There are a couple of reasons as far as I can tell. Programming can be adequately gamified or fulfill basic dopaminergic feedback loops in a way that “true” creative expression (outside of an effort-action-reward feedback loop) cannot. With fiction, the value is strictly non-instrumental or context-specific. While the parsimony of the (formal) language you deploy can be (reflexively) satisfying to look back on, the real joy of art for its own sake is the response from the reader, which is necessarily slower than that of a computer, as it requires a more complicated system of evaluation than pure utility.
K8s really kills the urge to say “oh well I guess we can just do that file onto the server as a part of startup rather than use a db/config system/etc.” No more “oh shit the VM died and we lost the file that was supposed to be static except for that thing John wrote to update it only if X happened, but now X happens everyday and the file is gone”.. or worse: it’s in git but now you have 3 different versions that have all drifted due to the John code change.
K8s makes you use containers, which makes you not run things on your machine, which makes you better at CI, which.. (the list goes on, containers are industry standard for a lot of reasons). In general the 12 Factor App is a great set of ideas, and k8s lets you do them (this is not exclusive, though). Containers alone are a huge game changer compared to “cp a JAR to the server and restart it”
K8s makes it really really really easy to just split off that one weird cronjob part of the codebase that Mike needed and man, it would be really nice to just use the same code and dependencies rather than boilerplating a whole new app and deploy, CI, configs, and yamls to make that run. See points about containerization.
K8s doesn’t assume that your business will always be a website/mobile app. See the whole “edge computing” trend.
I do want to stress that k8s is not the only thing in the world that can do these or promote good development practices, and I do think it’s overkill to say that it MAKES you do things well - a foolhardy person can mess any well-intentioned system up.
Hell, I’m a fan of k8s even for sub-planetary scale (assuming that scale is ultimately a goal of your business, it’s nice to build for success). But I agree that saying “well, it’s either k8s or you will build k8s yourself” is just ignorant. There are a lot of options between the two poles that can be both cheap and easy and offload the ugly bits of server management for the right price and complexity that your business needs.
That isn’t really true when you factor in the cost of engineering new parts/systems compared to just doing it like you’ve always done.
I know a guy who worked at GM and apparently they got bit by the “digital transformation” bug and decided that the army of iPhone app developers and ex Silicon Valley folks was what they needed to stay relevant. Hence the omnipresent touch screen.
Agreed, sadly comment OP is in dreamland about why an E-commerce company would ever even consider doing anything to stop people from buying things, regardless of quality or any other external factor.
This is exactly the subthread of this conversation I’m interested in.
Is what you’re saying that capitalism breaks down resilience problems into efficiency problems?
I think that’s an extremely motivating line of thinking, but I’ll have to do some head scratching to figure out exactly what to make of it. On one hand, I think capitalism is really good at resilience problems (efficient markets breed resilience, there’s always an incentive to solve a market inefficiency), on the other (or perhaps in light of that) I’m not so sure those two concepts are so dialectically opposed
To understand the effects, we first have to take a step back and recognize that efficiency and resiliency problems are both subsets of optimization problems. Efficiency is concerned with maximizing the ratio of inputs to outputs, and resiliency is concerned with minimizing risk.
The fundamental tension arises because risk mitigation increases input costs. Over a given time horizon, there is an optimal amount of risk mitigation that will result in maximum aggregate profit (output minus input, not necessarily monetary). The longer the time horizon, the more additional risk mitigation is required, to prevent things like ruin risk.
But here’s the rub: competition reduces the time horizon to “very very short” because it drives down the output value. So in a highly competitive market, we see companies ignore resiliency (they cannot afford to invest in it) and instead they get lucky until they don’t (another force at work here is lack of skin in the game). The market deals with this by replacing them with another firm that has not yet been subject to the ruinous risks of the previous firm. This cycle repeats again and again.
Most resilient firms have some amount of monopolistic stickiness that allows them to invest more in resiliency, but it is also easy to look at those firms and see they are highly inefficient.
The point is that the cycle of firms has a cost, and it is not a trivial one: capital gets reallocated, businesses as legal entities are created, sold, and destroyed, contracts have to be figured out again, supply chains are disrupted, etc. Often, the most efficient outcome for the system is if the firms had been more resilient.
So there is an inefficient Nash equilibrium present in those sort of competitive markets.
That’s a good clarification about firms vs. the broader system. I think that’s a pretty good breakdown, overall, and fits well with the general notion that capitalism is resilient, not efficient, by offloading efficiency onto smaller entities which are efficient, not resilient. You could compare to command economies where a firm failure is basically a failure of the state, and can destabilize the future of the entire system.
Of course GDP increases when the money supply does. It’s like people being incensed at “record corporate profits” amidst inflation - profits will always be record (give or take) because remaining the same is losing money relative to the free money being minted each day, etc. For whatever reason, people naively buy into GDP as a valuable metric, even knowing well that there would be something extremely mysterious going on if that number somehow shrank while the real value of the medium exchange also shrank
Anecdotally, I’ve discussed this a lot with my friend who claims to have aphantasia, I’ve walked away less convinced. I think visual/spatial reasoning can be anywhere on a spectrum, but it likely can be improved. I recommend trying to develop this form of reasoning- it wasn’t hard at all for my friend, after a few algebra problems, to get a lot closer to accurate graphical reasoning. Once you go from “here’s what y = 3x approximately looks like” to “here’s what z = 2x + 3y looks like” it’s pretty easy to start describing shapes and talking about what they’d look like rotated about an axis, etc.
A big part of this, ironically, came from a discussion of Tears of the Kingdom, where my friend was simply unaware of the mechanisms he was using to solve the little visual puzzles. Once he started understanding how concepts like plane rotation mapped exactly to what that video game required, we both sort of had to pass on a belief in hard aphantasia. YMMV, totally possible that things like this are or at least seem impossible.
At any rate, I’m not sure the presence or absence of visual reasoning skills has much bearing on memory, as this particular guy has an incredible knack for learning languages that I just don’t have in the same degree. At any rate, all I want to do is encourage you in your quest for better memory skills!
I don't believe there is such a thing as aphantasia insofar as one does not hallucinate "inwardly" and that the "condition" is merely an artifact of the terminology we use to describe imagining something.
I am a person self-diagnosed with aphantasia. I can for example think of a cube that is placed in front of me. I can spin it on an axis and have a rough idea of where the rotated edges should be. I wouldn't be able to draw it, though, because I would just be guessing about the proportions, or reverting to tricks to draw perspective. Because I don't see the cube in any way. It's completely invisible. It's just an idea of what the cube's position might be in the space directly in front of me.
On the other hand, I can see hypnagogic images directly before falling asleep. These have fidelity, color, detail, look real, and are definitely visual. I also lucid dream occasionally, and the amount of visual detail there is more than I see in real life because of bad eyesight.
The cube I'm "picturing" in front of me, though, has no visual component at all.
I also remember reading about how in some study they watched the brain activity of people with normal visualization capabilities where the visual components of the brain lit up when they were visualizing but did not light up for people with aphantasia when they were visualizing (or trying to).
If people really have no visual component at all when they picture a cube in front of them, then I would agree that aphantasia is not a thing. But people I talk to go on and on about the level of detail they see and what they use visualization for without even consciously thinking about it.
>The cube I'm "picturing" in front of me, though, has no visual component at all.
Quite because that is not how the brain works, when imagining something we merely instantiate a generic of that class, it has no visual component although it has attributes, some of which may convey a visualization - the cube is red, the cube if oriented in the cavalier elevation, you describe it yourself as being "in front of (you)" in what regard could you consider this to be true even if it were inside of your head?
Through language we have been convinced of something that simply is not true, nobody wilfully hallucinates (internally or otherwise), to be aphantasiac is not to be special but to be aware of one's consciousness in a way that most people seemingly are not.
Of course it is self-diagnosed, even a pathological rubber stamp relies entirely on self-reported symptoms.
Interrogate anyone on the subject of their visual imagination long enough and you'll eventually bump up against inconsistencies or otherwise reluctant admission that they don't "see" anything.
NATS, especially in its most elementary form, is braindead simple, stateless, and ootb functional. If I only want a message broker/pubsub, I pick that. If I know on day 1 that I need queues or persistence, I would probably pick Rabbit over NATS’ offering (Jetstream).
Would you use NATS over Redis PubSub or Postgres Notify/Listen? Postgres's option I'm wary of for reasons I've discussed here before but Redis PubSub seems fairly simple to use and likewise not as uber-scalable as Kafka and other more heavyweight message broker systems.
Not the parent, but I would. We've been using NATS for about five years at my company, and we recently adopted JetStream, and have been really impressed with it.
NATS, especially with JetStream now, is a Swiss Army knife of messaging. It can do RPC, Kafka-type batch streaming, low-latency realtime notifications, large-scale network transfer, offline sync, work queues, mirroring, weighted routing, partitioning... it's incredibly flexible. The simple but powerful primitive you have around subject routing/mapping/transforms, stream placement, replication, offline lead nodes etc. are just fantastic. It's super reliable. It scales from tiny apps to huge ones. The CLI and API tooling around streams and consumers is also fantastic.
Everything just feels well-designed and sensible. The new key/value store and blob store (both built on top of JetStream as client-side abstractions) are also super neat, and we've started using this functionality.
Yes, and no issues at all. We run superclusters with a bunch of nodes, and the Raft-based leader election system has worked flawlessly so far (knock on wood!).
Keep in mind that NATS does not yet support value operations other than setting the whole value. Optimistic locking is supported, but NATS does not have inc/decrement, append, set members, etc. I believe such support is on the horizon, however.
I would probably use NATS just because I’m more familiar. I love redis but I’m fairly skeptical when my database starts wanting to be my message broker
An open argument doesn't automatically mean hard metrics.
Instead, both sides have to be discussing in good faith, curious about the problem, and open to a variety of conclusions.
If management has already made their decision, that's not going to happen. If employees have already decided to ignore anything that doesn't support WFH, that's not going to happen.
The greatest failure in modern debate is not honestly engaging with data contrary to the outcome one wants.
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