You can tell you’ve inherited a file from not-a-vim-user when there aren’t appropriately intuitively obvious blank lines for which to navigate with } and {.
Please—for the love of devops—when building a web app that you’re going to let people self-host, don’t require (Redis or Memcached or Kafka or whatever), if you already require Postgres.
Postgres can almost certainly handle the load of whatever it is you’re pre-maturely optimizing for in the vast majority of situations. Some of us use these tools to serve 25 users not 25 million.
Adding more pieces of the stack to maintain is a real kick in the face for people who just want to use your thing.
Remember when if the GUI had a toggle, it was actually a toggle control and not a button that sort-of-acts as a toggle control?
And remember when, if you clicked that button, it didn’t move out from under your cursor so that if you try to toggle it again, you didn’t actually accidentally click a DIFFERENT button because the button you want moved?
In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, people—regular people—were often afraid of ecommerce and open source software.
We did a ton of work to build trust in both of these things, to the point where they became the obvious defaults when people had a choice.
It really hurts me deep within to see “us” cashing out the trust we’ve built in the web for the short term profits of bad and unreliable search, cheap engagement tricks, and completely ignorant “hallucinations”.
Imagine being so bad at your job of creating log-in systems that you have to outsource rate limiting to a CAPTCHA that punishes your actual legitimate users—especially one run by a third party.
Air Canada does this with Google’s obnoxious “train our driving vision ML to see motorcycles” recaptcha scam. It doesn’t accept my answers probably 90% of the time, so I have to try over and over and over. I hate it so much that I’d change airlines if I reasonably could. https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112479401587652865
In the 1980s, there was a fad where every bit of food advertising had to make sure we knew about Oat Bran. It was added to everything, and all news/conversation about nutrition was “now with Oat Bran.”
Turns out that maybe it is actually good for you in some ways, but it certainly has no business being in every part of the conversation…
I was reminded of this ridiculous fad, as someone who just spent 15 minutes trying (and failing) to turn off an “AI” “helper” in one of our chosen tools.
Whenever I hear about big changes at AWS (like changing up the AWS CEO to Matt Garman), I not-so-secretly wish that AWS could find a way to split off from Amazon itself.