Doc Avid Mornington

Not actually a doctor.

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  • 93 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • What? Your colleague sounds like they may be struggling with some serious cognitive issues, they may want to see a doctor about that. As for me, I’ve been living with my brain my entire life, and have kept several different sleep schedules in that time, for one reason or another, including rigid adherence to a schedule you would certainly approve of, and at no time has the basic fact that my brain works better later in the day ever changed. Some people never learn that their own circumstances and experience are not universal. Maybe try not to be one of those people.



  • It’s better to have useful comments. Long odds are that somebody who writes comments like this absolutely isn’t writing useful comments as well - in fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it happen. Comments like this increase cognitive overhead when reading code. Sure, I’d be happy to accept ten BS useless comments in exchange for also getting one good one, but that’s not the tradeoff in reality - it’s always six hundred garbage lines of comment in exchange for nothing at all. This kind of commenting usually isn’t the dev’s fault, though - somebody has told a junior dev that they need to comment thoroughly, without any real guidelines, and they’re just trying not to get fired or whatever.




  • Pretty sure they meant to not have review. Dropping peer review in favor of pair programming is a trendy idea these days. Heh, you might call it “pairs over peers”. I don’t agree with it, though. Pair programming is great, but two people, heads together, can easily get on a wavelength and miss the same things. It’s always valuable to have people who have never seen the new changes take a look. Also, peer review helps keep the whole team up to date on their knowledge of the code base, a seriously underrated benefit. But I will concede that trading peer review for pair programming is less wrong than giving up version control. Still wrong, but a lot less wrong.




  • The UCC I went to every Sunday of my childhood (Dad was the minister, so kinda had to go) would have a loaf of really good fresh bread. Some was cut up in cubes, to take neatly, or you could pull a hunk off the loaf if you liked. One side of the drinks tray had grape juice, the other had wine, again, your choice, although obviously when I was young, I didn’t reach for the wine in front of my mom. Little tiny snack was the best part of church.






  • Democrats have pretty much been the same since Clinton, not really drifting right. Yes, Democratic centrism enables Republican extremism, but the neoliberal agenda of Democrats, regarding domestic economics and foreign affairs, has stayed pretty constant, while they have actually improved on social issues. Clinton or Obama would not have handled Israel’s recent actions differently, they might even have done worse. On domestic issues, Biden is probably the most progressive president since LBJ. Now, granted, that’s really a condemnation of American politics since then, more than it is praise of Biden - but still, we are finally moving in the right direction again, at least, and it’s important to acknowledge that, if we want it to continue.


  • STAR is ridiculously bad, it just has good marketing. It favors the preferences of voters who pick extremes, ranking everybody either a 1 or a 5 - likely the least informed and thoughtful voters - over voters who carefully weigh whether a candidate deserves 3 or 4 stars. Ranked choice is simple and effective, takes more granular voter preference into account, and provides runoff for each virtual round, rather than just the last. It also has a simple variant that works equally well for multi-seat elections.


  • the core ideas of religion are just about universal

    Even just within Christianity, in the modern world, there are radical differences in the core ideas between sects. Across all religions, throughout history, the differences dwarf that.

    It’s the details and names that vary

    It’s not (see above), but if it were: the details count toward this as well. Just saying “meh, ignore the details” is cheating to get the answer you want.

    You could describe religion as a connectedness to, and humbleness before the mystery of, the universe

    How many religious people have you actually met, friend? I have known some whose views roughly fit that description, but most do not. In fact, I’d suggest that you could describe science that way. Religious people start with the belief, the box they want to put the universe in, and then insist that it must be, and attempt to adjust the facts to match their views - this is the farthest thing from humbleness before the mystery of the universe. Science tells us to put our preconceptions and expectations aside, and observe how the universe really functions - if we see facts that don’t match our current understanding, we adjust our understanding.


  • Saying that some projects, at some point in their lifecycle, don’t need certain things, is not saying that those things have no place. Also, if one can’t design a monolith that isn’t bloated and tightly coupled, one definitely has no business designing microservices. Using microservices is neither necessary, nor sufficient to achieve decoupling.

    Monolithic services are the ideal way to begin a project, as using basic good practices, we can build a service that does many things with minimal coordination, and as it grows and requirements change or are discovered, we can easily refactor to keep things simple. As the software matures, we find the natural service boundaries, and find that certain pieces would perform better if they were separated out and could scale independently, or act asynchronously. Since we have followed good practices, this should usually be a simple matter of removing a class or module to a new service, and replacing it with a facade, such that the rest of the monolith doesn’t have to change at all.



  • Facebook is capitalist spyware and a social engineering tool. You have to remember that capitalism is not a normal power relationship, even though they have been working tirelessly to make the world believe they are – capitalism is at the bleeding edge of techno-fascist authoritarianism.

    OK you get the idea, and I’m not trying to defend China, but they’re just one of many powers - most private - that are using tools like this. I’d favor legislation to break them all up, to say any social network over a certain size has to federate, to say no one company or government can own more than one social network, lots of possibilities I would favor, but cherry-picking TikTok seems like Congress is working for Zuck. Taking out one of the big players just consolidates the incredibly dangerous power of the others.

    And truthfully, in my time scrolling TikTok, I’ve generally found the content to be a lot less manipulative, more liberal, and more democratic-leaning than on capitalist social networks, so if the CCP is actively using it for social engineering, they’re doing a terrible job of it.


  • I think Vim is more popular with sysadmins because, historically, you could count on Vi or Vim being available on just about any server you had to do some work on, while Emacs might not be. That’s still probably somewhat true, although in the world of clouds, containers, and source-controlled, reproducible configuration, it’s probably less common to edit files in place on a server.

    However, with Emacs tramp, you can edit files just about anywhere you can access, by any means, even if there is no editor installed there at all, using your local Emacs, with all your accustomed configuration. Like popping open a file inside a container running on a remote server by ssh, something I’ve done a lot of lately, debugging services running on AWS ECS.