Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bombcar 1139 days ago
This gives your customers nine years to change nothing and one year to panic and die.

Ask how I know.

5 comments

It should be legendary how much better humans are at long term planning than corporations. Yet more heaping mounds of proof. Humans consider their bodies & what might happen with far more realism than corporate naivety and reckless optimism.
We don't reward long term corporate thinking.

Humans can clearly do it, so corporations could too. The organism responds to its environment.

The problem of modern companies (public or private) is that institutional shareholders demand greater profits even if it affects the companies' long-term prospect. They simply want that line to go up, they don't bother much with the details of the company.
We need to socially rebuke the Friedman doctrine that’s at the root of all of this. It’s not even law but it’s so ingrained at this point people think it is.
We do, but 99.9999% of the people doing the work won't meaningfully experience any benefit from doing so.

So we never do. Nothing will change that other than enfranchising your people, other than upsetting the top-down hierarchy.

> how much better humans are at long term planning than corporations

> Humans consider their bodies & what might happen with far more realism than corporate naivety

Welp, this is how I learn I am not a human, but a corporation...

Well technically, humans are corporations of trillions of cells...
Aye by this logic I am a corp whose only offering is eating donuts all the time.

No regrets, btw.

But to the main point: corporations are humans, and the entire reason for executive positions is to create a human charged to act as empowered decision maker for the organization. They are the human while the rest of the bureaucracy is essentially a cog. That they, the execs, fail so often is a sign we need to GPT them

Well, better doesn't mean good.
>Humans consider their bodies & what might happen with far more realism

I don't think so. I'd say most people disregard to what's happening to them, even when it's apparent that something's wrong. And especially if there seems to be nothing wrong, so that the problem only exists in the form of warning, and forecasts.

But most people are also enwrapped in fantasies & dreams & ideas of where they are going.

What's happening to them famously doesn't incurse upon our dream-selves, is my view. We stick to our dream-selves & our quests, regardless of externals. And sometimes that is foolish. But it also shows I think a pigheadedness that gets it, that picks long wins, that isn't detered.

This is the frustrating part of being a linux user. Absolutely massive time periods before changes. Literally no work is done until it eventually changes, everything breaks, and people scramble to fix it. Which more desktop oriented distros would just drop xorg next year and we actually get the last remaining apps updated.
It has nothing to do with being a "Linux user" and everything to do with being an LTS OS user. Not being bowled over by rewrite-the-world changes is why rolling release distros exist.

And before anyone says it, no "rolling release" doesn't mean "unstable".

I'm on Fedora which is pretty up to date and I just have random issues all the time. Currently I can't get xbox controllers to pair. It works on windows, it worked on fedora when I tried a few months ago, absolutely can't get it working now. When I switch audio outputs, they don't work until I kill pipewire a random number of times and then they work.

And these are just the random breakages, not the missing features like fractional scaling and HDR. Obviously these problems don't affect everyone, but they affect me and despite a decade of linux experience, I can't find solutions.

Counterpoint: I run Arch Linux on all my machines and I can't remember the last time something broke that wasn't ZFS, and I opted into that one, it's explicitly unsupported. I switch between a Bluetooth headset and my speakers/webcam multiple times a day and it just works (I'm also using pipewire, not pulse).
There's the guy on my team who is steaming mad at Sindre Sorhus for making all his npm packages ESM only. https://gist.github.com/sindresorhus/a39789f98801d908bbc7ff3...

The time line is a little more compressed. I'm somewhat sympathetic. But my heavens, that using the language's official module system is a pain & difficult makes me think we needed to switch harder earlier.

(Also Node simply lacked the courage to try to do what many before them had done, & make cjs/ESM intercompatible: worked great in @std-things/esm but node let themselves get steered into prissily rejecting an obviously fine path for absurd technical minutia).

We gasp & moan the whole time old soggy gross bandaids are being ripped off. We direly need to call shots & make it happen. We need the will.

& as a shorthand to "and" makes you look like a child, discounting everything you say. Just sayin'.
Is there anything else anywhere that points to this strong bias you have? I have seen one other person bother to comment, in a slightly more sly negative way, counting how many '&'s I used.

I obviously dont seem to share the sensitivity, it seems natural to me, and I'm not sure where these feelings & reactions come from. I feel like there should be some substantiation or discussion, something available, if & for and is so unsettling to folks.

It hinders readability just to save you two keystrokes, you are effectively telling people "fuck you, I don't care about the effort you'll have to make to parse my gibberish". Plus, of course, I'm sure you know almost no-one else uses it like that, so you come off as begging for attention. Both are very childish approaches, when trying to communicate with peers.
This is the frustrating part of being a user, of any system. Change is risk, and why take risk? In case of Wayland, I see no upsides as a user. At most, it works as well as xorg did, which is to say, in the background, doing its job, for me to not worry about it.
It gives software developers 9 years to receive feedback from early adopters, and fix things if they want to stay relevant. There’s not much point to installing a new server if there’s no software for it.
And it makes it possible to say, well you had 9 years to make the change, now that you’re out of time it’s your problem.
How do you know?
Personal experience, I think. People still complain about python 2.7 even though python 3 has been around for 15 years and python 2 was EOL 3 years ago.
literally to have millions of lines in production code just in our company, untold billions or trillions of production Python2 code that works perfectly fine (well, did work) around the world. guess that will teach us to trust a scripting language for production systems!
So, whats the alternative? Try compiling a decade old java app and get ready for a surprise. Python2 was already dead 2 years ago. If your company did nothing to at least ensure the code runs, thats their problem. All languages go though deprecation and changes, except the dead ones - only if you had used *QBasic, you wouldnt have this problem.

*the choice would be Cobol for most folks, but not only cobol isnt dead, it actually changes and deprecates stuff throughout the years - ex. Cobol77 vs cobol85.

What's the problem? you have the source, nothing is stopping anybody from using python2. In fact from that perspective you could say it is a good thing, once python3 was published, the language python2 became more and more stable. Until we are at this point. The language is super stable. It will never change again. exactly what you wanted.
> nothing is stopping anybody from using python2

Eh... pip+pypi killing support for python2 is kind of a big problem for continuing to use it unless you have zero external dependencies.

This is the main difference between trying to get some ancient code written in C working vs "modern" toolchains - if you have the compiler and the code for C, everything is self-contained; many things like python2 download absolutely tons of support code and libraries to "build" - and when those go offline you can't easily build anymore; and you can't even say "this here VM will build this forever" unless you make sure that it will continue to work (and everything is separately cached/downloaded).
Should have used perl5 i guess? /s
yeahp when there is load bearing python 2.7 code written by someone who has left, puts folks in a tough spot. :/
You're just more aware of technical debt you already had.
Every single EOL product we’ve ever used has never been a priority issue until long after support has ended. It’s quite aggravating.
Its almost like companies fail to do software maintenance.