Found the root cause. The "World" entity (population ~8 billion) was being called alongside all individual countries, doubling the total. Thank you again!
As Charlie Munger used to say “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome”.
What are the incentives for these developers? Most businesses want trees on trucks. That’s the only box they care to check. There is no box for doing it with a sharp axe. You might care, and take the time to sharpen all the axes. Everyone will love it, you might get a pat on the back and a round of applause, but you didn’t check any boxes for the business. Everyone will proceed to go through all the axes until they are dull, and keeping chopping anyway.
I see 2 year old projects that are considered legacy systems. They have an insurmountable amount of technical debt. No one can touch anything without breaking half a dozen others. Everyone who worked on it gets reasonable rewarded for shipping a product, and they just move on. The business got its initial boxes checked and everyone who was looking for a promotion got it. What other incentives are there?
It's not about incentives; it's just bad management. As you said, the business just wants trees on trucks, so good management would realise that you need to spend some time sharpening axes to get trees on trucks quickly. It just seems to be something that a lot of software managers don't get.
I don't think every company is like this though. E.g. Google and Amazon obviously have spent a mountain of time sharpening their own axes. Amazon even made an axe so sharp they could sell it to half the world.
Early on in Amazon’s history (long before same day shipping), they added a feature that would tell you, on a product page, whether you had recently bought that same product. The metrics spoke loud and clear: it caused purchase count to go down. Human common sense about the customer’s experience overruled the data and they have some variation of that feature to this day. That’s the “customer obsession,” but unfortunately most businesses only copy the “data driven”.
There is some amount of time to spend on sharpening that, if you spend either more or less time sharpening, net amount of trees on trucks goes down. Smart businesses look for that amount. Really smart businesses know what the amount is, and make sure that they spend very close to that amount of time sharpening.
Indeed. My point is that that right amount is waaaaay more than most people think it is. At least in my experience.
I think part of the problem is people get... I guess "speed blindness". When stuff is taking ages they just think that's how long it takes. They don't realise that they could be twice as fast if they spent some of their time fixing & improving their tooling.
lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now. It took China putting on regulations on their side to disrupt that industry. Now you have to find other smaller economies to do that.
I'm not. Read their comment and mine. This was always, and will always be a thing. It's not a burden, just a marginal cost of business. Instead of paying a European company a €40k to destroy your broken products, you can pay an African one €10k to "recycle" your product. Best of all, you're legally forced to. I can see hundreds of companies lobbying for this because it completely takes them off the hook. "The law says we must do this. Please contact your representatives you dumb fucks"
The original comment says "sell them to «resale» companies". Selling goods means being paid for it, while you and the parent comment are both saying money goes in the opposite direction.
Outside of a few very rare circumstances, that’s not what “sell” means. 99.9999999999% of the time, “selling for a negative price” is more accurately called “buying”.
Then they'll sell at a profit, but the shipping cost will be inflated to offset that profit and then some. If this is identified and corrected in the law, then the sale will be at an actual profit, but there will be a corresponding price hike in goods purchased in the future through the same partner company. Or, a politician will be bought and it will be made it illegal to restrict shipping goods for destruction, citing damage to rising economies etc, and now it's 2 countries' laws creating a situation which will drag 20yrs in courts, while the goods keep getting destroyed. Or, the goods will be sold already in the first country to a separate entity, shipped through a 3rd country, and tracking will be lost due to unfortunate bugs, nobody's fault, really sorry.
There. 4 scenarios. I could make more.
They need more Italians helping draft these laws, we have a... cultural/genetic knack for figuring ways around regulations :) and I don't even think I'm particularly good at this. But maybe LLMs will make our devious disposition finally obsolete.
The law is naive, but well intended. Maybe with 20-30 patches it will achieve enough of its purpose.
I don't think you can sell at loss in Europe (not sure, happy to be corrected), so might be small but it'll still be positive. The bet is it will be high enough to be a deterrent. The other bet is that at some point the rest of the world will push back being a corporate dumpster.
This particular thread of the argument can go on for a while. I can't well articulate the doubts I have because I'm not in the industry, but many such well-meaning laws have a tendency to backfire once given enough time for bad/poor actors to game it.
There is enough local fraudulent waste management companies that shipping things to Africa to have it "recycled" is just a waste of money and time. Sweden recently had one of the largest fraud cases involving a waste management company, which also became the largest environmental case in Swedish history.
The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner. Rinse and repeat, and run it in parallel. It takes years before anyone call on the bluff that the stuff will surely get recycled "someday", and the main reason the Swedish police caught wind in the earlier mentioned case was that the waste started to self-ignite.
The only benefit to ship it to Africa is the hope that it won't be found out and create bad press, but that doesn't work if everyone know it is fake.
Oil companies have been doing this for over a century in US. Sell abandoned well to a small llc, llc files bankruptcy, big OilCo off the hook! Everyone happy!
>The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner.
This is what these countries get for having weak laws that allow people to do illegal dumping and then hide behind a corporate veil to avoid accountability.
Trouble is if democracy worked properly then corporate entities wouldn't be able to lobby and influence governments to weaken laws out of self-interest.
But the recycler has all the papers and documentation that they lawfully contracted an overseas company for wholesale recycle of the product. What's your civil court's jurisdiction? You might be able to play wack-a-mole with ebay, temu, alibaba express sellers through civil court in your jurisdiction assuming you have the money of course.
I'm supposing ExampleCo's civil court's jurisdiction covers the recycler's location, otherwise ExampleCo would have really stupid management.
I'm supposing the contract with the recycler would hold the recycler liable, and whatever third party contracts they made with another company would not matter one bit. If ExampleCo contracts with RecycleCo to recycle pants and they do not get recycled then RecycleCo is liable to ExampleCo, yes RecycleCo has contracts with OverseasRecycleCo and it is up to RecycleCo to sue OverseasRecycleCo to recoup the losses they had to pay to ExampleCo; ExampleCo will probably not be suing OverseasRecycleCo, they will take their pound of flesh out of RecycleCo. All of this of course implies that they have some way of verifying that pants they find out in the world are in fact pants that should have been recycled.
What jurisdiction will the suit between RecycleCo and OverseasRecycleCo be taking place in? Depends on the location of the two entities, and possibly also on contractual conditions.
I totally admit that it is not ideal to sue over breaches of contract, it is almost always preferable that breaches not happen because when breaches don't happen it means that things are going the way you specified that they should go and you should be happy.
But let's go to another point here:
what is it about recycling that means that clothes will be taken and resold instead of recycled in greater numbers than clothes that were supposed to be destroyed? Nowadays clothes that are meant to be destroyed are sometimes not, and sold and ExampleCo suffers in the same way as they would with recycled clothes. I suppose ExampleCo must be able to tell if clothes that they find out on third party sites are among clothes that should have been destroyed nowadays otherwise this whole thing is moot and exactly the same as it is now.
Sometimes clothes are stolen from trucks and trains and sold, will this stop happening because of all these clothes that were supposed to have been recycled destroying the market for stolen clothes?
Most non-authorized sales of ExampleCo pants are not actually lower quality ExampleCo pants destined for destruction but fake ExampleCo pants, because ExampleCo as a brand is just so exciting that there are lots of fake ones made, because most pants that are sent for destruction are destroyed and only some are diverted to resellers.
Will the surplus of pants from ExampleCo that were supposed to be recycled but for some reason are not because "oh no, it is impossible to sue people in this new world with recycling going on" going to be so great in amount that instead of completely fake ExampleCo pants there will instead be only ExampleCo pants of lower than normal ExampleCo pants quality?
Why exactly will lower than normal quality ExampleCo pants destroy the brand value of ExampleCo more than counterfeit ExampleCo pants? Are counterfeit ExampleCo pants better than real ExampleCo pants that failed some part of QA process?
Frankly a lot of the argumentation as to how recycling opens up the doors to destroying the value of ExampleCo seems specious, in that it seems like it would not damage ExampleCo any more than it can currently be damaged by breaches of contract where destruction of inventory is concerned or other civil and criminal acts.
> If you're building an app for yourself to track your own food habits; why does DB, framework, best practices matters?
They don't, it's just annoying as shit when things break at the worst time for lack of these "best practices" and you know that the only answer will be "do better". I'll give you an example. Years ago I migrated a lot of my app usage to selfhosted OSS apps for all the reasons one might list them. I did like 80% of what I perceived as the "important best practices". Setup ZFS with redundancy to handle drive failures, a UPS for power interruption, wireguard for secure access, docker for application and dependencies isolation, etc.
But there were always things I just thought "I should probably do that, but later. This is just for me"
It would be the end of the day, I'm tired and on bed wanting to just chill and watch something on my ipad, and what do you know my plex is down, again.
Why does it go down every few days? Now I need to go get a laptop, ssh into my server, docker logs. See a bunch of exceptions. I don't want to debug it today. Just restart it, ok it works again. Go to bed, start watching.
20 minutes in.. I think it's down again.. wtf? get the laptop again, google the error, something about sqlite db on an NFS share not being very stable. All my ZFS storage is only exposed as NFS and SMB share to another machine.. Ok, just restart and hope it works and I'll deal with it latter.
Forget for a couple of days. I'm with a friend as her place and want to watch again, and fuck me I never fixed the sqlite issue, nevermind lets just watch netflix.
Over the weekend, I'm determined to get this fixed. Move the application folder out of NFS on the local machine SSD. It doesn't have redundancy, but it's ok for now. I'll setup an rsync job to copy it to the NFS share in case the SSD fails. I just want to see if it'll be stable.
Few months pass, and it's been pretty stable until I have a power outage. The UPS was there, but the configuration to notify the OS to shutdown broke a while ago and I didn't notice. Files on ZFS are fine, but the some on the local SSD got corrupted and I didn't notice, including plex database. the rsync job just copied the corrupted file over the "backup" file.
It's late at night again, and I just want to relax and watch something and discover this happened. I could try to figure out how to recover it, but it's probably easier to just do a clean scan. It's gonna take hours. Lets just start it and go to sleep.
Later, lets just migrate everything to jellyfin. Have auto upgrade setup because I'm smart. Jellyfin 10.8 updates and unfavorites all the facorited music tracks. "You have backups right". "Well, yes I do. Let me make sure I have an evening cleared so I can setup another instance of jellyfin, run the old backups, export the favorite list, and import it in the new one"... oh there is no way to do that? I guess I can export it to CSV, get a plugin to automate it for me. the plugin hasn't been updated to 10.8 but there is a pull request. ok lets wait. Forget that I setup restic to delete backups older than 30 days. fuck me. I have the CSV somewhere I think. God my `/tmp` is ephemeral and I hope I haven't rebooted since then. phew it's there. fuck me still.
I have worked in managing services for most of my career. I know what I'm doing wrong. I need to setup monitoring, alerts, health checks, 321 backups (not just rsync to a zfs pool) and actually use a backup software that tracks file versions, off site redundancy, dashboards for anomaly detection, scheduled hardware upgrades and checks for memtest, disk health, UPS configuration checks. I know how 3 or 4 9s are achieved in the industry.
I spent years trying to find the PERFECT pantry tracking, auto shopping list generating, auto "what can I make tonight with what I have", auto meal preping app. The idea seemed so simple in mind back then. Let me input everything I have, then as I pull ingredients out of the fridge I just "decrease eggs by 3, decrease butter by 1tbsp, decrease bacon by 2 slices" then over time, it will just build my shopping list for me etc. I even built a requirement list and spent a year implementing my own thing.
Given the number of apps put there, from dozens of OSS hobbyist apps to industrial resturant inventory management ones, I wan't alone in thinking this is a solved problem and someone should just have the perfect interface for it. Between auto-unit converting apps, natural language processing apps, @cooklang, a million ideas about tracking pantries and ingredients and their categories, frequency of use charts, etc..
Then one time I went on a trip with a friend to his home town where we stayed at his parents house. His 78 year old mother had a 2 notepads attached to the fridge with a pencil on a string. As she worked in the kitchen, between washing hands she would just jot down random notes, cross others, doddles some on one notepad, and the other she would just add meal plans as she went along. Then when we were going to market she just ripped the page off.
Sounds so fucking simple and easy and I felt so stupid for the amount of effort I put trying to figure out the right app, the right device to mount on my fridge, how to connect power to it. How to make it not always on to blind me at night, but also so I don't have to keep fiddling with it to unlock it. how to use it with wet fingers, how to keep translating units and "catch up" when I miss updating it for a couple of meals, how to hide ingredients I don't care about and highlight ones I do, how to rearrange the interface. It seriously gave me a pause at how dumb I was that the solution is much much simpler and I pigeon holed my thinking on a tech solution for some reason.
Can't sell people notepads though. There is no margin or lock-in in that stuff.
I do hear what you're saying, and I've wrestled with "not everything should / can be an app". That being said, I'm still trying to solve food (for myself) with computers, haha.
Right now, that looks like trying to create a nutritionally-optimal "dog food for humans", using combinatorial optimization solvers. I think I'm going to write something up as a post when it becomes a bit more feature-complete.
It's living at chow.seanjohnsen.com if you're curious! Would love feedback from someone who has thought along these lines.
That’s the comical understanding being pushed by management in software companies yes. The people who never actually use the tools themselves, but the concept of it. It’s the same AGI nonesense, but dumped down to something they think they can control.
why does every AI skeptic assume that everyone is lying to them. theres millions of developers using AI to be more productive and you just keep plugging your ears and screaming, claiming its only dumb managers, meanwhile Linus Torvalds is vibe coding stuff.
Who said anything about that? The argument was "if you're not using AI RIGHT NOW, you will fall behind forever"
This is the nonsense management and CTOs are pushing. Use it now if you want, I do. Wait for things to cool down if you want. You'll be fine either way. The comical view that it'll be a "winner takes all" subset of developers who some how would have figured out secret AI techniques that make them 10Kx more productive and every other developer will be SOL is laughable.
If you’ve never driven a model T, how would you ever drive a corolla? If you never did angular 1, how would you ever learn react? If you never used UNIX 4, you’ll be behind in Linux today. /s
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