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_pi

_pi@lemmy.ml
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first class languages

So like Racket/Scheme and like maybe Ruby?

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Factory factory…n is literally just creating an OOP closure for when your language doesn’t support first class functions, closures and/or currying.

Also metaprogramming and abstraction is literally the only way to actually manage and deal with the capriciousness of your stakeholders.

It’s not simple, because it’s literally not that simple. It’s Conway’s Law. That’s what being a programmer in the industry is. I run a platform team, and I get paid because I can organize and deal with technical risk and contingency better than anyone else at my company. You bet your ass I do metaprogramming.

Also my product itself is a factory factory factory. Users create processes to author content, author content, and that content is delivered to other users. All in the same system. Managing complexity is extremely important if you want to work on interesting things.

“And this is the way everyone is doing it now? Everyone is using a general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory now, whenever they need a hammer?”

I’ve had this exact conversation with a programmer who was retiring. He was complaining that I ask too much because I told him that he needed a more generic way to represent the logic that encodes how our end-users traverse the content that our authoring users create and manage. He literally said something to the effect of the above quote to me, but as complaining contempt.

The business explicitly doesn’t want to spend money crafting individual code bases and products and unique logic. Our system lives and dies by our ability to service our internal clients and meet their needs in a dynamic manner. We need manage each factory layer carefully because very often different clients want two different things at two different times, and so each decision needs to be encoded in a way that allows us to make future platform changes without having to sell the business on refactors.

Sure you’ll run into people who overuse things when it could be simpler from the business perspective. But the reality is that most programmers in the industry have never stepped foot into a well run shop. Most programmers in the industry haven’t actually launched a product tip to tail.

It’s very easy to criticize patterns when you don’t actually have to use them, you’ve never seen them being used properly, and you don’t know how and when to implement them.

You don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain what two phase migration means and how to do them across multiple dependency links in the chain.

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This practically means nothing tbh. Social networks when they gain economies of scale due to the network effect will effectively shed all the pretense of open source and open platform etc.

We’ve seen it with Facebook, Google, etc, during the 2010’s with closing of chat standards and destruction of XMPP. Reddit 3rd Party API access is another example of this. We’ll see it again.

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They’re the same answer.

You need money to market applications to users. Bluesky is sold the same way that Twitter is, your favorite moron celebrity might hit like or retweet on your stuff.

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You’re talking from a relative position of understanding of these concepts. You’re not talking from a blank slate. Even in professional environments that I’ve been in where everyone went to college and theoretically is fully literate, you would have trouble getting people to retain these concepts even if you used friendlier technical language. You’re overestimating the amount of time it takes to actually achieve understanding, there are people on this site that constantly mix up these words and concepts, have a hard time applying them to the real world and misapply them regularly and are self professed Marxists. You’re also mistaking cultural policing of agreeing/using these concepts for understanding of them. Just think about how many people in America agree with capitalism but can’t adequately explain what capitalism is. They agree with freedom but don’t have a working definition or framework of what freedom means. On a societal level this often becomes bromides. My parents and grandparents read Marx in school but couldn’t give you an accurate basic run down of Marxist concepts.

Marxism isn’t some magical thing. There were plenty of people in the USSR that also didn’t understand the system they existed under and it’s concepts but reflexively or sheepishly agreed with it.

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Audiobooks aren’t really a good solution to be honest. Reading / writing literacy are the basis of scholarship. We have centuries of research and examples that we’ve turned our back on that efficient learning happens only when you can unlock good literacy skills. Specifically the aspect of reading/physical writing/sublingualization is a cornerstone of comprehension of complex ideas. With something like Marxism that’s based on understanding both technical and archaic language and social constructs it becomes really hard. There are tons of self professed Marxists that couldn’t tell you what commodity fetishism actually means in simple terms.

Great example is the Communist Manifesto itself, meant to be a pamphlet for factory workers in the 19th century, but is typically a mildly difficult text to approach for the average person today.

Audiobooks can replace something like pleasure reading where you’re just reading pulp garbage, but they’re not really a good replacement for learning.

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Yeah because it’s primary research and this is a huge unaddressed and uncared about problem that’s only growing. The last National Assessment for Adult Literacy took place in 2003.

PIAAC (PROGRAM FOR THE INTERNATIONAL ASSESSMENT OF ADULT COMPETENCIES) which this is likely partially based on is typically who provides the survey data to these institutions.

Barbara Bush Foundation is another source that deals specifically with this.

A lot of this data is cobbled together because the government has practically defunded any studies of this issue. Literacy has effectively been taken for granted and hasn’t actually been upheld. Everyone in this space says more data is needed but isn’t optimistic that more data is going to paint a better picture of literacy (both in children and adults) in the US.

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0 points

It’s not about serving assets it’s about hiding telemetry from adblockers, dns filters, ip lists, etc.

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1 point
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Almost every B2C company I’ve worked at, I’ve written or had my devs write proxies for whatever trackers we use. The reality is that every company to whom this data matters to figure out their business model will proxy their trackers. If they don’t they need to fire their lead engineers.

It’s actually pretty easy to disguise this traffic even to the point where you can use the originating server/cdn to interleave the tracking with the content source.

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27 points

Most companies are incapable of actually building something this techical.

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