I think your critique is actually the hollowest thing here.
The article is presenting an idea, not a solution. You've failed to see this and have constructed several strawman arguments in order to critique it.
Most importantly the article does not present itself in a definite sense - it is written with care to say "I think", "Next thought:", "Probably", "So yeah.". This article is a person sharing what they are thinking, and unlike many of my thoughts - it is a fairly complete thought which is clearly sparking many other reasonable people to think along similar lines.
The author doesn't present the solution - but there is no reason they should have to. What an odd and unreasonable bar you set.
I also don't find your attacks on the authors site particularly endearing. The taste gap is well known, and punishing someone for their conceptual contribution outstripping their practical skill is quite... distasteful.
A more competently written critique would have been more charitable and in the spirit of this community.
>> The article is presenting an idea, not a solution.
The article establishes an arbitrary standard, provides examples and criticizes them on the basis that they don't meet that arbitrary standard, and then... nothing.
It is easy to criticize something from the outside. Much harder to dig deep, learn the material and understand why it produces the status quo, and then propose workable solutions. That's where the actual value lies.
There’s an irony in you claiming my comment is uncharitable and claiming the article is a discussion point when you haven’t even taken up the question I posited and framed them as a strawman.
Can it be possible to make everything during a user interaction perfect looking? What does that mean?
That was part of my original comment that you skimmed past rather than engaging with. So if you truly believe this should be a starting point of a discussion, then why not even bother taking that point to build a discussion point off of?
I’d also argue that this is not presented as just an idea. That is disingenuous. The author clearly writes “I call these situations “The technology has outsmarted the programmer” “
That is more than just a discussion point but a levied criticism at the skill of the people making things. In turn therefore they’ve set the framing of skill as part of the discussion and I don’t think it’s unfair to point out their own lack of ability to execute to their high standard.
But let’s go by your standard of saying that we shouldn’t take the authors own execution or their own words into consideration but only focus on the core idea they present.
Then that still leaves defining what they consider every frame being perfect. What are the bounds of that statement?
I’m really shocked you can’t see the sheer hypocrisy on your part here again.
You have literally added nothing to the discussion, other than levying criticism and denigrating any points made just because you either don’t agree or don’t actually have anything material to add.
Anyway, it’s the internet. No point getting annoyed by drive by responses from a stranger. Enjoy your weekend.
This feels analogous to the old Google latency improvement story - improve performance and p99 goes up, not down, because more people are now able to use your product.
These angry customers are a symptom of having more customers; in this direction (compatibility) companies shouldn't be KPI'ing on angry customers.
It is very legitimate that high compatibility means more very obscure, low value, high cost, bug reports that are hard to classify as such. And my gosh, I hate working with rude ticket writers.
> These angry customers are a symptom of having more customers;
No, it's a symptom of having more of a very specific type of customer who is more demanding and difficult to please than your other customers.
When you don't officially support Linux, the Linux users are not surprised. It's normal for them. They find other ways to use the product.
When you do announce Linux support, you open Pandora's box of complaints. They're extra angry that you claim Linux support but it doesn't work perfectly on their unique combination of laptop, distro, display protocol, and window manager.
You gained a small number of happy customers, but picked up a disproportionately large number of angry, vocal customers in the process.
Indeed. You make anything past that the customer's problem. I have a few Ubuntu apps that needed a bit of jiggery-pokery to make them run on not-Ubuntu.
Whoever is giving a six figure pre-seed to a tech startup and doesn't know this is a bad idea is probably quite out of their depth with the investment.
This does smell of an attempt to avoid AML checks.
Many places run analyzers on published code; many security users have reason to shorten the period. The default period becomes the period where white hats have a chance to detect it and stop it passing the threshold.
> If you know how to edit your ~/.npmrc etc, you don't really need any of them, but if you have a loved one who just needs a one click fix, these can likely save them from the next attack.
This feels like a very very small group of people; and people who really could do with opening the file and adding the line.
I wish that was the case. Asking people to do something simple, doesn't matter how simple it is, depends on how simple they view it. Changing your own car's oil is actually not that hard, once you know how to do it, most people don't even try. Think of QR codes, people hardly used them for many years, because you needed to download an app for it, small step. It only started to catch up when you had it built in the camera app in most providers. In any funnel, each step, no matter how easy, adds friction, remove the friction and you get bigger adoption.
So yes, everyone could open a file and edit it, also everyone could watch a youtube video on how to do X and yet choose to have someone else do it for them :)
> Changing your own car's oil is actually not that hard
It is. Changing oil requires a place where you have sufficient access to the vehicle to drain it; the right equipment; the right disposal solutions. Most people who have cars do not have that. And it takes significantly more time to change your own oil than to have someone else do it as part of other specialist maintenance.
> Think of QR codes, people hardly used them for many years, because you needed to download an app for it, small step. It only started to catch up when you had it built in the camera app in most providers.
Exactly. Using a QR code app required specific knowledge of the app, an internet connection, some time, knowledge of how and when to use it, and something to use it with - the barrier of which surpassed the convenience gained from the QR code.
> So yes, everyone could open a file and edit it, also everyone could watch a youtube video on how to do X and yet choose to have someone else do it for them :)
I'm struggling to find a non-contrived group of people who:
- do not know how to open and edit a file on their system
> a place where you have sufficient access to the vehicle to drain it
Probably the only valid argument for people who park on the street.
> the right equipment
One $5 wrench, one $10 filter wrench (optional). One set of ramps ($40), or jack stands ($30) if you already have a jack. One drain pan, $10 (or free if you're resourceful). Total cost max $65. Cheaper if you look for deals, buy used, borrow from a friend. If you can't afford $65 once to save money in the long run while owning a car, you probably should've bought a cheaper car.
> the right disposal solutions
Every oil change requires a jug of oil to be purchased. You can drain your used oil into this jug and then dispose of it along with your other household hazardous waste. This is not hard.
> Most people who have cars do not have that.
I might believe this for a place to do an oil change, maybe. I struggle to believe most, but I would believe many. Aside from that, if you don't have those things, you are choosing not to have them.
Which is kind of the point. None of these things are hard, at all. The majority of car owners 100 years ago could adjust their own timing, clean distributor points, replace belts, etc. because if they couldn't, they'd be calling for a tow truck every few hundred miles. Those are all harder, and things have only gotten easier with time. If you can't do them, you are choosing not to, because there's an even easier solution - spending more money and getting someone else to do it for you.
In ~300k km worth of diy oil changes, I’ve yet to change a crush washer, and yet to have a drain plug leak.
I always replace them on friends’ Toyotas, because they seem more important, but on every car I’ve owned it hasn’t mattered. And if you take the least amount of effort to google “how to change oil on ________” (fill in the blank for your year, make, model), some forum or video will probably tell you exactly what steps to take, including whether or not changing a washer is necessary.
Costs me 15 cents per washer delivered, why bother risk it? The world doesn't need more cancerous used motor oil on the ground.
After downloading a service manual and doing many things myself it became very apparent that mechanics barely bother to do work the right way despite it coming at virtually zero extra effort.
It's quite rare to see them use a torque wrench on many bolts and if you ask them why "they know it by feel", cool, but why not use a torque wrench to the proper specs anyway? It's not any harder.
My favorite way to do it is in the auto parts store parking lot. They will help you cart your full drain pan back to their oil recycling receptacle and some will even prop the back door open for you to walk it straight there. The bonus being if you do happen to spill a bit you're not stuck having to power wash your own driveway. I've got a process down to where I can pull it off with one pair of nitrile gloves, one rag, and one trash bag, to keep any residue from the drain pan staining anything.
That group of people is the loosely affiliated people called "vibe coders". Even to get them to install depsguard is a challenge. I just ask them to point Claude to depsguard or cooldowns and follow the instructions (to save the tokens, of course Claude can figure it what needs to be done on its own)
The issue is that Claude Code also will be super happy to npm install axios / tanstack etc unless you explicitly tell it to add cooldowns.
Ha. Yes I haven't calibrated myself well for that form of users. It would seem that telling them to tell their agent to read cooldowns might be the best advice there; they sure as he'll won't read it.
The JS ecosystem is really, really complicated, so any non-trivial app is going to use multiple bundlers, node runtimes, native runtimes, etc, etc, etc.
Every one of those has a different opinion about how to spell "cooldown".
On top of that, there's the bootstrapping issue of "I want to install the N pieces of ecosystem sprawl that read the .[p]npmrc that have the cooldown directive in them. How do I do that with a cooldown?" (Where N is unknowable, because of course it is.)
> The JS ecosystem is really, really complicated, so any non-trivial app is going to use multiple bundlers, node runtimes, native runtimes, etc, etc, etc.
This statement makes very little sense to me. I've worked on several of what are likely the largest JS monorepos in the world, and they all define a specific version of a specific runtime and package manager you should be using.
An extra $15 of labor is well worth the cost of not having to change my own oil. They will do it efficiently and won't break anything. The cost of messing up one time immediately cancels out a lifetime of DIY savings, and they are equipped to do it right.
If everyone that can read the logs are people who can read the secrets, then nothing. If there are any log readers who should be be secret readers, its a potentially exposed secret.
The article is presenting an idea, not a solution. You've failed to see this and have constructed several strawman arguments in order to critique it.
Most importantly the article does not present itself in a definite sense - it is written with care to say "I think", "Next thought:", "Probably", "So yeah.". This article is a person sharing what they are thinking, and unlike many of my thoughts - it is a fairly complete thought which is clearly sparking many other reasonable people to think along similar lines.
The author doesn't present the solution - but there is no reason they should have to. What an odd and unreasonable bar you set.
I also don't find your attacks on the authors site particularly endearing. The taste gap is well known, and punishing someone for their conceptual contribution outstripping their practical skill is quite... distasteful.
A more competently written critique would have been more charitable and in the spirit of this community.
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