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TCP is a one to one relation, distributed systems are many to many.

You mean like UDP which also works amazing?

UDP gives you practically no guarantees about anything. Forget exactly once processing, UDP doesn't even give you any kind of guarantees about delivery to begin with, whether delivery will happen at all, order of delivery, lack of duplicates, etc, nothing. These things are so far from comparable that this idea makes no sense even after trying real hard to steelman it.

UDP plus increment means that the client can request a snapshot to be re-sent. This mechanism is used in financial exchanges and works amazing.

This illustrates that the webdevs who write articles on "distributed system" don't really understand what is already out there. These are all solved problems.


Or perhaps you've simply not learned the basics of actual distributed systems literature, and so are ignorant of the limitations of those solutions?

UDP doesn’t guarantee exactly once processing.

See my response to your sibling.

What I really want to know is how much they paid to acquire ui.com and whether that investment is paying off in any measurable kind of way.

I'm not sure which endpoint gp meant, but as I understood it, as an example, imagine a three-way handshake that's only available to enterprise users. Instead of failing a regular user on the first step, they allow steps one and two, but then do the check on step three and fail there.

This paraphrased urban legend has nothing to do with quality engineering though? As described, it's designed to the spec and working as intended.

It tracks with my experience in software quality engineering. Asked to find problems with something already working well in the field. Dutifully find bugs/etc. Get told that it's working though so nobody will change anything. In dysfunctional companies, which is probably most of them, quality engineering exists to cover asses, not to actually guide development.

It is not dysfunctional to ignore unreachable "bugs". A memory leak on a missile which won't be reached because it will explode long before that amount of time has passed is not a bug.

It's a debt though. Because people will forget it's there and then at some point someone changes a counter from milliseconds to microseconds and then the issue happens 1000 times sooner.

It's never right to leave structural issues even if "they don't happen under normal conditions".


I don't think this argument makes sense. You wouldn't provision a 100GB server for a service where 1GB would do just in case unexpected conditions come up. If the requirements change, then the setup can change, doing it just because is wasteful. What if we forget is not a valid argument to over engineer and over provision.

If a fix is relatively low cost and improves the software in a way that makes it easier to modify in the future, it makes it easier to change the requirements. In aggregate these pay off.

This is all relative though.

If a missile passes the long hurdles and hoops built into modern Defence T&E procurement it will only ever be considered out of spec once it fails.

For a good portion of platforms they will go into service, be used for a decade or longer, and not once will the design be modified before going end of life and replaced.

If you wanted to progressively iterate or improve on these platforms, then yes continual updates and investing in the eradication of tech debt is well worth the cost.

If you're strapping explosives attached to a rocket engine to your vehicle and pointing it at someone, there is merit in knowing it will behave exactly the same way it has done the past 1000 times.

Neither ethos in modifying a system is necessarily wrong, but you do have to choose which you're going with, and what the merits and drawbacks of that are.


In hard real-time software, you have a performance budget otherwise the missile fails.

It might be more maintainable to have leaks instead of elaborate destruction routines, because then you only have to consider the costs of allocations.

Java has a null garbage collector (Sigma GC) for the same reason. If your financial application really needs good performance at any cost and you don't want to rewrite it, you can throw money at the problem to make it go away.


There are many contexts where this comment would apply, but border crossing is not one of them. If you're a foreigner trying to enter another country, then by definition you have less rights than natives.

Who is "they" in this context?

The World Economic Forum is famous for saying people will own nothing by 2030 and be happy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...

The essay was a thought experiment based around the popularity of the so-called "sharing economy" at the time, not a WEF strategy document and certainly no government's policy.

Even the author of the piece said it was not a description of her vision of the future, but intended to start a discussion about technology.

But it's been picked up by wackaloons around the world as part of some overarching conspiracy theory.


> overarching conspiracy theory.

it's because it's so easy to simply blame the ills of society on some illusory few pulling the strings behind the scenes. It used to be the migrants, or blacks, or the chinese (still is apparently) or the japanese...and now, it's the rich/shadowy figures etc.

The actual truth is that the collective actions of everybody leads to certain outcomes - today's outcomes. It can't really have happened any other way.


But it's literally true?

Please don't dilute the argument by comparing racial groups with the ultra-rich.

The (ultra-)rich form a class in the classical Marxist sense - a group whose interests naturally align, and they work together to further their interests.

There is deliberate government policy behind what's going on with housing - free money for the rich, which they can in turn invest into speculative assets to make yet even more free money.

Then they ensure that their money has weight by putting said money into housing, pricing out common folk, and building new units to serve as price control to preserve the value of their assets.


Then it's a good thing that the World Economic Forum are not government and do not have lawmaking powers. It's essentially a lobbying firm. I wouldn't worry too much about random slop they publish.

That phrase was an essay from a Danish Social Democrat, the exact same party that has been pushing very hard for Chat Control in Europe.

It’s not a lobbying firm, it’s the same people that make our laws and decide our future.

By the way, the full title of that essay is “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better”


https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1981i3j/ubisoft_get...

The strategy is everywhere now. You buy but buy doesnt mean you own. How did that happen?


There is the WEF thing as other have mentioned but company representatives have said that

One recent case https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1981i3j/ubisoft_get...

But you see that everywhere. You buy the hardware but the company may block your property totally or partially.

You buy a car but pays to use heated seat? Who eats this thing that you haven't paid extra for the seats. The costs are just sunk in other parts.

You buy a movie but it can be revoked. You buy an smart tv that can have features revoked. You barely can pay your rent because now everyone needs to rent because no one has money to buy except equity firms.

There is no need for "they" to be a centralised being. It is just happening. Doesn't matter who or if there are a "they".

We live in a world where people think that the homeless man is the enemy because people are to simple minded to not understand why there are incentives to keep make it worse and worse.


They are the proponents of The Great Reset. Here’s an excerpt from a book I read:

‘As Hitler declared in 1934, “The German revolution will be concluded only when the entire German Volk has been totally created anew, reorganized and reconstructed” (cited in Koonz, 2003, p. 87). The “Great Reset,” announced by World Economic Forum (WEF) director Klaus Schwab, son of Nazi industrialist Eugen Schwab, attempts the same thing on a global scale, promising to “revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country [ . . . ] must participate, and every industry [ . . . ] must be transformed” (Schwab, 2020).’

The book is: Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of the Deep State

By David A. Hughes


It's a big club and you ain't in it.

them.

I can see where you might get that sentiment, but where do you plan to go when new tech rolls around, the docs don't cut it and your LLM of choice hallucinates APIs that don't exist? This was always Stackoverflow's bread and butter, and people who only use it as noob search tend to miss that fact. SO can be a tough crowd, yes, but mostly it's people who didn't read the rules before posting who get burnt. That aside, it still has a very high concentration of experts that you'll struggle to find anywhere else.

>I can see where you might get that sentiment, but where do you plan to go when new tech rolls around, the docs don't cut it and your LLM of choice hallucinates APIs that don't exist?

Not Stackoverflow, because all my questions are either ignored or closed, even when extremely detailed and unique.


> even when extremely detailed and unique.

or so you claim.


Well my last attempt turned out to be a vendor issue. It was officially acknowledged by a vendor support rep. It had to do with their unique method of populating a whitelist with DNS entries, and weird response chain to blocks in that state.

I read through the backlog, ensured I had completely exhausted every other avenue (short of 3 more weeks of yelling at one of the involved vendors for information about how they were performing their whitelisting) and had available captures for network and application, full reproducibility steps and details of everything that had been interrogated. I even remember linking similar issues, and explaining how I ruled out their causes.

In fact I am still relatively confident that the way mobile browsers were responding to the bug, probably constitutes a bug in itself but honestly, cant be assed to pursue it.

When enough time has passed I will probably produce a blog about the issue, so it can be digested by the next iteration of the troubleshooting machine. But I really dont feel compelled to provide further data to the stackoverflow community directly considering their complete lack of response. Even closing it as a duplicate of an existing issue would have been helpful, but it wasn't a duplicate so it was just ignored.


Unfortunately the answer to that is the Discord server of whatever technology I'm working with. Communities are now separated each in their silo on Discord, far away from the public internet, where nothing can be indexed.

Most of my work these days are around the AWS SDKs and Terraform. I always just say “verify the APis on the internet”.

Now, AWS has a documentation MCP server that can integrate with ChatGPT.

https://github.com/awslabs/mcp/tree/main/src/aws-api-mcp-ser...

I haven’t used it.


> the docs don't cut it

Yet. By the time stackoverlow shuts down, AIs will be powerful enough to take data from docs or just from the source code alone. I mean the new version of opus is pretty good at understanding my front end source code. I think that should be the goal of AIs (that they are so advanced they don’t need to read code examples from a third party website like stackoverflow)


This is a pretty narrow view. Most APIs out there are not source available, frontend libraries are the odd one out in that regard. Likewise for docs, it doesn't matter if the LLM can read the docs or not if the docs literally don't include the things you need to figure out. I suspect this is a generational divide, people who grew up with SO can't imagine what life was like before it, but right now we're on a straight course back to isolationist communities, if we aren't already there.

Really? That’s actually a very narrow view to think that AIs need to rely on code examples of some third party forum.

AIs will be good enough to understand the docs and source code alone, just like the human answering a stackoverflow question.


LLM clients like chatgpt can scrape the code of new tech on demand. They tend not to hallucinate when you provide fixed inputs like this.

While LLMs may have used Stack Overflow data to get their start, I think it's reasonable to assume that this source of training data will no longer continue to be useful.

Therefore, as both a data source and a QA website, Stack Overflow has lost its relevance.


The source code itself.

If an LLM can read the source of the library you’re trying to use - or examples of others using the library in GitHub, or official documentation - then there is less of a need for a fellow SOer to put the pieces together to debug issues and answer questions.


This is kind of like asking what the point of Dropbox is when we have rsync. Rsync is nice, but most people won't know how to use it.

Setting up a server with SSH and GitLab is more work than setting up a server with SSH. Dropbox is great and I use it but only because I can’t get the same functionality out of rsync without major additional orchestration. But if I am the only one working on my own project why would I need a second read-only UI for my own code?

If you're working alone you can also send raw IP packets down the wire by way of telegraph key if you'd like. What you do alone behind closed doors isn't really anyone's business and is up to you. For everyone else, the benefit of using Gitlab is that once it's set up, a wide range of users of varying skill levels and backgrounds can use it to collaborate.

Which is why I asked if there is any benefit to that type of setup for personal projects. Your answer so far has been the least helpful or informative.

Helsinki hits more or less the same weather, people cycle there just fine. It's only a matter of infrastructure and gear.

According to Wikipedia, the mean daily minimum of Helsinki in January is -5.6°. In Quebec City, it’s -17.7°. Not the same, at least according to Wikipedia.

Yes I agree but in general we dont have infrastructure and it gets much colder. Salt doesnt work at some point so you dont have dry pathways.

Bike paths don't have to be dry though, you can sweep them and it's fine. If you use studded tires, you can ride a bike in places where you can't even walk. Source is I used to do this when I lived in the middle of nowhere in Sweden. I agree with you that infrastructure is key though. The temperature doesn't really matter, if you're good to go on a walk, you're also good to go for a ride.

I see bikes in the summer here. I dont see almost anybody biking in the winter here. Like 100:1. The winters here are not mild (like in vancouver). This is basically artic-like weather. People also tend not to walk. The very poor take the bus. Most drive.

The problems this article outlines are very real, but the explanation for the underlying mechanics doesn't really pass any kind of a sniff test for me. The central thesis is that real economic growth is stagnating because the overhead for producing energy grows with time. But this is not the case! Fossil fuels will run out eventually, yes, but nearly every other type of energy production does not suffer from this, and is in fact getting better over time. Solar panels of today are miles ahead of those of yesterday. Similarly we're building out more and more wind and thermal energy. Nuclear is also fine, if we don't account for the regulatory difficulty in actually getting new plants up and running.

Yes, any shortage of energy we have today is more or less entirely voluntary on a species level.

You can blame Moloch or wall Street or whatever for making it functionally impossible for whatever multipolar market-actor reasons, but with the right choices we could have plenty of energy today, just as we could (but don't) feed everyone on Earth.

Eventually the will bea point where it does actually become physically impossible to generate that much power without melting the Earth's crust or boiling the seas, but that's a long, long way away.


Seems more correct to say with different choices rather than the right choices.

For example plenty of energy likely means far more nuclear reactors, and the unfortunately truth is that most can be used to breed plutonium, so while we could be living with energy abundance, we also at least slightly increase the chance of global nuclear war. (IMO probably still worth it but it's no longer a super clear right/wrong).

With food, the problem is not producing it, it's the distribution. You aren't going to get it distributed in many countries that need it without overthrowing governments which will include lots of killing and bombing. Now it being the right choice to feed everyone is much murkier.


It points out a problem but ignores the obvious solution. We want the nominal value of stocks, houses, and essentially everything to continually increase. The escape hatch is that these can increase in value slower than inflation and thus be reduced in real value.

Everybody assumes that correction will happen via crash. And perhaps that's the case for stock market prices. But while we have had housing price crashes in the past, that's very much the exception. House prices are very sticky, people are irrationally unwilling to sell their houses for a loss. I've seen several markets where real estate nominal prices stayed roughly flat for a couple decades, moving the market from "overpriced" to "underpriced" without anybody really noticing.

"Just build more houses" is the fix for many (but not all) of the US economy problems. Not sure about the UK, but I wouldn't be surprised if it applies there too.


Home building is indeed the solution, but it can never outrun the printing presses. Ultimately there is a bare minimum cost of a house too. If people are too poor to pay for that, the home building pipeline will have to stall. People need to be productive and competitive enough in the economy to be able to pay for all the new houses being built.

People want absolute values to be ever increasing too, but they'd settle for nominal values to be ever increasing. This violates the law of supply and demand, and common sense about depreciation and changing demographics. We should experience falling prices as material wealth increases in the world. Governments and money lenders hate this because they want to print off as much money as they possibly can get away with (as if they know how much that amount even is). They can't stand the idea of someone being rewarded for conserving their own resources, when those resources could be siphoned off for some other bullshit.

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