Genuine question: What in your opinion are the differences between a great and an average band leader? I've been making music as hobby for most of my life, and band leading is a topic I think about a lot - but it seems for many musicians I meet is not even on the radar.
Hi. Good question! That could take a book to answer. I meant to just refer to their level of purely musical skill though, thanks for the chance to clarify.
Personally, I also ask more questions about on-call:
- is there a SLO?
- what is the schedule? 24h is no go for me.
- is non-business hours on-call compensated (even when there are no pages)?
In particular, I strongly believe we (as profession) should push more the employers for the last point. Being oncall during weekend means I need to seriously adjust my plans; need to have corporate devices somewhere close, etc. In particular this also means I don't fully disconnect from work if I have to carry laptop/phone with me. This kind of stress slowly accrues long term. All in all: staying alert for oncall is some sort of work. A physical security guard gets paid for keeping an eye on things even when nothing happens; it's startling that so many devs don't.
I agree. I think on-call is a big gotcha of the industry and different companies I've been at wildly succeed or fail at this. Some of it can be more team-driven even if corporate isn't on board.
Good-ish example:
- On-call T1 was mostly business hours
- T2 during off-hours/weekend
- Decently large rotation so you're on-call less frequently than every ~6 weeks
Bad Example:
- Escalation goes to another team that likely doesn't know much about the system
- T1 24hrs/day
- Small team so on-call is fairly frequent
Both of these are still not good examples though. There's no compensation for the on-call hours. The team in my "good" example recognized heavy on-call load and was okay with taking some time off after a heavy on-call week "off books" but that's flimsy at best.
I think this would be a great case for a union personally. Engineers have done very well but I don't think there's enough desire to fix this without a centralized coordinator like a union.
Kinda. In this context I mean "response SLO" - how much time you have between receiving the page and starting debugging stuff. I think it's also important to clarify; I've been on rotations with response SLO ranging from 5 through 30 minutes to unknown: literally my manager couldn't answer the question "so how fast do you expect me to react" (in hindsight, that was a pretty big red flag about how team approaches production that I missed).
That's a very good point. I always ask when they last worked in the weekend, but I didn't consider work expecting you being on-call without mentioning it.
I used to really like Spotify when I first installed it long time ago, but over the years they worked really hard to make me hate them with passion. It feels like their motto is "Change for change's sake", they seem to remove and add stuff randomly, shuffle UI elements whenever they want to, etc. In the meantime, the basic functionalities regress. I had the app bug out on me countless times in weird ways; offline stuff disappearing, freezes when clicking on an album, that one time when I was listening on headphones and suddenly Spotify changed volume from minimum to max and almost gave me hearing damage, etc.
Some time ago I moved to Tidal. It's not perfect, the search is inferior, the app bugs out sometimes too; but at least they don't seem to change it that much.
It's fun (scary maybe?) how ones experience can be so different with the same software. I use Spotify daily on a number of different platforms (iOS, Android, Linux [Arch + Ubuntu], Windows and macOS) and never experienced any of those issues. I also can only remember ~3 redesigns since I started using Spotify back in 2007 or something like that, none of them have significantly moved around the playback controls, although the overall browsing experience has changed a lot.
Edit: Continuing to read the HN comments, it seems some people (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31618177) have a constantly shifting UI, possibly driven by Spotify doing A/B testing. Could be that some locations (the US?) are subjected to this while others are not. I've used a total of 5 accounts since I started using Spotify, and never had anything change day-to-day when using it, so doesn't seem to be account-based.
Well, that's sad news. Wolt used to be the only food delivery company that had actually functional customer service. They replied swiftly, sometimes automatically even granted some promo codes when the delivery was really late. I suppose that will be gone soon.
Other companies I used ranged from "Your order never arrived? Ok, we'll refund you after some time if you jump through enough hoops" (Glovo) to non-existent: "Your order never arrived? Not our problem, talk to the restaurant. Restaurant ignores your email and calls? Well, still not our problem." (pyszne.pl, polish-only).
I've never used pyszne but if I ever use such service I'd use my CC to pay and if I never get a refund I'd just file a chargeback. Sure, they may just ban you but you get your money back and you don't have to deal with their bs anymore.
Well, DoorDash has always a) instantly replied to me and b) fully refunded me for any order that doesn't arrive. In fact, they have an automatic flow to get refunds that takes a few seconds to complete.
Agree, my experience with their customer service has been excellent. Missing side = automatic 50% refund for cost of that dish, don't have to talk to any customer service, you just tap a few buttons in the app.
I liked the concept when I first saw it but honestly it's more trouble than it's worth. On my old work laptop, it would sometimes bug out and stop registering touch. That's a problem when you are in the middle of a call and you need to adjust volume because one of the speakers is too loud or too quiet.
I also don't like how it's harder to operate than physical buttons. Too many times I hit the wrong spot on the bar and for example ended up putting my laptop to sleep instead of adjusting brightness. I've also tried to configure Ableton Live to do something useful with it (maybe mute/unmute tracks or control their volumes); but with little success.
Not OP, but I've met people that seemed to sort of lost their agency and ambition, because their psychedelic insight was that the universe will sort everything out on its own. Though maybe the causality is the other way round here - they were not ambitious in the first place and psychedelic insight helped rationalise that.
Also disclaimer: I'm not trying to discourage or encourage people from psychedelics. Personally I believe they should not be criminalised, but people should be cautious using them.
Just a personal note, I experienced the complete opposite. I knew I wanted to do great things and accomplish things of importance, but depression was like a black cloud holding me back from doing so. Psychedelics took away that cloud and also infused a deep level of meaning into my everyday life.
I went from depressed and basically dropping off the edge of the world to traveling across the world and starting a startup with new friends in a different continent, which was just now recently acquired.
What might interest you is all the psychedelics I did were technically legal. Shoutout to 4-AcO-DMT and 4-HO-DMT.
Fwiw 4-HO-DMT is psilocin (it and psilocybin are both in mushrooms in varying amounts; and psilocybin metabolizes into it in the body). It probably wasn't legal. 4-AcO-DMT is a bit more of a grey area (probably covered by the analogues act; allegedly also metabolizes to psilocin in the body too).
> What might interest you is all the psychedelics I did were technically legal. Shoutout to 4-AcO-DMT and 4-HO-DMT.
They are both illegal where I live (Poland). The government maintains a huge list of forbidden substances (link only in polish: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wykaz_%C5%9Brodk%C3%B3w_odurza...). This is in response to a big designer drugs crisis that started over decade ago. Which most likely than not was caused by tightening of the drug laws happened around two decades ago. It's a bad situation that will take another decade to improve, I suppose.
>but rather that they have different priorities than you and that you're narrowminded and judgemental.
Having been loosely affiliated with the Goa/Psytrance scene, I too, have met some individuals who seemed to have "fried" their brains.
If those "different priorities", how you call it, also include being almost dysfunctional and therefore dependent on constant external support, paranoid and frequently incoherent then, yes, it made me judgmental too.
And this isn't even speaking of phenomena like Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD)[1].
The thing is, it's not at all clear this was caused by psychedelics, so much as psychedelics and the lifestyle that goes with it shape the sort of dysfunction we observe.
If they had been in the midwestern USA would they also be dysfunctional but taking prescription painkillers? Mental health problems are common, and confirmation bias is real.
There is also the danger of reverse causation — and this may apply to cannabis. The epidemiology there suggests psychosis may cause people to take cannabis at higher rates, rather than the reverse.
Finally... I've also often wondered what partying so hard would do without the drugs. I've experienced festivals both with and without recreational drugs and it often feels like the sleep deprivation and over-stimulation have as large an effect on my subsequent mood as the drugs did.
>so much as psychedelics and the lifestyle that goes with it shape the sort of dysfunction we observe.
I wondered about this myself.
I think it is hard to pinpoint exactly since festival-goers often also consume a mix of different substances (the infamous "candy flipping") including alcohol instead of just straight mushrooms or LSD.
Funnily enough, I just came across a study of ecstasy use in Mormon kids who didn’t take alcohol or other drugs... not sure if they were staying up all night raving but my prior is not. Apparently they didn’t suffer the same cognitive deficits found in other ecstasy users.
Few production incidents are enough to change this mentality. I'd rather write more verbose but "obvious" code than "clever one liners". I feel sorry for anyone who has to understand someone's DSL on the fly when there's an outage and your business is burning through X$ per minute of downtime.
(On the other hand, you probably want to structure your production changes in the way that they are easy to roll back without understanding everything, but that's other conversation. Either way, the thought that someone may want to chase me after work because my code broke and they can't understand it is enough for me to stop being clever).
Yeah, good luck when someone with experimental temperament decides to implement some of your crucial functionality with semialgebras. (that's what happened in my previous job where we run Scala). I'm happy I didn't have to debug any customer issues around that module. Also, I didn't enjoy constant bickering with my reviewers what makes a beautiful code or not. Apparently there are five ways to do everything in Scala and I always ended up picking not the one my teammates would like the most.
Yes. That's pretty much how the Scala project I was working on ran itself aground. Everyone got so caught up in flexing at each other that solving actual business problems became a secondary priority.
This is why I think the community is way more important than the language. In Python people are like, hmm, this is a hack, but it works for now, in Scala it’s, what have you done you savage?!?
It's also just really weird, when you step back and take a good long look at it, to see people getting worked up about hacky ways of doing things within the context of a language that implemented sum types the way Scala implemented sum types, and that implemented typeclasses the way that Scala implemented typeclasses.
Which, I don't want to be too down on Scala. Overall, I like the language. Scala's real weak point is its culture. There's a decent risk of cognitive dissonance when you try to wrap an ethos of design purity around a language that's always been a bit of a communal experimentation project.
This doesn’t terribly surprise me. Community isn’t just the people but also the customs and idioms within the community. It’s probably similar to ‘code switching’ in verbal languages. People talk (and act) differently depending on who thay’re talking to.
Were semialgebras a right abstraction, or over-engineering?
What is helpful in situations like this is the motto "as simple as possible, but not simpler". During a code review, if you see something you think is too complex, ask the author: "How could it be made even simpler? If not, how exactly a simpler approach did not work?" It sometimes helps find an overlooked simplification.
The problem with wrong abstractions, though, is that they do not work, especially when you make the next step on the roadmap.
I would say that clear, testable, evolvable code with little abstraction may be fine. OTOH boilerplate and copy-paste prevents easy or well-controlled evolution. The abstractions end up inlined and fused in the code, instead of being made visible, and become easy to miss a case when a concerted change is needed.
