People do joke about being dangerous without their morning coffee, but I have yet to see a coffee addict breaking into vehicles to score their morning fix. Also I have never had to worry someone is going to mug my loved ones to get some quick cash for a double-double. And have you ever heard of someone who skips important appointments because they stayed out getting high on caffeine instead
Pretending caffeine is as detrimental to our society as e.g. fentanyl is prime intellectual dishonesty.
Only drugs that have artificially high prices caused by having no legal source lead to addicts committing crime to find their habit. Caffeine and alcohol are cheap and easily available.
With all due respect, I've heard the exact same thing from a number of folks taking Opioids after surgery. They were right, fortunately, and navigated their withdrawal symptoms without incident.
I'm sure you're right too, but it's not a particularly convincing argument. I've definitely seen behaviors that horrify me from some of the caffeine addicts in my life. I bet caffeine prohibition would lead to a rise in domestic disputes, for starters, followed by Starbucks speakeasys and coffee cartels.
> Pretending caffeine is as detrimental to our society as e.g. fentanyl is prime intellectual dishonesty.
These are your words, not OP's. OP isn't claiming that caffeine is as bad as any other drug. They're claiming that it, like other drugs, is likely to have negative health effects that outweigh positive ones and that it's interesting that it gets a special place in our culture while other drugs get banned and shunned.
Nothing in that claim says that caffeine is as bad as the worst illegal drugs.
> They're claiming that it, like other drugs, is likely to have negative health effects that outweigh positive ones
That alone is a strong and unsupported statement. Drugs frequently involve tradeoffs, but saying the negative out weighs the positive is not the same thing.
People would absolutely be burglarizing homes to feed their caffeine habit if caffeine wasn't dirt cheap due to the free market. If it were legal to produce meth your local meth-head would not be raiding your house for copper because it would be cheap enough that his minimum wage job could support his habit.'
And frankly I've showed up to important events absolutely fucking geeked on caffeine, feeling like complete dogshit, but because caffeine use is normalized no one bats an eye.
It feels like the strength and type of withdrawal symptoms for each substance plays a big role here.
I've only ever been addicted to caffeine and cigarettes and while my withdrawal symptoms were terrible (almost-disabling headaches, anxiety, etc) I don't think they were ever so bad that it would make me violent.
As opposed to people I knew that were addicted to cocaine and meth which would go absolutely crazy for their next fix. In the particular case of the person that was addicted to cocaine, money was not an issue and would still become violent when the fix was not available, so I don't think it's necessarily a function of price or access to it.
Of course, my sample size is very small but given that I also know a ton of people that quit cigarettes and caffeine without becoming violent, I would say withdrawal symptoms are probably a strong component on how violent people get.
Drug war bad, but I'm not sure these drugs can be equated so simply. Caffeine has a mild euphoric effect but not nearly as much as meth. Both caffeine users and meth users are prone to hyper-focused behavior loops - e.g. super meticulous house cleaning. But meth is so much more euphoric that the behaviors don't have to be intrinsically rewarding at all. For many people, when you feel that high, doing pretty much anything is rewarding. That's why you get weird behaviors on meth like people pulling out their hairs one by one, or completely disassembling a working TV.
Those behaviors are not conducive to holding down most jobs. If our society did more work educating and supporting people in productively integrating their use of drugs into a functional lifestyle, maybe it would be less of a problem. Certainly there are some ways people could use meth that are positive. But I still think there's something about meth that makes it more likely to ruin lives than caffeine.
>People would absolutely be burglarizing homes to feed their caffeine habit if caffeine wasn't dirt cheap due to the free market.
I'm about as caffeinated as most anyone else I know, and I would not. There are times where just putting on a pot of coffee is too much work for me to make my daily fix and I lazily skip it for the day.
I do get withdrawal headaches and probably behave a bit differently, but even then sometimes I don't make the effort to get it. I've been at conference and hotels where the only options were so badly made I skipped it for days and just took the headache.
I have to agree when my coworkers and I are chugging energy drinks from before work till the afternoon. I finally quit that level of intake because of panic attacks (still have 1-2 cups of coffee occasionally).
So many programmers saw "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" and thought it means "Caring about performance makes you a heretic".
You can't hotspot optimize a Fiat Multipla into an Formula 1 car. When every software you run creates a dozen factories to replace one for-loop, you get the modern desktop experience
> So many programmers saw "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" and thought it means "Caring about performance makes you a heretic".
This is very well said. Also, with enough experience, many good programmers will "know" where the hotspots will be, while writing the code. So, they can be "sloppy" in areas where it doesn't matter, and "care more about performance" in areas where it will likely matter much more.
I think the key idea is that this system is meant to require zero maintenance; it automates updates, it provides rollbacks if anything goes wrong, it prevents most ways of modifying the OS and sticks applications in containers/sandboxes.
> Every Linux distro promises they are the ”works out of the box” one
Well not every - Arch, Gentoo, Alpine, Slackware, NixOS...
Funny that you mentioned these distro but I've never installed them, perhaps installed Slackware once, more than 20 years ago then just used Red Hat 7 (the original 7 not the later 7 version). After that Ubuntu and its derivatives.
What people don't realized that most of the Windows and MacOS users never installed their desktop OS, it come pre-installed. The main problem with these "works out the box" distro, there's no "box" to start with. Tried to installed Gentoo when it's initially released but it's a death by thousand cuts if you know what I meant, conflict after conflict resolution, and painfully slow installation process due to it's a source based distro.
If Aeon can work as promised, I think it will be a huge success provided that they solve the installation nightmare of many Linux OS and install seamlessly on mainstream laptop hardware.
> The main problem with these "works out the box" distro, there's no "box" to start with.
You know, I realized this recently, as I was updating the HW in my desktop PC. After days of trying to figure out why an AMD GPU is power throttling (and thus giving me ~20% of the performance I paid for), I just gave up and installed Windows.
It pains me (and honestly, it's a huge pain to set up Windows from scratch as well), but at least the proprietary driver blobs that you can download work as advertised.
This really showed me that in my free time, I don't want to futz around with setting up my HW on Linux. I just want to use it. And even though I bought a computer that officially supports Linux (intel nuc extreme), the experience of setting it up is pretty bad even for me, a software engineer who's been using and administering Linux for the past ~15 years at work.
As a total newbie I saved my company a quarter million dollars in Oracle licensing in a single afternoon by rewriting a PL/SQL function. That change was a few lines of SQL. Seniors don’t have a monopoly on good ideas.
Salary is driven by market conditions and nothing else. It is not an approximation of merit or even delivered value.
This is laughably false. The highly-paid, experienced seniors produce so much more value than juniors that it's not even in the same ballpark. It's also usually the kind of value that juniors don't even notice, because it's not measured in lines of code.
A good junior will write a hundred lines of code in a day. A good senior will delete a hundred because they realize the user dictated a solution instead of detailing their problem, asked them, and figured out that they can solve that problem by changing a config variable somewhere.
Violent agree on variance in value produced. Violent disagree on that junior, senior or other titles or roles have such strong correlations. For very simple reasons: we can’t measure value, and we absolutely can’t measure value within a performance review cycle.
The most devastating value destruction (aside from the rare intern deleting the prod db) that I’ve seen consistently is with senior/rockstars who introduce new tech, takes credit, moves on. There’s a reason for the term resume driven development. Think about what a negative force multiplier can do for an org.
How does violent agree/disagree work? Like after you conclude you agree/disagree to this internet text, do you then proceed to scream out on your balcony that which you agree with / smash up your apartment in rage, respectively?
I don't know, I think where I work we have a pretty good idea for the value each person brings. I don't know how much they're paid, but I do know how good each person is (including whether they tend to complicate things, to use exciting technologies, etc).
But that’s the entire point you’re missing. The pay is not proportional to contribution or technical skill. It’s proportional to market forces and negotiation skill.
I know what level each of our people is, and levels are compensated fairly evenly. The fact that I don't know exact numbers doesn't mean I don't have a proxy.
> This is laughably false. The highly-paid, experienced seniors produce so much more value than juniors that it's not even in the same ballpark. It's also usually the kind of value that juniors don't even notice, because it's not measured in lines of code.
This particular case sounds like someone got incorrectly hired as a junior. Maybe they didn't have enough "real world" corporate experience and that is why they weren't offered a senior position?
It's true, not "laughably false". I've seen with my own eyes the most effective developer in a company being paid in the bottom quartile, as well as a vice versa case.
In the former case, we basically had to demand management raise his salary to the low end of his market value, over the cause of six months, until they finally gave in. It was just so disgusting to us we couldn't let it go.
The reason comes down to a skill bias - it's a different skill set to navigate other people into getting yourself a good salary, versus navigating the ins and outs of coding. The skills don't overlap, so time spent on one detracts from another.
In the end he finally got the message we kept ramming in to his head, applied to work at a brand-name tech company, and instantly more than doubled his salary. He could've done so years earlier.
This stuff is the norm. I've been a manager having eyes on salaries while also having eyes on people's performance (although unfortunately not much of a lever on the former), and rest assured it is often a very jarring experience. Like "that person should be let go immediately / that person should job hop immediately".
> instantly more than doubled his salary. He could've done so years earlier.
So it's not true, then?
The GP claims this is universally true. All I need to do is post a counterexample, and I did. Yes, there are shitty companies that try to keep salaries as low as possible, not realizing that that will lose them their best people. Don't work for those!
My view as a burgeoning senior dev is that the "senior" bit is generally less about coding and more about domain knowledge.
Understanding the business processes of your industry, how to solicit feedback from and interact with end users, how to explain things to management/sell on ideas.
If you put a junior dev in front of a panel of executives and ask them to explain requirements for a project odds are quite high they will info dump tech mumbo-jumbo. A senior should be able to explain risks, benefits, timelines, and impacted areas of the business in a manner that non technical people can easily grok.
I'm mid-level engineer. Honestly, several staff+ engineers may not be spitting tech mumbo-jumbo, but they do dump all other kind of BS. Political BS, "tactical tornados"[1]. May not necessarily mean they were good at engineering, but just good with people skills. Obviously, not everyone is like that, but I would say many are.
For me, "senior" just counts the amount of time they've been doing something. If someone isn't very good at something after putting ten thousand hours into it, they just might work at microsoft.
Statistically speaking a senior (more experienced) engineer is more likely to consistently deliver time saving results, while a junior is more likely to occasionally do it, if ever.
Proving it’s not a one time thing is what pushes you in the salary and seniority ranking.
Senior engineers have less opportunity to write time consumingly careful code because they get paid so much. Much easier to throw new great hardware at it.
The corporate structures that reward people who prove especially good at building the product with more meetings and less time building the product are perhaps not optimal in their deployment of resources.
Maximising the fraction of the product built by people who don't know what they're doing would however explain the emergent properties of modern software.
Not a monopoly, but a majority. Many juniors who do have that potential don't ever get put in such a situation.
Junior/senior isn't necessarily about skill level; I'm sure many can find a senior with 1YOE ten times over. It's about trust both in technical and sociopolitical navigation through the job. That's only really gained with time and experience (and yes, isn't perfect. Hence, the aforementioned 1x10 senior. Still "trusted" more than a 1 year junior).
Many of the proposed syntaxes for this feature were absolutely bonkers, nearly as bad as the ones proposed for raw strings. The JVM is technically impressive, but the syntax is almost C++ levels of terrible
I have yet to see the real-world project where a nicer interface to the JVM makes the difference. Not saying that they don't exist, just that they are way less than one would assume.
Yep. Just like Clojure, Scala and others, depending on the flavor. Just language-wise there is little reason for Java. But tooling and ecosystem are of course also relevant.
I would expect that of Apple, yes. Apple should eat its own dog food to make sure that the iOS security model doesn't require exceptions for their own applications.
...which doesn't make it right. Even the existence of "private APIs" is a massive red flag. If an operating system feature is accessible from user space, then it should also be documented, supported and legal to use.
I just don’t agree with this for a moment. And ironically the topic was covered in Gruber’s WWDC talk. What you’re proposing is exactly the same as saying that Apple is not allowed to privately test their APIs and frameworks in their own software before they let others use them.
Of course they should be able to do that. Of course they do not have an obligation to open everything to everyone at all times.
This is not like the bad old days where Microsoft used private APIs to disadvantage third party software in an operating system that literally had 95% world wide market share. I don’t know what share iOS has, but it’s a tiny fraction of the installed base of all operating systems.
It’s my device. I should have the right to invoke any API, public or private, just as Apple has the right to change the private APIs out from under me. Same as on the Mac.
I disagree. I want my phone to Just Work. I don’t want people to publish software that uses unstable APIs because that means your software running on my phone is going to break when I upgrade it.
There are many dimensions to “freedom”, and in the case of my phone, I want freedom from janky software that breaks when the OS gets a minor upgrade. I want the freedom of a device that almost never fails. I want freedom from malicious software that puts its fingers down my throat and rips out my private data because some alpha quality API has bugs.
In any case, you can and do have the freedom to use these private APIs on your phone, you can do it right from Xcode and install the software directly on your phone.
The only freedom you don’t have is the freedom to publish that software as a product and risk making my phone break, or worse.
Great, don't run janky software on your phone then. Exclusively use the App Store. Your preferences should not impinge on my freedoms.
Also, if you happen to use a Mac, all that same private data from your phone lives there too. I haven't heard a good argument for why this one class of device should be open while the others are locked down, especially given the availability of secure enclaves across Apple devices.
> You can and do have the freedom to use these private APIs, you can do it right from Xcode and install the software directly on your phone.
If I pay $99 a year, have access to the code, renew my certificate every week, and stay in Apple's good graces. To me — and seemingly to the EU — this is simply not acceptable.
> Exclusively use the App Store. Your preferences should not impinge on my freedoms.
I understood you to be arguing that the canonical App Store should allow use of private APIs.
If your argument is simply that there should exist other ways to get apps on your phone, then we agree. I wouldn’t touch an alternative App Store with your ten foot pole, but go nuts.
But you originally said,
> If an operating system feature is accessible from user space, then it should also be documented, supported and legal to use.
And it was this that I disagreed with. Apple has every right to test APIs without committing resources to documenting and supporting them.
ETA: also, as far as I know, you don’t need to pay $99 to compile and build locally. I did just that the other day and it seemed to work just fine.
> If your argument is simply that there should exist other ways to get apps on your phone, then we agree. I wouldn’t touch an alternative App Store with your ten foot pole, but go nuts.
Oops, I guess I should have read the rest of the thread more carefully. Yes, this is what I meant — sorry for the misunderstanding. Apple should be able to do whatever it wants in its own App Store, and I don't think that private APIs need to be documented or available to use without an entitlement. However, I don't think that I should be prevented from using those private APIs in apps outside the App Store.
>This is not like the bad old days where Microsoft used private APIs to disadvantage third party software in an operating system that literally had 95% world wide market share.
This is much worse than the bad old days. If an app is in a business Apple doesn't like or uses technology Apple doesn't approve of they just ban them outright.
Pretending caffeine is as detrimental to our society as e.g. fentanyl is prime intellectual dishonesty.