I would really urge everyone to actually engage in the arguments people are making.
Go’s core design philosophy is stability. This means backwards compatibility forever. But really, even more than that. The community is largely against “v2” libraries. After the first version is introduced, Go devs trend towards stability, live with its flaws, and are super hesitant to fix things with a “v2”.
There have been exceptions. After 20 years of the frankly horrible json library, a v2 one is in the works.
Most of the uuid concerns come from a place of concern. After the api is added to the standard library, it will be the canonical api forever.
There are surely pros and cons to this design philosophy. I just don’t understand why people who disagree with Go’s core goals don’t just use a different language? Sorry to take a jab here, but are we really short on programming languages that introduce the wrong v1 api, so then the language ends up with codebases that depend on v1, v2, and v3? (Looking at you Java, Python, and C#)
That’s just not true though. Sure English doesn’t have tones, but there are other tricky parts of the language. Additionally, Russian is another “difficult” language, but all the satellite nations had no problem picking it up.
The real reason people learn English isn’t because it’s easy. It’s because they need to. As someone who is married to an immigrant, it’s not easy for them. They’ve just worked really hard over decades.
Americans will do fine learning Chinese if it ever becomes an economic necessity.
It's not easy to become highly proficient in english but it's quite easy to speak just barely well enough to communicate effectively in a professional context. Importantly, the written form follows naturally from the spoken. You won't get all the edge cases right (that's incredibly difficult even for native speakers) but getting in the ballpark can be done purely phonetically with a fairly small set of rules. Combine with modern spellcheck and I expect it's pretty difficult to beat for ease of practical use.
I think at least a few of the latin based languages are in the same ballpark but for inane historical reasons it's english that won out.
Compare with chinese where even if you sweep tones under the rug you've got a bunch of idioms (difficult) followed by one of the most difficult writing systems in existence. Don't get me wrong, I think the writing system is quite elegant and has a truly impressive history, but neither of those things has anything to do with ease of mastery.
A tangential thought is that if you intentionally set out to come up with a rule following yet maximally difficult language I think a reasonable approach would be to fuse the equivalent of latin grammar with chinese tones and then fuse a chinese style writing system with arabic style contextually sensitive ligatures.
> Russian is another “difficult” language, but all the satellite nations had no problem picking it up.
Russian is not more difficult than English and a lot of the satellite states were speaking other Slavic languages.
If you already speak Spanish, it's less difficult to pick up Italian too.
There’s also the fact that a huge portion of foreign immigrants to the US don’t and won’t learn English, but can still operate just fine (or even have the system cater to them - press 1 for Spanish).
Look at the uproar over requiring commercial drivers to be able to read road signs in English.
The US also did annex large parts of what used to be Mexico in the 19th century, so you don't even technically have so be an immigrant to speak Spanish
Unless you're 126 years old, that excuse doesn't really hold up. Plenty of immigrants came from Italy, Poland, and Russia more recently than your mentioned time, but you don't hear Press 3 for Italian too often.
They didn't have to. But they also shouldn't expect the annexing government or populace to accommodate them.
Their country lost the war, lost the territory, and those that stayed and chose to take American citizenship should've learned English, the (de facto) language of the country they chose to join.
It’s sort of surprising how naive developers still are given the countless rug pulls over the past decade or two.
You’re right on the money: the important thing to look at are the incentive structures.
Basically all tech companies from the post-great financial crisis expansion (Google, post Balmer Microsoft, Twitter, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, etc) started off user-friendly but all eventually converged towards their investment incentive structure.
One big exception is Wikipedia. Not surprising since it has a completely different funding model!
I’m sure Anthropic is super user friendly now, while they are focused on expansion and founding devs still have concentrated policial sway. It will eventually converge on its incentive structures to extract profit for shareholders like all other companies.
I worry that if the reality lives up to investors dreams it will be massively disruptive for society which will lead us down dark paths. On the other hand if it _doesn't_ live up to their dreams, then there is so much invested in that dream financially that it will lead to massive societal disruption when the public is left holding the bag, which will also lead us down dark paths.
It's already made it impossible to trust half of the content i read online.
Whenever i use search terms to ask a specific question these days theres usually a page of slop dedicated to the answer which appears top for relevancy.
Once i realize it is slop i realize the relevant information could be hallicinated so i cant trust it.
At the same time im seeing a huge upswing in probable human created content being accused of being slop.
We're seeing a tragedy of the information commons play out on an enormous scale at hyperspeed.
I think corporations can definitely transform society in the near future. I don't think it will be a positive transformation, but it will be a transformation.
Most of all, AI will exacerbate the lack of trust in people and institutions that was kicked into high gear by the internet. It will be easy and cheap to convince large numbers of people about almost anything.
We were pretty close to a collapse of the existing financial system. Maybe we’d be better off now if it happened, but the interim devastation would have been costly.
We weren't that far away from ATMs refusing to hand out cash, banks limiting withdrawals from accounts (if your bank hadn't already gone under), and a subsequent complete collapse of the financial system. The only thing that saved us from that was an extraordinary intervention by governments, something I am not sure they would be capable of doing today.
I'm still not buying that AI will change society anywhere as much as the internet or smart phones for the matter.
The internet made it so that you can share and access information in a few minute if not seconds.
Smart phones build on the internet by making this sharing and access of information could done from anywhere and by anyone.
AI seems occupies the same space as google in the broader internet ecosystem.I dont know what AI provides me that a few hours of Google searches. It makes information retrieval faster, but that was the never the hard part. The hard part was understanding the information, so that you're able to apply it to your particalar situation.
Being able to write to-do apps X1000 faster is not innovation!
When I look at my own country it has proven to be open to change. There are people alive today who remember Christianity now we swear in a gay prime minister.
In that sense Western countries have proven that they are intellectualy very nimble.
Three of the best known Christians I have known in my life are gay. Two are priests (one Anglican, one Catholic). Obviously the Catholic priest had taken a vow of celibacy anyway to its entirely immaterial. I did read an interview of a celeb friend (also now a priest!) of his that said he (the priest I knew) thought people did not know he was gay we all knew, just did not make a fuss about it.
Even if you accept the idea that gay sex is a sin, the entire basis of Christianity is that we are all sinners. Possessing wealth is a failure to follow Jesus's commands for instance. You should be complaining a lot more if the prime minister is rich. Adultery is clearly a more serious sin than having the wrong sort of sex, and I bet your country has had adulterous prime ministers (the UK certainly has had many!).
I think Christians who are obsessed with homosexuality as somehow making people worse than the rest of us, are both failing to understand Christ's message, and saying more about themselves than gays.
If you look at when sodomy laws were abolished, countries with a Christian heritage lead this. There are reasons in the Christian ethos if choice and redemption for this.
Most of the core products at Google are still written in pre-C++11.
I wish these services would be rewritten in Go!
That’s where a lot of the development time goes: trying to make incredibly small changes that cause cascading bugs and regressions a massive 2000s C++ codebase that doesn’t even use smart pointers half the time.
Also, I think the outside world has a very skewed view on Go and how development happens at Google. It’s still a rather bottom up, or at least distributed company. It’s hard to make hundreds of teams to actually do something. Most teams just ignored those top-down “write new code in Go” directives and continued using C++, Python, and Java.
I wouldn't say most. Google is known for constantly iterating on its code internally to the point of not getting anything done other than code churn. While there is use of raw pointers, I'd argue it's idiomatic to still use raw pointers in c++ for non owning references that are well scoped. Using shared pointers everywhere can be overkill. That doesn't mean the codebase is pre c++11 in style.
Rewriting a codebase in another language that has no good interop is rarely a good idea. The need to replicate multiple versions of each internal library can become incredibly taxing. Migrations need to be low risk at Google scale and if you can't do it piecewise it's often not worth attempting either. Also worth noting that java is just as prevelant if not moreso in core products.
I think the problem is actually political capital.
Someone who deeply understands how to qualify the product.
But with enough political sway to tell entire orgs of 1000s employees to shred their timelines and planning docs and go back to the lab until it’s right.
Without those two pieces, the problem is that individual devs and leaders know that there’s a problem. But the KPIs and timelines must lurch onwards!
This just feels so backwards. Yes, I know recreating ambiguous issues is annoying because it’s a lot of work, but it’s also our job.
Reminder: we are asking users to give us money in exchange for software.
It’s our job to deliver that working software. It’s not the user’s job to hold our hands and pep talk us into fixing problems. Users can and should find another product that will just do it for them without the whining.
I think the real point of the website, besides joking around, is poking fun at the broke state of the software industry where a bunch of whiny developers and managers will make a million tired excuses for why their software doesn’t just work.
Highlighting bug report and bureaucratic process in response to “your keyboard is jank” is exactly the mindset we need to change.
The point isn’t to start a forum or technical conversation with Apple devs. The point is to laugh at them because their software sucks and “just one more Jira ticket” isn’t going to fix it.
Hopefully the published postmortem will announce that all features will be frozen for the foreseeable future and every last employee will be focused on reliability and uptime?
I don’t think GitHub cares about reliability if it does anything less than that.
I know people have other problems with Google, but they do actually have incredibly high uptime. This policy was frequently applied to entire orgs or divisions of the company if they had one outage too many.
First off, you’re ignoring error bars. On average, frontier models might be 99.95% accurate. But for many work streams, there are surely tail cases where a series of questions only produce 99% accuracy (or even less), even in the frontier model case.
The challenge that businesses face is how to integrate these fallible models into reliable and repeatable business processes. That doesn’t sound so different than software engineering of yesteryear.
I suspect that as AI hype continues to level-off, business leaders will come to their senses and realize that it’s more marginally productive to spend on integration practices than squeaking out minor gains on frontier models.
Go’s core design philosophy is stability. This means backwards compatibility forever. But really, even more than that. The community is largely against “v2” libraries. After the first version is introduced, Go devs trend towards stability, live with its flaws, and are super hesitant to fix things with a “v2”.
There have been exceptions. After 20 years of the frankly horrible json library, a v2 one is in the works.
Most of the uuid concerns come from a place of concern. After the api is added to the standard library, it will be the canonical api forever.
There are surely pros and cons to this design philosophy. I just don’t understand why people who disagree with Go’s core goals don’t just use a different language? Sorry to take a jab here, but are we really short on programming languages that introduce the wrong v1 api, so then the language ends up with codebases that depend on v1, v2, and v3? (Looking at you Java, Python, and C#)
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