Visited China recently and it's pretty astonishing what can be achieved if you just ignore the whiners, complainers, environmentalists, and local governments. NIMBYs? Get lost. Have unique local culture? Funny but no. There's a special kind of beetle living there? Tough shit. It's ugly? So is your face. Etc. This is how the West built its infrastructure back in the day - nobody consulted NIMBYs or the native Americans on railway construction - but now we're too good for this, and we reap the consequences.

I'm still on team democracy, and we'll see how long it takes before China regresses to the norm of dictatorships. Xi has already broken the term limits. Nothing suggests he won't slowly lose his grip on reality like most dictators. But for now China has its charms.

China will also acid-wash land to extract rare earths. It does achieve what they wanted though.

Rail lines in the US were not great examples of this. Many towns refused to grant right of way to the rail unless a stop was added which basically forced passengers to change trains. As a result, there’s were so many changes it took two to three days to get from say, Chicago to NYC when it should have taken no longer than a day

The problem with the Chinese system is when there are genuine engineering problems then people are afraid to voice them.

p.s. I don't think Native Americans are a factor in most of the west except Canada and the USA.

True, but it's a provocative and widely understood example. Some things are lost in steamrolling everyone, basically, but it's still not a mistake.

In big enough projects this is the job of a civil engineer. The architect vs engineer fight that ensues is widely memed. This is of course mostly an issue in one-off projects with ambitious architects.

I learned this early in a conservative org. Preventing things is risky. Just keep the solution ready for when things go wrong because then you'll get approval.

Anecdotally I know of an engineer in the Excel team. They would keep around a list of low priority security bugs. When they wanted to do improvements on the system they would attach it to one of the security bugs “nearby“ because the change would become approved much more easily than just fixing the problem itself.

I've had this in my career also, I've had a solution that was deemed too risky to release by management but would have prevented an outage, but when an outage actually happened that was the first thing they wanted to try and it worked gloriously. I'm thinking that if it was released prior to the incident it would have not have had the same impact on my career.

Never waste the opportunity a good crisis presents

I'd say the evil lies in the infliction of suffering, not the killing or eating.

Criminal gangs specifically recruit legal minors because they are able to do things legal adults can't: Repeatedly and with impunity violate the law. Whether it's smuggling or assassinations, using legal minors make it all a lot less risky.

Would it stop stupid kids from doing stupid kid stuff? No. Would it make minors less attractive to organized crime? Yes.

That sounds like a lot, but your music player probably costs that much in RAM anyway.

Seriously, with the current RAM prices we as an industry have to figure out a way to use less of it. Laptops with 4GB of RAM are still common and are going to remain so for the rest of the decade. Spotify using more than 1GB of RAM is obscene.

Well we could start by not building ever gd app with f*cking electron.

To be pedantic, Spotify's desktop client uses CEF, not Electron.

This is when you say "We support Ubuntu", and honestly that's fine.

Indeed. You make anything past that the customer's problem. I have a few Ubuntu apps that needed a bit of jiggery-pokery to make them run on not-Ubuntu.

I've been in an acquisition where code quality was important. But it was probably an edge case since the buyer just wanted to turn the company into a feature, and ease of integration into the buyer was important.

You cannot possibly with a straight face claim that Scaleway is a VPS provider. Hetzner, sure, but Scaleway offers compute and database services in the same way that AWS does - just fewer.

This. I'm presently running serverless containers, serverless jobs, managed container registry, managed database, virtual private network, IAM policies, DNS, managed Grafana and object storage on Scaleway for a project I'm working on. Doesn't get more cloud than that.

Sure, Scaleway still lags behind the big three cloud providers in the US. But the US providers have a lot more money and been around much longer. Scaleway is quickly expanding its feature set though. They've recently introduced managed Clickhouse and OpenSearch among other things.

Hetzner for sure?

Hetzner Cloud is simple to use, but it's a distinguishing feature, not a bug.

I think in order to call youself a cloud you must offer blob storage, managed Kubernetes, and managed Postgres. That is the absolute minimum to me.

If packaging and marketing stopped mattering so much Coca-cola would go out of business immediately. Sugar water is cheap and simple to make. The off-brands taste just as good if not better in blind testing. The only defense they have is their brand and the amount of money they spend on marketing. Same with Red Bull.