Remote: optional, open to in-person in the NY area.
Willing to relocate: probably not.
Technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, RSpec, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, Alpine.js, Git, Tailwind, Stripe/Netsuite/Salesforce & many other APIs
Resume/CV: Full-stack developer with an emphasis on Ruby, freelance and then at charity: water (www.charitywater.org) for nearly a decade. Interested in working with good humans above all else.
I subscribed to MacAddict in the mid-90s, back when Gil Amelio was Apple’s CEO, the company couldn’t ship software (Copland, Dylan, Gershwin, etc.), & they could barely afford to acquire NeXT.
It still blows my mind that this is the same company.
The joke is that NeXT acquired Apple and got paid to do it.
There’s a lot of truth to it. A huge amount of the software stack is inherited from NeXT. Steve Jobs was inherited from NeXT. Modern Apple is vastly more successful than NeXT ever was, but there’s a lot of continuity there as well.
In fairness to all concerned, the MacOS to MacOS X transition was brilliantly executed. These days we take VMs for granted, but back then it was a novel idea to run MacOS 8 as a process inside of MacOS X (the "blue box"). For most users it was seamless.
Yet they completely failed to do so for Mac 32-bit apps. There is a huge library of apps that have not been updated to 64-bit to this day and it is a travesty they never released a virtual classic mode to run 32-bit and even OS 9 apps. It is the one place Microsoft shines in comparison, and the only excuse they give is “deal with it”.
I am certain the reason Wine never tried Mac emulators is fear of Apple legal and consequently you far more easily run ancient Windows programs on Mac then you can even fairly recent Mac Applications.
I can see Apple's position: The Mac has been through four major ISAs and the value to most users of maintaining that entire stack indefinitely in the current macOS is nil.
A number of digital preservation standards are emerging (Wasm, MAME/MESS, EaaSI, Olive, ...) and I would like to see a legal requirement on OS vendors that platforms that are no longer supported must be made available to archivists.
In most ways, it isn't meaningfully. It became what it is now, but in the same way a 600 year old oak isn't anything like an acorn or a sapling, what exists now isn't meaningfully that.
On a more serious note, they were mostly f*cked by their paas provider imo. Claude will always do dumb shit. Especially if you tell it to not do something... By doing so you generally increase the likelihood of it doing it.
It's even obvious why if you think about it, the pattern of "you had one job, but you failed" or "only this can't happen, it happened!" And all it's other forms is all over literature, online content etc.
But their PaaS provider not scoping permissions properly is the root cause, all things considered. While Claude did cause this issue there, something else would've happened eventually otherwise.
Also, some folks seem to be forgetting the virtues of boring, time-tested platforms & technologies in their rush to embrace the new & shiny & vibe-***ed. & also forgetting to thoroughly read documentation. It’s not terribly surprising to me that an “AI-first” infrastructure company might make these sorts of questionable design decisions.
Absolutely yes, all over the place! Startups are building greenfield software with Rails as we speak. Loads of established businesses have Ruby applications that are quietly chugging along doing their jobs well. & Shopify, a company with $1.6 billion in annual revenue, uses Ruby _very_ heavily & also invests in the wider Ruby ecosystem.
Ruby is not without its drawbacks & drama, but it’s elegant in a way that few languages are to this day (how many JS programmers _actually_ grok prototype-based object-orientation?) & compared to NPM, RubyGems is (lately) unexciting in the best way.
I was very skeptical of these plans at first—as a New Yorker, I don’t exactly have a lot of trust in our city’s government to run things well.
But I’ve come around. Let’s try something new! Let’s show people that local governments in the United States really are capable of making a difference in their daily lives. If it fails, well, we tried & we’ll keep trying.
"Hey, let's try something new!" without a plan for success is just a recipe for failure.
I honestly don't understand the desire for municipal grocery stores at all. Grocery stores famously operate on super slim margins, so it's not like they're raking in the dough. Many of them are often run extremely well. In Texas, HEB is so beloved that a lot of people consider it far better at disaster recovery operations than the actual government.
I'm not against plans to better help people afford groceries, but somebody needs to at least explain how the plan is economically rationally viable, not just "let's try something new!"
Error 1: "Something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done." Yeah, but "this" is something stupid, with no real-world chance of working.
Error 2: "We will not do anything until we can prove that it will work." You can analyze things to death and waste years in the process, and never do anything.
Somewhere in between is the right answer. You see plausible success, but still far from certain. Then you experiment.
Now, is New York striking the right balance? I have no idea. I'm not privy to their internal discussions. But I know that, if it fails, everyone is going to mock them for trying. That is, everyone is going to assume they fell into error 1. But did they? Getting the balance right still means that the experiments fail a fair amount of the time.
There gotta be a lot of accounting magics working here. Otherwise you can't explain why they simply don't sell everything and buy bonds. I don't have a theory so hopefully some finance people can explain.
As an outsider, it will be interesting to see a pilot at minimum. I'd be hesitant for NYC if it rolled out massively expensive stores across the entire city without understanding if it succeeds at the small scale. I'm not sure why this succeeding or failing has to be viewed as a violation of a sacred value.
Governments should do more experiments, and this does seem to have been thought out enough to not be a total waste of money.
I believe it's simple tribal behavior, combined with American blindness to a "free market". They'd rather be correct and put everything in a good / bad bucket instead of experimenting and learning from the experience.
So many conservative states and cities absolutely running things into the ground, making people miserable and oppressed and their cost of living skyrocketing for years, decades, look at Texas look at Florida, so many examples
So why not try something progressive for a change and see what happens?
- A number of "officials" (friends) will get cushy jobs for running this program.
- It will lose millions of tax dollars
- a small portion of the population will get cheaper produce for a photo op
- Mamdani and friends will call it a success
- But net, this will be net negative for the city (ie. tax dollars to crony jobs and subsidizing food for some).
Whats the point? The USSR has tried this (subsidized grocery stores centrally planned). Lets not.
If on the other hand, the issue was hey its expensive to bring produce XYZ, so why don't we work to reduce that cost by legalizing Kei [1] trucks and exempt from tolls. Now that would be something interesting.
Yeah it was so successful that people would line up around the block for bananas the one time a year. Or when boots came into the store you'd pick up whatever size you could, as you'd trade later.
Updated - since my text was confusing. The subject at hand is subsidized grocery stores, the USSR is an example of failed centrally planned subsidized grocery stores.
My fil owns a bunch of grocery stores in Russia. The gov't still essentially subsidizes the cost of basic goods to keep prices low for the poor. Because of this, even the poorest have access to what they need, and they worship Putin because of it - "he makes sure we're taken care of". Obviously we could get into the corruption, why they're so poor in the first place, etc, but it is clearly working pretty well.
Also in Israel, stable basic products (like milk) have a government mandated pricing, not even subsidized.
It’s a good idea in its simplistic form, and works well most of the times, but once every 2 years you get a crunch where the manufacturers just decline to produce products at a loss, so we don’t have milk or butter for 2 weeks.
NY Post wailing aside, it’s unclear that hizzoner has engaged in that much personal graft. There’s also no evidence presented that the staff of this program are being hired through a graft scheme.
You could be right about it losing millions of dollars, we’ll see. Millions isn’t very much on the scale of NYC’s civic infrastructure; it would be difficult to even call it a waste at that scale, since the results will themselves be valuable.
The USSR fell before I spoke my first words. The world is a very different place, and the United States works very differently from the USSR.
At worst, some people will get some cheaper groceries out of this. If you want to get mad about government spending, maybe we shouldn't be building a ballroom attached to the White House.
As opposed to the millions that come out of your pocket on top of the taxes you pay? At least this brings some of the tax money back to the people. When you let grocery store price gouge you without competition, the money goes to executive pay and shareholder value.
A gov run grocery store will have to pay rent and taxes.
The only difference is it doesn’t have to make profits to pay its owners.
The question is, why are you prioritizing being “fair” to people profiting off hunger, over being fair to working people trying to eat? Even if it is “unfair” this is a kind of unfair we should all support (assuming it succeeds at feeding people).
Afaik bodegas make most of their money from cigarettes and booze, so this is unlikely to cut into their income in any real way. As for grocery stores owned and operated by the people who work in them, there aren’t many of those but I would expect they’ll be aware of that and open these gov stores far away from small local grocers (who tend to have cheap food already).
As for people who own grocery stores and don’t work in them? That’s an investment not a job, gov has no duty to protect individual investments over people’s basic needs.
And even worse, last estimate I saw was 30 million to open a store! 30 million! Graft is alive and well. Communism is a dismal failure, and I don't want to live through it myself. Say no to communism.
It’s the complete disregard of typesetting in ebooks that has always repelled me. I fundamentally reject the notion that all books can be reduced to text files. Design matters!
I only read works consisting purely of prose on ebooks, mostly fiction. They are rubbish for text books for at least a couple of reasons:
1. The typesetting, as you point out. Books are carefully typeset for the size of the pages they are printed on. Screens are going to be completely the wrong size/shape for most things,
2. Seek speed. Seeking to a point in an ebook is excruciating. A real book is by far the best format for quickly seeking to a place or seeking backwards and forwards between multiple pages. I can also open two books at once and seek between them using only my eyes.
I live in a section of Brooklyn (the "flat south section" per this fantastically detailed Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lettered_Brooklyn_aven...) in which the avenues (which run east to west, like Bogotá's calles) are lettered. Some of them, mostly early in the alphabet, were named or renamed in this same way (Albemarle, Beverly, Cortelyou, Ditmas, and so on). The streets running north/south are numbered.
(Interestingly, Avenue Q was renamed Quentin Road to avoid confusion with Avenue O.)
Either way, lettered or named in alphabetical order, I appreciate the lettered/numbered combination. It's a good mix of character and practicality, and it sounds good when you say it out loud ("It's at E 14th and K"). The doubly numbered intersections of Queens always drive me nuts.
A final sidenote: some real estate developers in the early 20th century decided to rename sections of E 11th through 16th from Prospect Park South down through West Midwood to fancy-sounding anglicized names like Stratford, Westminster, Argyle, Rugby, and Marlborough (the SWARM backronym here is useful) so they could make more money selling homes on those streets. It worked. Yet another example of nefarious street naming...
I agree with almost all of this, & yes, retreats can be life-changing. They certainly have been for me!
However, I do not understand this comment:
For the Soto Zen and Vipassana traditions, practice is everything - not philosophy, opinion, or behavior.
Right action is an essential element of the Noble Eightfold Path. I have myself found the teachings concerning behavior to be a central element of my practice as I have gone deeper with the dhamma.
I agree about right action. I (shouldn't have) used "behavior" (probably idiosyncratically) to mean performative actions to signal compliance - projections for the sake of their impact, like holding opinions for the sake of the ensuing emotions (illusions) or expounding them for the sake of social acceptance. "Right action" I take as practice in all of one's interactions, just as dharma is philosophy and opinion, but as practice in thinking and communicating. Similarly, forms are maintained for practice purposes (not for weeding or highlighting people, etc.)
I don’t think it counts as NIMBYism if you don’t want it in yours or anybody’s backyard, ever. I would describe that as principled opposition.
Also, what happens when we don’t need such enormous data centers anymore? How many communities in the U.S. are saddled with enormous dead malls while the developers walk away with zero liability?
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Remote: optional, open to in-person in the NY area.
Willing to relocate: probably not.
Technologies: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, RSpec, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, Alpine.js, Git, Tailwind, Stripe/Netsuite/Salesforce & many other APIs
Resume/CV: Full-stack developer with an emphasis on Ruby, freelance and then at charity: water (www.charitywater.org) for nearly a decade. Interested in working with good humans above all else.
Email: dave@robador.com
https://robador.com/daf
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