As a civic technologist currently contracting, I feel like more Americans should know that procurement rules all but prevent federal offices from doing their own software development and that most of it is, as you wrote, subsubsubcontracted.
And that generally, the people who've won the contract to build the website or application are not the same people who've won the other contract to manage the databases, which is a totally different someone than those who've won the contract to run the DNS system, oh and also that the DNS contractors and the database contractors definitely bid on the website contract but didn't win so they want the website contractor to fail so they can get a second chance at bidding on the contract when you do
Don't forget the database contractor and frontend contractor aren't allowed to directly talk to each other but have to make contact through their individual contracting officers.
and that the leads from both of the other teams are on the change control board eagerly waiting for your change to come before them so they can find the least-obvious-but-still-patently-obvious excuses to make your request look unprepared to the govvies who pay them in lieu of having any expertise so "new table" requests can be shot down with lowbrow questions like "But have we thought about the security implications?!?"
Pissed off contracting officers at the least, losing their trust will ensure you will be micromanaged on all the things to the letter in all the hundreds of pages of contracts you signed. They can make life hell and probably stop you from renewing the contract at the least, or make it an instant recompete at the worst.
Should all gov websites move to the recreation.gov model where the contractor is incentivized disproportionately on a percentage basis ? It seems that customers get shafted no matter what; the latter at least creates a better product.
What does it have to do with procurement rules? I was under the impression that it was just that the federal gov't won't pay salaries that are remotely competitive, so the only way they can get work done by competent people is by hiring a contractor who then pays market wages to a consultant.
Eh, I've worked with a whole lot of incredibly intelligent, talented people in the federal government. If there's a problem they have with wages, it's more that they can't retain the best people any more, but it wasn't so much of a problem 20 years ago before Silicon Valley salaries skyrocketed so quickly. The security of the civil service and a guaranteed pension used to make up for the slightly lower pay, but it doesn't make up for 1/3 the pay. Given it takes a literal act of Congress to change the pay bands and Congress won't even fund the existing budget they already passed, they simply can't adjust at the speed of industry.
But they probably will eventually add a compensating bonus for critical work the way they had to do with medical doctors. Physicians that work directly for DoD make an enormous bonus compared to others in the same pay grade but different career field because otherwise they wouldn't be able to hire anyone. They react slowly but eventually react.
What you're talking about, though, is a problem with procurement procedures. It's far easier to get through Congress than any change in operational budget that involves increased pay for federal employees, even if the outcome is otherwise identical. And it frankly makes sense to a large extent. Even if they have to pay way more for a private workforce, they only have to justify it for a several year project. Hire the same number of civil servants and you're committing to employing them for the next 30 years. They need to know they'll consistently have work for them to do. They can't just institute mass layoffs and hiring spurs on the other side the way industry can.
I mean, ok? 20 years ago is a long time. As you say, pay is now like ~1/3 that of industry, and the pension doesn't make up for it.
> What you're talking about, though, is a problem with procurement procedures. It's far easier to get through Congress than any change in operational budget that involves increased pay for federal employees
Wait, is raising the pay of federal employees considered "procurement"? If not, aren't you agreeing that procurement of software consulting services is an end around the main issue, which is that wages of federal employees are too low (a non-procurement issue)?
It is notoriously extraordinarily difficult to fire an underperforming federal employee. It is possible, but generally, you are committing to keeping this person around for quite some time.
It took me a while to grok monads, and the IO monad, and longer still to figure out how to compose them in safe ways, and manipulate execution order, etc. But: now I can write typesafe applications, and I produce fewer bugs when I work in non-FP languages (I get paid to write Java.) Lisp is a starting point. Haskell is where it's at. I recommend learning the style, even if you never produce production code in it.
Yes, Haskell is magnificent for learning FP. I used to think Haskell was terrible for IO, but my tune has changed dramatically since I started working with it full time.
Let’s say I want to do something simple but slightly beyond the scope of a traditional toy demonstration:
* Read some environment variables and a local file
* Start a monitoring thread that consumes from a channel or something similar, then every X s or X events writes to a local temp file and then sends a request batching some metrics to an external system
* Configure and start an http server
* Said server has a handler that 0. Starts a timer 1. loads, then increments an atomic “num requests served until now” variable 2. uses synchronization to lock on a list or ring buffer containing the last 5 requests’ user-agent headers 2.5 copies the current last 5 values, replaces oldest one with the one from the handles request, unlocks 3. generates a json response containing like “num_so_far: x, last5agent: [..], “some_env_var”:..” 3.5 stops the timer 4. write request user agent and time interval to monitoring thread’s channel 5. write response and end handling
* server’s gotta be able to do concurrency > 1 with parallelism
* On sigterm set the server to a state that rejects new requests, waits for existing requests to complete, then flushes the monitoring channel
I’d consider this a trial run of some of the most basic patterns commonly used by networked software: init io, immutable shared state, atomic mutable shared state, synchronization locked shared state, http ingress and egress, serialization, concurrency, parallelizarion, background threads, os signals, nontrivial cleanup. In Go, Java, or C++ I could write this with my eyes closed. How easy is it in Haskell or Lisp?
If you know of any demos or repos that do something like this - not a pure toy or barebones demo, but not a huge task all in all- in either I’d be interested in seeing what it looks like.
There are bunches of web frameworks and various support libraries for both Haskell and for Common Lisp. They'll range from simple use cases to more complete and/or opinionated in style, depending what your needs are. For Haskell examples, Servant is used for web APIs, where Yesod is a larger all-around framework.
I'll cover the Haskell side because I'm more familiar with its library ecosystem:
> Read some environment variables and a local file
import System.Environment (getEnv)
import System.FilePath ((</>))
main = do
dir <- getEnv "WHATEVER_DIR"
data <- readFile (dir </> "foo.txt")
putStrLn ("Had " ++ show (length (lines data)) ++ " lines")
> Start a monitoring thread [...]
import Control.Concurrent
import Control.Concurrent.Chan
import Network.HTTP
-- also more stuff...
monitoringThread :: Chan String -> IO ()
monitoringThread chan = do
file <- openFile "log.txt" AppendMode
forever $ do -- no $ needed if you pass -XBlockArguments [0, 1]
batch <- replicateM 5 (readChan chan)
let chunk = unlines batch
hPutStr file chunk
simpleHTTP (postRequestWithBody "" "text/plain" chunk)
main :: IO ()
main = do
logChan <- newChan
void (forkIO (monitoringThread logChan))
-- ...
forever $ do
threadDelay (1000 * 1000) -- 1M usec
writeChan logChan "Hello, world!"
> Configure and start an http server
import Network.Wai
import Network.Wai.Handler.Warp
main = run 8000 $ \req respond ->
respond (responseLBS status200 [] "Hello, world!")
> Said server has [...]
Yeah, this is long. If you're just getting the current time with the timer, that's here[2]; synchronize across threads with MVars[3] or STM[4]; JSON is in aeson[5], which should feel broadly familiar if you know Rust's serde.
> server’s gotta be able to do concurrency > 1 with parallelism
Yep, GHC Haskell has _excellent_ concurrency support on top of a parallel runtime.
> On sigterm set the server to a state that rejects new requests, waits for existing requests to complete, then flushes the monitoring channel
I haven't personally tried this, but this[6] function sounds like... exactly this, actually, so I think its example should suffice?
On two separate notes:
- Common Lisp and Python 3 are a _lot_ closer than Common Lisp and Haskell, or even Python 3 and JavaScript; the Python 3 object model is very close to Common Lisp's, and Common Lisp is not particularly pure (setf isn't unidiomatic by a longshot), and supports a very non-functional style of programming (it has gotos!).
- "Haskell is worse at IO than other high-level languages" isn't particularly true. What _is_ true is that Haskell has the same "function coloring problem" as JavaScript (Haskell has the IO monad, JavaScript has the Promise monad); Haskell also has a "uses funny academic words" problem (well, debatably a problem...) which I think confuses the issue.
[1]: Haskell has a spec, one "main" implementation (GHC), little spec-committee activity, and a respect for that implementation not superseding the spec; many improvements become language extensions (-X flags or {-# LANGUAGE #-} pragmas), so when you invoke GHC you're getting a by-the-spec implementation by default.
I don't know... I think some classes of drugs amplify someones shittyness. Call it Inherent Shittyness (IS). Time is a big factor, too. The longer they are on drugs, theore shitty they become.
Δ Shittyness = IS x drug amount x duration
Sometimes people get off illegal drugs and become decent again, but
I also think that everyone has a Decency score, where
Net Shittyness (NS) = IS + Decency
Some drugs remove the Decency filter such that NS = IS. If a person knows they have a high IS, and that, say, alcohol temporarily lets that show through, and they care about their perceived NS, then it behooves them to stay away from it.
I've read articles like this since I started working in silicon valley in 2012, but I haven't seen it in person. Maybe some selection bias at play, but I'm generally pretty open.
Stuff I have seen:
- LSD usage is pretty common relative to where I grew up (midwest-ish), but usually rare (once a year, burning man, someone has tried it once) even so, I'd still guess this is a pretty small minority - I guess 15% max? I'd guess mostly this is curiosity driven, reading about it, etc. I've never seen anyone seriously use it as a productivity drug.
- Adderall is more common, but that's because it's prescribed (and it works well so everyone thinks they have ADHD if they take it) - I haven't seen it abused, I've heard people talk about modafinil but have never met anyone that was actually taking it. Even in the adderall/adhd case, I'd guess 20% max? Most people I work with do not take it.
- Ketamine I don't know anyone that's tried it beyond someone in the therapy trials and non-techie druggie types.
Maybe it's more common and I'm not in the right circles, but I don't really buy it. I think it's rare and elevated by articles like this because it's salacious not because it's common. I'd guess my made up percentages are also too high.
Personally, I haven't witness any drug use in the various developer circles I've run except for ADHD meds. The number on ADHD meds is somewhere around 5-10% I would guess...
Just because you don't like the idea doesn't mean it is "fascist". I don't find using that word flippantly contributes to intellectually substantive discussion. Frankly, it is lazy. It is better to provide reasoned criticism, but that may require revisiting some assumptions you're making, and that may be uncomfortable.
Most people are not especially disciplined in interpreting historical realities through the lens of the day. The result is that we form anachronistic and sloppy views of the past. Take, for example, women's suffrage. If we view the pre-suffrage US through the lens of the radical individualism we embrace today, then we more easily conclude, that 19th century America was a "woman-hating" land and all the usual polemic. But if you interpret the vote as one vote per family, then things start to look differently. The family, and not the individual, taken as the basic unit of society as has almost always been the case, with the husband/father as head and representative of his family and its good in society, becomes the natural voting entity. Maybe you don't like that, or think it needs some exceptions, but logically, this basic idea is coherent and it makes sense.
Now, even if you think Musk's views deserve criticism, you can, at least, appreciate the idea, especially in light of what he's said about demographic collapse and the tendency of parents to be more future- and other-oriented--given that their children will need to live in that future--than atomized individuals, who have a greater tendency to live only in a self-indulgent now (celebrated, unsurprisingly, by New Age). You can expect parents with children to vote in ways that prioritize long-term good in a way that atomized individuals would not. It's harder to not give a shit about where things are headed when you have children.
It's important not to let your sensibilities and biases get in the way of the truth, or to confuse sensibilities with reason.
You can make a lot of ideas make logical sense if you create the correct framing, which you did in your post. However, your frame excludes the discrepancy between single males, who could vote, and single females, who could not vote; we can recurse, and say that single females could barely exist in the middle-class world due to social and economic norms which prevented women from getting jobs above starvation wages, and even look further into the concept of coverture, whereby marriage was a union of baron and feme in which the feme (wife) was legally subsumed into the baron (husband) and ceased to have an existence outside the home after being wed.
If all of those things are outside the frame, sure, one-vote-per-household can be made to make sense. However, don't expect others to agree to your restrictive agenda-driven narratives.
But his point still stands.. the lens of chronological snobbery is intellectually dishonest regardless of “framing”.
Our modern society is radically oriented towards the individual, and not the family. That does bias our view of how good or bad a previously family-oriented society was.
It’s hard to fully quantify the long-term implications of that change.
Throughout history we've had single marriages, polygamy, second+ marriages, combined families, divorce, matriarchal societies, and patriarchal societies. And there was certainly a time before any kind of marriage at all existed, and it's possible nobody knew who any fathers were. Throughout all of that, the individual is the only common denominator.
There is no reason to think that a single marriage is the best format, other than it happens to work well within the framework we've built up to support it over the last few hundred or few thousand years in specific countries. So the individual is it, because it's common to all.
You're going with a modern, nuclear family idea that has really only existed for about a hundred years in specific countries. Single marriage existing in its own house is recent, and specific to some cultures. As I've written below only the individual is common to all those systems.
I think humans are past pure reproduction as a basis for society. The primary thing that humans leave behind is contribution to culture. I don't necessarily mean the capital-C Culture, though that can be it. A contribution to the lives of those around you, related or not. On a local scale I have known people without children who are absolutely treasured by the community and their loss has been felt greatly when they go. Sometimes they have buildings or rooms in a building named after them. On a larger scale, our history books are full of people who were childless. Isaac Newton was. I don't think this is isolating. I think you have full buy in to the future, with or without children. But you have to choose it.
On the flipside, I have a father in law, who is a pretty nice guy in general. He's still happily married and appears to love his kids. When asked if he was willing to fly less than 5 international vacations per year because, you know, climate change is serious and he has a grandkid... his answer was a very serious "What do I care? I'll be dead."
If you're not getting service to the community or belief in a future beyond yourself, perhaps the problem isn't marriage or your concept of individualism. Maybe it's telling people they aren't worth anything, or their contributions don't matter. Telling single people they can't vote isn't going to help that.
The 10 kids while repping on his $44 billion dollar Titanic transphobes, homophobes, etc. I'm not talking about fascism as in "kill all of the people of a certain ethnic group," but there are, if you're in the study of ideology, politics, moral epistemology, etc., smaller, lower-case fascisms before people start calling you "Fuhrer." There is something in Elon's behavior and signaled preferences that very much comes across as a bio-Darwinistic, egoistic, self-maximizing project, e.g. a fascism.
That is, indeed, an observed phenomenon. I work in human behavior in Washington, D.C., in a position where I am paid to think about the causes of harassment, discrimination, and violence, and how we, if we believe it is valuable or necessary to reduce these behaviors, how they come into existence, arrange human affairs such that their costs are minimized. I am not some random left-wing hack for whom fascism is anything to the right of Stalin. Musk is definitely on the fascist spectrum.
I am so so so glad people are seeing this human shitbag for who he is. I've been telling people for years he is an egomaniac bastard with a cult of personality.
He's shown us his character as a leader so many times at this point. When he called Vern Unsworth "pedo guy", I didn't know how to square it with my image of him, so I mostly forgot about it. Took a while to realize it's who he is.
