Spartaco Pécora {🇻🇪 ⋂ 🇮🇹} @zpartacoos@qoto.org

@textovervideo kdenlive although I'm looking for a faster alternative.

Which by extension means most of us working in tech companies are probably useless in the grand scheme of things :)

I've been working for a well-known tech company for the last 9 months as an intern and one thing stands out to me as a sad and stress-inducing revelation: most people don't contribute to the financial value of the company. I'd say about 20% of the people, most of whom are hardcore smart engineers deliver 90%+ of the value. Notice that value != Work so I'm not claiming that they do most of the work, simply that they do most of the complex, difficult and important work that actually determines our position in the market.

From Wikipedia:

Law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly or typically give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.[1] Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.

#work
#sad
#softwarw #engineering

@jmw150 Ah I see. Well, I agree that there is a misunderstanding in the Rust community regarding "safety" as many of them seem unaware of formal verification tools and even things like Valgrind which anybody can easily use in C. Not to mention, a lot of the old-school memory bugs are caught by the OS (at least in Linux kernel) compared to 10 years ago. So, all in all, I still think Rust has cool things to offer such as cargo but strong typing and memory safety is not particularly novel. I think a lot of this comes from the often-quoted "70% of MS vulnerabilities were due to memory leaks". And, I think it's important to differentiate between Microsoft and the rest of the world as in this scenario it's not appropriate to extrapolate and say "most software errors are caused by memory leaks" which many people in the Rust community seem to think.

I think for any serious programmer that statement should ring a bell as obviously wrong since clearly in GC languages this is not even an issue, we can see that actually most bugs are due to logical errors in the program, not actually accounting for edge cases, changing requirements, breaking compatibility in modules, or purely dumb programmer errors, not necessarily memory.

Having said all of that. I still think Rust feels ergonomic and nice to use.

@thunder@tilde.zone @freemo I remember seeing job postings from Visa when they first started recruiting block chain devs and asking for people with "at least 8 years of experience with ethereum blockchain" back in 2018 when ETH had only been around for about 3 years... Apparently they had an internal policy that meant they could only hire people with at least 8 years of experience for senior roles .

@jmw150 I'm curious. Why do you think Rust is a stupid language?

Part #0: Darth Vader voicer changer

Idea: let's see if we can get an SPW2430 working with the RP2040 in pure C to record and playback an altered version of the original sound wave.

@binyamin I'd be interested in that. Perhaps we could use Jitsi or similar.

@jmw150 great link in general, thanks for sharing. I learned a bit of Coq during an undergrad logic course and a Haskell course. Reading the titles and contents of the other books in the series vaguely triggers some memories although in reality I'm pretty sure I've forgotten most of it. Sometimes, I wish I could focus more on formal systems but the problem is that in my head I need to be able to see tangible results relatively quickly to keep engaged with something which is why I lean more towards embedded systems and ML rather than more theoretic aspects of SWE like formal validation and proofs. Nonetheless, I can appreciate it from a far as a very fascinating field.

@CameoJiraffe your story reminds me of my cousin. She actually tried to finish college for about 9 years and kept lying to the family claiming that she had switched from one engineering degree to another. In the end, she realized that for what she wanted to do (business management) the degree didn't matter too much and the only real reason for her wanting to do it in the first place was due to my uncle forcing it on her and saying that if you don't get an education you'll be a nobody.

I think in this day and age, this is certainly not the case. So, if you want to be a doctor, sure get a degree. Almost any other career makes it optional. Accountants can get certified without degrees. Even in more technical fields like software engineering or if you want to be a mechanical engineer you can learn math up to differential equations online (i.e Khan academy) then take some coursera courses on fluid mechanics, thermodynamics and CAD modelling then apply that to a real project and fill a personal portfolio. You'll probably learn more than in the degree and be better prepared for industry where you'll always need to be teaching yourself new things anyway. Idk, that's my 2 cents.

@code4cville welcome 👋

@jmw150 Hmm. That's somewhat true. If you live in a big city you probably have internet access but in more rural places it can be more difficult due to electricity being very inconsistent and you can go several hours and sometimes days without it. Also, at least in Venezuela not long ago (around 2012), less than 50% of population had access to internet and just because you have access to it doesn't mean it's reliable, on top of that, the Gov nationalized internet service with "CanTV" and it's basically utter shit + they censor the crap out of it.

I guess a much cheaper version of Elon's Starlink + consistent electric grid would could solve this issue and once you have widespread easy internet it's fair game for all in terms of information availability as you mentioned.

Pfizer has been accused of “bullying” Latin American govts in COVID-19 vaccine negotiations ...
---
Even as somebody who is economically conservative it seems clear to me that a company shouldn't be able to put entire governments and people's lives at risk in this way just so they can cash in some extra $$.

I guess that one of my old teachers in Venezuela was right when he kept banging on about how we needed to be more self sufficient in Latin America and not depend on Western medicine and devices. I used to disagree. I have reconsidered my position on this matter and now believe that most countries should have enough self sufficiency to develop their own tech, not necessarily to the same standard as USA/UK/EU/JN, etc.. but at least good enough that if somebody tries to bully us we can depend on our own stuff and not be forced to just give in to all their demands.

Probably unfeasible in the short-mid time frame but perhaps in the next 50-70 years if high quality education and infrastructure reaches our Barrios then we'll see more local startups and innovation.
 https://science.thewire.in/health/pfizer-demands-governments-gamble-with-state-assets-to-secure-vaccine-deal/

@pedrohgb@mastodon.online nice to meet you. I'm also interested in IoT and more generally in embedded systems. Looking forward to great conversations.