situation.
Exactly. Kids are already living in an excessively sheltered world. I don’t buy into the “bullying makes you stronger” bullshit but kids should be able to go walk around outside and play in the woods and build their own little tiny societies before they enter the real one.
And in tiny societies, just like in the real one, there will be injustices that need to be managed by some mechanism other than just “don’t go outside, put cameras everywhere.”
I mean this genuinely: do you have anxiety? Because I do, and it can make it hard to handle uncertainty and the feeling of not having control. A big project, especially one with lots of things left to do, is the definition of uncertainty. So, instead of tackling the anxiety-inducing project work, you spend time trying to cope by erecting larger and larger edifices of organization. The problem is that this never actually helps, because rearranging Jira columns doesn't get code written. But it, briefly, makes you feel better, and can even feel like progress. It's a sort of avoidant mechanism. I have OCD, and one of my compulsions is counting. Anxiety is the actual problem, and counting is the maladaptive coping mechanism. It's possible that spending too much time on organization tools functions similarly.
If this affects other portions of your life, some mild therapy might not be a bad idea. Otherwise, you might consider trying a very lightweight system, like notes in a text file, but with very actionable goals and milestones. Start with your end result, and work backwards. What would it take to get to, say, a production web service? Then write TODOs as you break the chunks up. Crucially, tell yourself that you can totally do the work, and then do a small task. You know how to do the work, but it's easy to talk yourself out of it. And it won't always be easy, but so what? It's a personal project, the stakes are so low! And it's supposed to be fun anyway, not a chore. But you have to think about why you're worried so much about finding the perfect tool, because I think that's the root of the issue.
Caveat: not a psychologist, just someone who struggles with anxiety and a crippling inability to get things done. :) I hope this helps a bit.
I do have anxiety. I think it is exacerbated when I use digital tools because anything can be edited/improved at any time. I can expend considerable mental resources in analysis paralysis. What should I call this user story? Do I need to break it down into smaller ones? Is this description of the issue accurate or am I being sloppy with my thinking/writing? How much specification should I do before I start coding? Do I need to document my thinking process? Do I archive or delete the user story once it's done? Do I need to transfer any of the insights acquired while completing it into long-term storage, like a knowledge management system (Zettelkasten, Notion, Confluence, ...)? And so on.
Jira to me is like a playground of torture machines haha. Oh, I can link this issue to this Confluence page. Oh, I can build a custom workflow from scratch and set conditions for issue completion. Oh, I can limit the number of cards in a column.
The weird thing is that I KNOW that I don't need any of this shit. Because I've done this many times before only to then delete all these projects and databases and go back to pen and paper. And yet, sometimes I feel like THIS TIME I'll do it right and stick with the system long enough, until it begins to return on my investment with productivity and clarity dividends. But this never happens.
Recently I've been experimenting with keeping an engineering logbook. One notebook for EVERYTHING. No tearing out pages. Chronological order, naturally. I like that all of its power is contained within the limitations of its physical form. Funny how it's the limitations that liberate.
I am rambling. But this reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Lao Tzu: "Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?" Project management, the way I am doing it, is like stirring the water and the mud trying to force clarity.
Are these extremely large shops in some sort of pocket universe? Because I've been around the block enough to regularly experience Kubernetes's issues over and over again, and I'd say that the GP comment you're critiquing is actually right on the money. In my experience, people downplaying Kubernetes's drawbacks have either never been bitten by them, or make a lot of money by getting people to use Kubernetes.
Complex systems are complex. If you don’t need it, don’t use it.
But you’re absolutely wrong to call it unreliable. I’ve also “been around the block”, and I’ve seen 50k lines of BASH fail in complex ways too.
A google search would show you plenty of extremely large shops using k8s, and dozens or hundreds of tech talks by their lead engineers saying how much better it made their lives.
Let's be clear: all of the YAML-cum-DSL K8s deployment options are terrible. It's still just templating with extra steps. But Kubernetes is, fundamentally, one big while(1) loop turning YAML into infrastructure, so, eventually, you have to target YAML. It's just unfortunate that we got to "spicy regexes with if statements" and then stopped, instead of using something more robust.
Not having DBAs, the people with the actual skills to run the databases you need, available when you need them, certainly sounds like a business staffing problem, and not an engineering problem. Why are inexperienced developers managing databases in the first place? Or is this something people think you can just wing and be okay?
Who says ‘inexperienced developers are managing databases’? That is not the use case EDB is advocating with cnpg, EDB offers a Postgres DBaaS for developers.
The README [0] explains that CloudNativePG has been designed by Postgres experts with Kubernetes administrators in mind. Put simply, it leverages Kubernetes by extending its controller and by defining, in a programmatic way, all the actions that a good DBA would normally do when managing a highly available PostgreSQL database cluster.
