Fast always has a price.
> Construction start was delayed two weeks to allow the 42 families living on Pine Point, which was scheduled to be demolished to build the shipyard, to move.
Fast
101–110 of 306 posts
Re: Fast
#102Major one missing: China built 5,000 miles of high speed rail in 6 years. In California, it's been 15 years and we have 0 miles complete. Also built numerous hospitals during pandemic in a couple weeks. Demolished and replaced a bridge in 43 hours: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a... . General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a blistering pace - and they work. Also landed a…
> You just have to quash special interests sometime. Autocracy gets shit done.
This is a classic "pros and cons" situation. I'm not sure the ability for the authorities to "get shit done" would balance the downsides, e.g.:
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/07/05/...
Re: Fast
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern JS is a passable language only after a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested to retrofit it as such. For all of the purported isomorphic benefits, I still don't know why anyone would choose to use it outside of being forced to in browsers
All the "good" languages have tremendous effort - it's how they get good. Nothing starts great...it's a journey. We've been watching the sausage being made.
Just because "it's a journey" and we invested tremendous effort, doesn't mean it's suddenly great. It's a terrible language with many illnesses, even today's modern version, because it's kept its diseases from the past. It surely is lightyears better than what it used to be, but it's still a pile of turd IMO (I work with JS every day).
Re: Fast
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern JS is a passable language only after a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested to retrofit it as such. For all of the purported isomorphic benefits, I still don't know why anyone would choose to use it outside of being forced to in browsers
I don't really mind that "a tremendous amount of time and effort was invested" into JS. It works great for me and my team and we are hugely productive using it. That why. It works and we deliver a lot of value.
It works great for you because you haven't seen better. Which other languages do you have more than 1 year of professional experience with? May I answer that for you? None. Just because you've just discovered a knife, doesn't mean it's the best tool to eat the soup with.
Re: Fast
#105For the Van Ness Bus Line example: one reason there were major delays was because maps of underground sewer lines and plumbing were inaccurate, and needed to be relocated. The 6 years of construction was really a bus lane + major sewer infrastructure project. Which brings up another reason why some of these projects were Fast -- they operated in places where there there wasn't existing infrastructure or residents to…
For anyone looking for an in-depth post mortem of the Van Ness bus line, please read the report from the SF Civil Grand Jury here: https://civilgrandjury.sfgov.org/2020_2021/2021%20CGJ%20Repo...
Great report except it missed the most obvious recommendation: "decouple transit improvement from utilities projects"
Re: Fast
#106Re: Fast
#107Having worked at a top 5 big tech company from college hire to a high level position, I have seen many factors that contribute to things being much slower than a startup. Some of them might be valid, but others are just the result of tragedy of large organisations (a big tech company is surprisingly similar to governments in terms of internal bureaucracy). * Large number of people and orgs willing and fighting to tak…
> Large number of people and orgs willing and fighting to take credit. If you need 1 week of support from an org, forget it unless you give them large credit worth a huge amount of work. This means you need to justify that credit via creating more work.
I've worked at a couple of top 5 tech companies, and it saddens me that people have such a sour/cynical view. You're saying that people don't move unless they get credit... but isn't it more likely that the people you need support from, are (1) already overloaded with work for other teams, (2) busy with their own core work, and (3) it's hard to keep plans aligned between very large number of teams, which then often makes "simple" requests difficult?
Re: Fast
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google released its search engine when it was just 2 guys. If those two guys kept working on it for the past 25 years, but hired nobody new, I wonder what their product would look like? I suspect it would still be pretty decent.
> I suspect it would still be pretty decent. A fun thought experiment, but I suspect they'd be bankrupt from the meritless lawsuits that come from being big, or in prison for not being able to follow laws they had to be big to lobby against. And even if not, the combined efforts of the scammers would probably evolve faster than two people could react.
Since we are in fun thought experiment mode, here’s another one I just had: what if we somehow could prevent companies from getting too big? Would we manage to keep a line where they all stay more or less in “pretty decent” territory?
Re: Fast
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern Typescript is fairly decent. Plain Javascript is still awful. And I wouldn't say either are great. I especially don't understand why Javascript doesn't have a "modern" mode where `var` and `==` are banned, prototypes are immutable, etc. You can do all that with linters but the people that need help with that stuff don't know how to set up a linter in the first place or what options to choose.
> You can do all that with linters but the people that need help with that stuff don't know how to set up a linter in the first place or what options to choose. Then how would they know how to enable "modern" mode? Junior devs shouldn't be setting up any of that stuff anyway, they should be given a laptop with VSCode + prettier already installed, and all of the config they need should be in the project repo.
The language specification should have a directive similar to "use strict" (the JS doctype kinda thing), something like: "use es23"
Re: Fast
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google released its search engine when it was just 2 guys. If those two guys kept working on it for the past 25 years, but hired nobody new, I wonder what their product would look like? I suspect it would still be pretty decent.
Difficult to know. It would have been difficult for them to make money without adding an ads team. Without making money it would have been difficult for them to create the infrastructure to process the large amounts of data and change that are a big part of how google search works these days. Would a two man company focused on search have created google maps or google earth? Probably not - gathering just the data for…
Google acquired both Maps and Earth, they didn't create them.