It’s a compliment. You’re skilled and valuable enough that the company won’t dare to give you any bullshit for leaving on time.

sometimes, it feels like managers hate engineers

They hate engineers because the engineers ask difficult questions that somebody needs to answer in order to really automate a process, and they take the time necessary to do so.

SQL was explicitly designed to allow “normal humans” to query the database. Nowadays even “normal developers” aren’t able to use it properly.

Oracle has a product called Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) that it sells as “you can write the rules in plain English in MS Word documents, you don’t need developers”. I worked for an insurance organization where the business side bought OPA without consulting IT, hoping they wouldn’t have to deal with developers. It totally failed because it doesn’t matter that they get to write “plain English” in Word documents. They still lack the structured, formal thinking to deal with anything except the happiest of happy paths.

The important difference between a developer and a non-developer isn’t the ability to understand the syntax of a programming language. It’s the willingness and ability to formalize and crystallize requirements and think about all the edge cases. As an architect/programmer when I talk to the business side, they get bored and lose interest from all my questions about what they actually want.

I want something that runs a small local LLM for text prediction, but there’s no proprietary alternative for that either.

IntelliJ is an all-out full IDE in the tradition of the old Visual Studio or Borland IDE:s, so it makes sense there. Zed is ostensibly a text editor in the same niche as VS Code, vim and Sublime, where I expect to be able to just open a single file and edit it without any bigger investment.

I typically have both an IDE and a text editor installed, for different use cases. But Zed can never replace IntelliJ and because of this design choice it can’t replace VS Code/vim/Notepad++ either.

It drives me nuts that there’s no way to close a folder once you opened it. There’s no way to just edit a file without making it a “project”. In my mind that’s a weird design decision (which is probably rooted in weird fundamental ideas) and gives me no warm & fuzzy feeling about what direction it will take in the future.

This seems like such a poor choice if you want a cross platform browser.

Brainpooping

So call the shareholders and ask them to pay back the dividends that they’ve received over the years, to fund the YouTube infrastructure? That begs the question, what do we do when that money runs out?

That’s conjecture, and so is my view, but I disagree. They’ve even developed specialized hardware just to deal with all the transcoding they have to do, specialized for YouTube. There’s a lot of effort that goes into maintaining things that are unique to this particular service. But in the end, what matters is if they could make more money by spending their resources elsewhere.

Of course not, Google is a huge company that could probably just live off of patents for the next 100 years. But they’re not going to keep on running a service that just costs them money. Google is in fact notorious for killing off products.

That’s fine. It just reads to me sometimes as if people in the comment sections are angry at YouTube for trying to uphold a stream of revenue, when it’s the only thing that makes the platform possible. Personally I think YouTube has been a huge boon, I’ve learned so much from people who post on the platform and I don’t want to see it go away (which is not to say that it doesn’t have huge issues). So I’m fine with paying in some manner, at least until a better alternative comes up. If you don’t think it’s worth it, great for you, go and do whatever you think brings value to your life. But I don’t understand the vitriol or sense of entitlement to getting a costly service free of charge.

What is your suggestion for financing the YouTube infrastructure and development?

It sounds like a Hollywood movie. “Hacker tattoos”? Single person took on an entire country? I dunno, something about this is off, like it’s too juicy of a story for Wired to scrutinize it properly and there’s really more (or less) to the story.

Great, but can you access the DOM?

When will Wasm grow, according to your gut? I feel like I’ve been waiting for a decade now.

Funny you would post about such an obscure subject now. I was just checking that book out a couple of days ago, probably because of a reference from the tz database or Joda Time. In my spare time I’m working on a library for calendar calculations so this might just be the push I needed to order that book.

An iOS styled drawer that is styled according to Material You? This seems contradictory.

Draw… with a mouse??? Now I’m possibly more confused.