Interesting. Things I think of as quite reasonable, though certainly with counter arguments, are to him fundamentally preposterous and not even worthy of reasonable consideration.
My kid goes to a very liberal California school. The main difference between it and my school growing up is that it is no longer acceptable to ostracize or beat up lgbtq kids or kids who are different in other ways. Part of that is because, gasp, the school builds acceptance into the curriculum. I wish I grew up now, it’s such a nicer time to be a weird nerd.
You’re ignoring general heavy workloads such as observability. How much telemetry do they gather and analyze for tracking and fraud detection. A quick google on Tesco engineering shows that they process 35k qps against couchbase, and 35 terrabytes of telemetry data per day.
They track 150k devices in their ecosystem, which, reading between the lines, would produce the telemetry and require observability, state management, anomaly detection, etc. They have hundreds of thousands of employees using these devices for varying purposes. We’re talking quite a bit of compute, which also requires high availability.
I know nothing about Tesco beyond that quick google search, but I’ve been at several companies where I would read online comments claiming we could reduce our workload to a few servers, and I would think of our tens of thousands of fully loaded machines and roll my eyes.
I’d say a useful way of thinking about caching is through the lens of the CAP theorem. You are facing a situation where compute requirements exceed the bounds of a single process. There are a variety of things you can do here, all with consequences to the Consistency aspect of your data. Two strategies with consequences are caching and horizontal scaling. So look to vertical scaling or efficiencies in data modeling first.
I like your comment btw. I’d add Observability to CAP to incorporate what you’re saying.
Quite agree, this is how I explain it to people. When you think of cache as another derived dataset then you start to realize that the issues caches bring to architectures are often the result of not having an agreement between the business and engineering on acceptable data consistency tolerances. For example, outside the world of caching, if you email users a report, and the data is embedded in the email, then you are accepting that the user will see a snapshot of data at a particular time. In many cases this is fine, even preferred. Sometimes not, and instead you link the user to a realtime dashboard instead.
Pretty much every view the user sees of data should include an understanding as to how consistent that data is with the source of truth. Issues with caching (besides basic bugs) often come up when a performance issue comes up and people slap in a cache without renegotiating how the end user would expect the data to look relative to its upstream state.
The cache is an incomplete dataset by definition. It’s not a data set, it’s a cache of a data set. You can never ensure you get a clean read of the system state from the cache because it’s never in sync and has gaps.
CPU cache means that the same value read twice will return the same value. Some exceptions for NUMA, and mu[tiple threads. But two reads of a cache cache make no such guarantees.
There is a vast number of undiagnosed race conditions in modern code cause by cache eviction in the middle of 'transactions' under high system load.
I enjoy wordle and wouldn’t automate it to replace my play. I also enjoy techie people demonstrating that you can automate X with Y tool. That’s another form of problem solving. Can’t those enjoyments exist simultaneously?
Huh, I agree with your last sentence but think the author did a good job of explaining that the cost of layout experimentation in a startup can grow over time if the results of the experiments are overstated. The first question for a startup should always be: is this work worth doing in the first place? Tinkering with layout can be a tempting but fruitless rabbit hole. Even if it doesn’t tie up resources it can lead to a false sense of progress and get product thinking stuck in local maximae.
I partially agree with you but have some counter thoughts.
Tone is something that can be adopted intentionally or unintentionally. If you hear a pilot on a radio dryly say something in a calm and detached tone, it could be in the context of an emergency. Pilots are enculturated to adopt that tone (for various reasons). Meanwhile particular cultures have different levels of acceptability when it comes to tone: some cultures perceive other cultures as more angry, or detached, because of the norms of communication within those cultures.
In short, I think the tone of “calm, scientific detachment” is often weaponized to lend undeserved credibility to an argument, because people tend to believe people more when they adopt that tone.
Furthermore, tone does have a purpose if used alongside a well done argument. For example, in the article the OP linked to, there is a rather exhaustive refutation of the book in question. The tone of the author previews that their entire opinion on the book is negative, given all the arguments they put forth in their review. If the author of the review had adopted a calm and thoughtful tone, perhaps it would indeed have been more effective because the reader would decide. On the other hand, most people won’t read the entire review, so the tone of the author makes it clear what their opinion is.
That said I am not wholly disagreeing with you: would be interesting to do a study using some varying markers to identify tone, and identify, I don’t know, argumentative complexity, and see if snarkiness is associated with a lack of complexity. Assuming you can find markers with predictive power.
I think what actually convinces me more than tone is nuance. If you can fairly assess arguments on both sides, recognize when either side makes a good point, and mention when you're confused about your conclusion, or when some point of evidence doesn't mesh with the theory. Things that are all one-sided are usually wrong (though I suppose there are cases where the truth is indeed one-sided, it's just pretty rare, and less likely to be things that people that you otherwise consider serious would argue about).
Even that attitude can be weaponized I suppose, if nuance convinced more people, than more people would learn to fake nuance to push their favorite outcome. Though I'd like to think that the process would change them a little bit for the better too.
I was intrigued and took a Quick Look at the top studies on this subject and the metrics used are things like relative overdose deaths in an area, crime statistics, and usage of treatment programs. They say that by virtue of a number of epidemiological metrics that safe consumption sites appear to be associated with harm reduction in terms of overdoses, while not increasing crime stats. I don’t see outsized claims of objective truth being made, more of the standard, “here’s how we got the numbers, here’s the numbers, they appear to point in this direction.”
I’m not doubting your claim but I’m wondering how that very weird paper you’re citing bubbles up to the top, when there’s some very middle of the road meta analyses that don’t make outsized claims like access to objective truth.
It's not that the paper itself made the claim of having access to objective Truth, it's that papers like these make conclusions, and these conclusions get taken in aggregate to advance various agendas, and the whole premise is treated (in aggregate) as being functionally identical to building a rocket based on conclusions reached by mathematics and physics research papers—because both situations involve making decisions based upon “scientific research”, so in both situations you can justify your actions by pointing to “Science”.
Huh! If I reflect back on my involvement in projects that had difficulties, there was rarely a dearth of competent people, and in fact it was often political and communication concerns that led to suffering.
Look at Conway’s Law: “any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.”
The “kind” people are the people who optimize an organization’s communication structure by helping competent people to have a voice and not be impeded by political wrangling.
In short, I think it’s the ‘kind’ people who can help an organization realize an architecture that is less warped by political considerations and more true to the customer’s needs.
Of course an organization needs both kindness and competence. In my decades in tech, competence was over-valued in my early years (the worship of the trope of the rockstar-but-asshole programmer), so if there is an overindication towards kindness right now, it is probably a counterbalance.
I would also question your conclusion about the government. While I have not worked in the government myself, I come from a sort of “federal government family”, in that I have multiple close family who have spent decades in federal government roles, and they are full of stories of incompetent managers undermining their employees, politically fighting one another, etc. To your point, they also have plenty of stories of crass incompetence, Nepotism, etc. But I think it’s an easy and incorrect answer to say it’s simply due to “HR-values” as opposed to “engineering-values”: it’s multi-faceted in both directions.
All that need for political wrangling was created by incompetent kind people. Getting more of those just creates more of those issues, if not at your place its at others, its an arms race.
Personally, I find a team seems to be healthiest if a mixture of personalities are on it. They should all be competent.
When it comes to incompetence, people can hide that behind kindness, or behind bluster and bullying. Both are certainly unhealthy. I wouldn’t say one leads to issues over the other.
My kid goes to a very liberal California school. The main difference between it and my school growing up is that it is no longer acceptable to ostracize or beat up lgbtq kids or kids who are different in other ways. Part of that is because, gasp, the school builds acceptance into the curriculum. I wish I grew up now, it’s such a nicer time to be a weird nerd.