We also have Wero now, which unifies the mobile payment systems in belgium, France and Germany, with more to follow. Promises to be a unified mobile payment system across Europe within a couple of years.
> Most developers blame the software, other people, their dog, or the weather for flaky, seemingly “random” bugs.
> The best devs don’t.
> No matter how erratic or mischievous the behavior of a computer seems, there is always a logical explanation: you just haven’t found it yet!
I don't see how you can conclude from that that real issues would be overlooked? I interpret this to be the opposite.
I agree. The author isn't saying that the best devs never complain about something. He's saying they never leave it at complaining and throw their hands up, but dig in until the find the underlying reason for the behavior, or a way to work around it, as long as the problem remains in their way.
This is unironically true. There's nothing wrong with wanting to use different tools which are better suited for the task. There's nothing wrong with trying to convince people "this tool isn't right for the job, let's switch". But after all that, if the decision is to stick with COBOL (whatever the reason may be) - a good professional does the best they can with it. If you can't suck it up and write stuff in COBOL, you aren't a very good developer.
Idk lots of popular languages/tools simply suck, addressing issues is interpreted as crying about it by more experienced devs. Experienced that a lot in my career so far. So I think the original comment is fair.
If an experienced developer looks at someone who tries to address suckage of a tool/language sucking and then characterises the behaviour as crying about it, it is the experienced dev that also takes part in the suckage.
Signalling? Talks about investing 800 billion in the military industry across the EU would have been unthinkable 4 months ago. Now they're proceeding at a speed that is staggering when you see how long these talks/processes normally take.
EU cloud is certainly much discussed, and more than that. Holland for instance voted and accepted a resolution last week for more digital sovereignty. This doesn't mean we'll have an AWS competitor overnight, but we're also only 3 months in.
The problem is precisely that most things have been (and continue to be) "unthinkable" "impossible" "unreal" in Europe for a long time. The unthinkable has the tendency to hit the many walls that exist in the corrupt and disfunctional European institutions. Lots of virtue signaling, lots of talk, lots of discussion, lots of failure, little action, little results. Put me in the skeptical bucket that European leader (and population) have the will power to sustain the unthinkable beyond an American election cycle.
It's unclear how this EU momentum will stand the test of time, even if the war in Ukraine were to stop quickly.
Where do these 800 bn really come from, how fast they will transform into R&D and products, how much the industrial status quo is going to change? These are hard questions that remain unanswered.
> It's unclear how this EU momentum will stand the test of time, even if the war in Ukraine were to stop quickly.
I don’t think it really is unclear. The war in Ukraine served as an initial trigger that did spark some notesble changes. But the trump administration even more so. Ask the former UdSSR and Warsaw pact states. They were sounding the alarm bells for a long time and don’t appear to be willing to take any chances going forward.
> Where do these 800 bn really come from,
Government deficit.
> how fast they will transform into R&D and products
R&D is not really the issue. While there are some notable exceptions, the European defense industry has lots of very capable system that match or exceed the capabilities of US counterparts. The problem is primarily production capacity.
And production capacity is a problem that is relatively easily solved by throwing money at it and committing to long term purchases.
The main risk is that states want to ensure that if they want to spend more, they also get proportionally more. With production capacity being a bottleneck, increased spending could lead to inflationary pricing.
I think the momentum doesn't come from the Ukraine war. It comes from the US going back on NATO article 5, declaring any promise of mutual defense dubious at best. And it comes from the US threatening NATO allies such as Canada and Denmark (to which Greenland belongs) with invasion.
When you treat your closest allies like that, you instantly become untrustworthy. And you will remain untrustworthy far longer than Trump can stay in office, be it with the current terms or some Putin-like term extensions.
Also, the 800bn are a huge bunch of money that politicians would have never gotten otherwise. Now they have it an can spend it on their military-industrial-cronies. They won't let that opportunity go to waste, even if the reason were gone.
>Talks about investing 800 billion in the military industry across the EU would have been unthinkable 4 months ago.
Okay, but if that's true then what does that say about the relationship between Europe and the United States when they could have done this the whole time and chose not to? Especially when the last 4 or so presidents have all complained about European nations neglecting to meet their NATO defense spending targets only to be politely ignored or in some cases laughed at in public by European counterparts?
I assume Europeans are willing to forgo some, maybe even most of their social benefits in exchange for increased military spending? I understand many currently enjoy fairly generous government support.
If not, then will there be an even bigger increase in taxes? How does EU plan to roll this out?
Absence of a (high-level services) cloud provider is a big problem. I hope that changes at some point, but probably impossible to start something like that without measures in place to make the existing offering less attractive.
My first thoughts exactly. How do you prevent this from turning into what we had with flash if you don't provide the framework to build the UI components.
Turning the web into what we had with flash except for the many security issues seems to be the way things are headed. Not that I'm happy about it, but more and more web applications are going that route.
The design behind WASM helps keep this iteration of Macromedia/Flash/Java/ActiveX stay quite secure, at least until people start adding the extra APIs that a certain subset of WASM enthusiasts trying to turn WASM into another JVM are going for.
Almost everything I do for work uses teams, so I can't say MS missed any boats. It's spectacular how pervasive teams is given how universally reviled it is. I'd personally switch back to slack in a heartbeat for instance.
Don't know about Slack's videoconf, but Slack's cheap insistence that we pay a rip-off amount of money per month for storing some TEXT messages more than 90 days has continuously degraded my appreciation for it over the last years to the level of me hating it now.
They're so cheap. Just put a quota on total storage or something, that actually map to their costs..
We have a Slack for a shared office of 10 people or so, we use it to like ask each other for where to go for lunch or general stuff, it must cost them $0.001/month to host, but you continuously get a banner that says PAY TO UNLOCK THESE EXCITING OLD MESSAGES all over it, and when you check what they want, they want some exorbitant amount like $10/month/user so $100/month for a lunch-synchronization tool. For $100/month I can store like 5 TB on S3, that's a lot of texts.
I'm genuinely curious why they don't have some other payment option, I'd be happy to pay $1/month/user for some basic level if they just don't want freeloaders there. Well, I wouldn't be happy.. but still :)
Slack is primarily a business tool, and for a business tool $10/user/month is extremely reasonable for the value (perceived or real) it brings. The company has to make money, and you do that by charging for your products and services, and that price is not exorbitant.
The really egregious thing is that when businesses pay for Slack, it remains unindexed and they just change the retention to 1yr.
Nothing is as frustrating as looking for an old conversation referenced in a doc and being smugly told by some corporate dick that Slack isn't for documentation and if it were important info, clearly someone should have saved it. Never mind who, it should just magically happen.
The gap between "messages last for 30 days" and "Slack keeps a searchable record of all your business decisions in a useful way, forever" is huge. I can pretty easily see the value of the latter but it seems to freak executives out for some reason...
They don’t want records around that expose crimes when discovery happens, and they want that so much that they shave a percent or two off the company’s productivity to get it.
If it's important enough to mention in a document then the person creating the document should preserve a copy of what is clearly ephemeral information. It's just as daft was referencing emails in a document.
Yes, but what people should do rarely matches what they actually do and deleting old messages just makes it impossible to recover that info.
I find that this take is much more common among managers and executives who are used to being spoon-fed documentation than among the engineers who actually have to write and hunt for it.
This frustrates me too. Discord stores your messages forever for free! They're slowly eating Slack's lunch when it comes to internet communities... but I guess Slack doesn't really care; those communities were never going to pay any real money anyway.
At my job we use Teams, but basically just for meetings (and the associated chat), and it works really well. About the only complaint I could make is that it occasionally guesses the wrong audio devices, but it's fairly easy to change them.
I didn't understand all the hate until a few groups tried pushing the actual "teams" inside "Teams", and goddamn they are bad. They're an awkward and confusing mashup of chat rooms and forums, with conversations spread across different levels and constructs that each receive different levels of UI focus.
At a company I worked at someone saved some important data in Teams and left the company and I was tasked with trying to export it but it turns out it would have taken significant time scripting the API to extract all the data. They said forget it and just left it in the Teams and made sure not to delete her account.
Yeah teams for actual phone calls is good, often with better noise cancelling and reliability than zoom these days.
But the mess of sharepoint/o365 opened in wrappers inside of teams for the teams and it's just a hot mess that makes me angry when the UI is so different.
My colleague showed me his windows machine recently. The rubber on the back around the fans has melted from the times he forgot to shut it down and sleep didn't trigger when he packed it away in his backpack.
Linus tech tips on YouTube did a video about a windows bug where sleeping while charging would allow the laptop to wake up to check for updates etc but often caused this issue of turning on in a bag
It wouldn't happen that this feature was released around early/mid 2020? Windows sleep used to be semi-reliable but one it's been shit for a couple of years.
Search "LTT Windows Modern Standby" on YouTube. Sadly all the workarounds to turn it off no longer work reliably. For reliable sleep, buy a Framework (only current Windows laptop that still supports S3 Sleep) or Macbook.
