Nah, idealism is itself defeatism -- nothing sustains the status quo greater than people wallowing in speculation unmoored from reality instead of taking practical measures to address the problems before them.
Fortunately, we learned from this lesson, and we'll never let elites bring in tons of outsiders to push down the price of local labor, to the detriment of everyone but themselves.
This is just a long-winded way of saying it's popular. It's popular, therefore people know it, therefore they view whatever it does as "the standard." Kind of like... MS Windows?
It is based on checking features.
The feature-checking approach is slow and makes cross-compilation unnecessarily difficult. Plus a lot of the "features" that auto-conf checks for are things that haven't been an issue for decades, like "sizeof char"
Standardised doesn't mean popular. It means you know what --help, --enable-foo, DESTDIR, etc. will do and that you can rely on that format. It means packaging can rely on the same flow and common options for each package using autoconf. It then means that unless you've got very specific needs, your packaging can be abstracted to "here's the source, the name and the version - go!" and that's the abstraction many distros provide.
You're partly right but autoconf's design is pretty rigid. I've never seen one where the install destination isn't set via one of the standard flags like --prefix. But I have seen other build systems randomize their install processes. Maybe this is a function of what kind of people use each tool. Autotools is mainly adopted by experienced geeks. Other build systems are more beginner-friendly and that might result in less appropriate solutions being written.
Once you leave behind the simple things like --prefix, it's not that standardized. But, arguing over this is futile, this wheel has been reinvented innumerable times.
Sizeof char is still an issue because it can be changed via additional compiler options. I don't know why anyone would do it but you have to know it sometimes. Just because you or someone else has not had a need to use a thing doesn't mean nobody uses it. Making a decision about that really ought to involve a lot of people.
Cross-compiling with autotools seems like asking for trouble, but I bet it does do that. It even runs on Windows. I would discourage anyone from using it in general, but as a user it rarely causes problems for me.
1. Managers ARE bureaucrats, though. That's what the job is, integrating employees into processes. If you want to be a principal engineer doing architecture, that's a different career track than management.
2. You should not "get into trouble" for pushing back on flawed metrics, as long as the pushback is actionable and constructive. No metric may indeed be better than a bad metric in a lot of cases.
3. If you're "bringing everyone into the room" to make engineering decisions then either you have a very small company, or you just treat all engineers as juniors (meshes well with constant micromanagement, of course). Google doesn't "bring everyone into the room" to make tech decisions about networking, they bring the networking experts into the room (the "small decision groups" the author hates).
1 - I don't think he's trying to use bureaucrat precisely here - he's saying that the role of engineering manager is more valuable if they understand their domain vs. if they do not. This seems uncontroversial; staffing decisions for projects are more likely to be made correctly when those projects are understood.
2 - "should not" and "will not" are not the same thing. A huge part of bridging the divide between general management and engineering management is finessing the issue of performance/productivity measurement.
3 - Yeah I agree, I like a lot of Larson's stuff but not this. I kind of wonder how much of it is even real vs. just posturing; as you say it doesn't scale well at all, and he's worked at very large companies.
MATLAB is available for Linux. "Just switch OSes" seems like a perfectly valid and actionable piece of advice.
What's "useless" is sticking with an operating system that doesn't support the use-cases you need it to.
(Buying a license for Windows Enterprise might also be a valid and actionable course of advice -- I don't have experience there, but it should be considered if the use-case requires it.)
It's actually NOT ironic. You just don't happen to share the ethical framework that SBF and his parents were operating under. It's a framework under which the ends justify the means. If you want to learn more, you can look up "effective altruism."
It's funny that I got downvoted for this comment. Did you think I was supporting EA or something? I'm not. I just wanted to point out what they believe.
That’s a goddamned stretch if ever there was one. SoCal is more or less a recognizable region in California, and does indeed have almost 24M people, but nobody sane would call it a megalopolis without some weird agenda I can’t quite figure out.
Los Angeles is a city of about 3.9M. LA County is well, apparently experiencing some population decline because last I checked this was a little over 11M, but apparently as of 2023 is around 9.6M. If you count all the urban areas that touch, are surrounded by or very very close by without driving out into the bloody desert, “greater” LA, 18.4M is probably a reasonably close figure. Some of what’s on Wikipedia’s map is a stretch though. The further East you go, the more rural California gets until you’re either in Clark County or Arizona.
San Diego though is by no means part of that. It’s a large city in its own right and going downtown to downtown, you’re talking at least between 2 and 2.5 hours driving. You can also just fly, on a regular commercial airline.
A megalopolis isn't characterized by a placename and an airport. It's characterized by continuous development. You can drive from Ventura to Yucaipa to to Temecula to Rosarito Beach in Mexico, and the only time you'd need to get a mile away from of high-density development is 5 miles of I-15 in a mountain pass, or 10 miles of coastal highway, both to span the Santa Ana Mountains (property of the US Forest Service / Cleveland National Forest for the most part).
The Los Angeles Conurbation is about to swallow the northern Imperial Valley as well, because the I-10 corridor is made up of flat sandy dirt that could be a suburban back yard.
> A megalopolis (/ˌmɛɡəˈlɒpəlɪs/) or a supercity,[1] also called a megaregion,[2] is a group of metropolitan areas which are perceived as a continuous urban area through common systems of transport, economy, resources, ecology, and so on.[2] They are integrated enough that coordinating policy is valuable, although the constituent metropolises keep their individual identities.[2]
2 hours driving, in the US, is a natural distance for complementary but distinct cities to form. NYC/Philly/DC, SF/San Jose, LA/SD.
How is Tijuana, Mexico part of the Southern California megalopolis? That doesn't make much sense and I wouldn't consider San Diego part of the LA/OC megalopolis either, especially since there's a mountain range separating them with not much civilization in between.
Either way, we've got enough people to invade Australia and no Kokoda Trail is going to help them this time! We must get a plan to Gavin Newsom’s desk at once. The Koala mines will be ours!
The only thing that stops San Diego from being connected to LA/OC is the Camp Pendleton Marine base for about 7 miles. Basically you can go from Tijuana all the way up the coast to LA and only have that stretch not populated with civilians.
realism
reply