Rolled my eyes at the capitalism comment. Was that really necessary?
Idealism > logic
Code is run more than read
211–220 of 325 posts
Re: Code is run more than read
#212Very nicely explained, as I kept reading it covered all my experiential "yes, but" thoughts. I will add that-knowing- all this is helpful, but implementing it when you are early in your career is hard. For example, it's good that Business is the big priority, but when you gave no experience of what is good, or bad, in business, it can be hard to understand the ramifications of decisions made now. Equally, business pr…
> Open Source software is the exact opposite flow, dev > maintainer > user > business That's a pretty sad assumption. "dev > user" is why a lot of projects have very poor usability.
Obviously it's not true for all projects.
But it's true for most of them, no?
Re: Code is run more than read
#213Some users are not using a system because they like it but because their company bought it. In those situations biz > user by definition and the developers end up having to cater to the needs of the middle managment of their customers rather than the needs of the actual users. The price of not doing this is failing to win the contract. Users then get locked in to whatever crap you have time to provide for them while…
This is short term thinking - users who hate software can voice enough complaints to get things changed in at least some situations. (not all: many SAP programs with garbage UIs exist)
The user of SAP you describe is not the 'user' in the sense of the article. The user is the one who pays, i.e. some other business.
SAP absolutely delights its users to the tune of a $200 billion market cap.
Re: Code is run more than read
#214For enterprise software:
Customer > User ??
Re: Code is run more than read
#215Some users are not using a system because they like it but because their company bought it. In those situations biz > user by definition and the developers end up having to cater to the needs of the middle managment of their customers rather than the needs of the actual users. The price of not doing this is failing to win the contract. Users then get locked in to whatever crap you have time to provide for them while…
I've experienced this. I worked for a company that sold software to municipal governments. All that mattered was the Mayor/Town Manager/City Councils opinion. If the reports looked good and the price was right, they were going to renew.
I remember being in site meetings where people who used it every day would tell us to our face how terrible it was. Without fail, that site renewed with some promises to fix a couple specific bugs and a minimal price increase.
Re: Code is run more than read
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
An imaginary number wouldn't obey the stated constraint of being real.
No, but if the parent's question goes beyond "how can this happen with reals" to "how can this happen with numbers in general", this answers his question.
The very next example on the page is "imagine two complex numbers with the same magnitude and different angles". For that to answer the parent's question, you'd have to assume he stopped reading immediately after seeing the part he quoted.
The question is why the page says "imagine two real numbers that aren't comparable".
Re: Code is run more than read
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is false - real numbers fulfill the trichotomy property, which is precisely the lack of such a relationship: every two real number is either less than, equal or greater than. But the numerical context can still be correct: (edit: ~~imaginary~~) complex numbers for example don’t have such a property.
As I've written in another comment here, a great example of a number-y field which is not totally ordered is Games ⊂ Surreal Numbers ⊂ ℝ. There you have certain "numbers" which can can confused with (read incomparable) whole intervals of numbers. Games are really cool :)
You've got the subset relationships backwards: Reals are a subset of the field of Surreal Numbers which is a subset of the group of Games. (Probably better phrased as embeddings, rather than subsets, but the point remains...)
Note that Games do _not_ form a field: there is no general multiplication operation between arbitrary games.
Re: Code is run more than read
#218Re: Code is run more than read
#219> There’s a lot of software being produced that just doesn’t care about its users [... caused by] a mismatch between what we thought doing a good job was and what a significant part of the industry considers profitable [... so] perhaps we should take a stronger ethical stand not to harm users. Or, we could ditch the "biz" part. It just so happens that software not written to serve business interests tends to also res…
If we ditch the business part what's your recommendation to pay rent?
I happen to believe in subsidised/affordable housing (I assume a UBI is what cybrox meant by not paying rent; also cracking down on housing-as-investments[1] sounds good to me, a layman, though apparently it wouldn't be enough[2] in our case, supply just needs to increase)—but I'm sure that other, less drastic societal changes would also be sufficient. For example, medium to large businesses could fund any open-source projects they make direct use of[3]. With the likes of OpenCollective[4][5] and GitHub Sponsors[6], the only roadblocks to adopting such a policy are corporate red tape and corporate greed. (And if it leads to smaller SBOMs, well, that's just a bonus as far as I'm concerned.)
All that said, I was actually referring to individuals (who aren't necessarily developers) choosing which software to use. Over the last 20 years, we've all taken free downloads and sign-ups for granted, ignorant to that whole "if you're not paying, you're the product" thing, and a lot of us now have a $500+ supercomputer in our pockets which is to some extent owned by a tech giant and not its nominal owner. It's apparent that such centralised platforms have some intrinsic problems with regards to users' freedom. That's what I'm cautioning against—not the idea of selling your programming labour to a business, which is fine.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_property_bubble#For... (This article is outdated. From a quick web search, it seems foreign real estate investment fell during the pandemic but has now picked up again.)
[2]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-02/housing-property-aust... (1M unoccupied houses in a country of 26M, ~120k of whom don't have secure housing...)
[3]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/01/07/open-source-has-a-fund...
[4]: https://blog.opencollective.com/funds-for-open-source/
[5]: https://docs.opencollective.com/help/financial-contributors/...
[6]: https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-c...
Re: Code is run more than read
#220So, the author hijacks a perfectly good rule of thumb to build their grand theory of everything. It is all nice, clean, and wise, and besides the tortured turn of phrase is just rechewing of popular truisms.
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