Yup - I just recently learned this lesson the hard way with Turso's LibSQL server. While some of the features (like s3 replication) are cool and interesting, the amount of time working around multiple writers and foreign key shenanigans was not worth it when Postgres would have just gotten the job done.
What Brian and a lot of the commenters here need to realize is that online outrage does not help progressive causes in the slightest.
While the examples in his article are valid & concerning, especially as talks of a third Trump term have started, I truly can't see anyone changing their mind because the response to it has been completely ineffective and tone-deaf:
Instead of a solid, modern, coherent plan to keep the democratic party alive in a time of populism and radicalization in response to a crumbling economy and cronyism, it has solely been a "look at all the bad stuff Trump is doing!" and "oh me oh my how outrageous!" which does nothing but fall on deaf ears after 2020.
This is because most of the people writing these "why you should be outraged" posts are in a bubble of educated, traditional-news-consuming, upper-middle class skilled workers -- all groups that are very quickly falling out of power and favor with the majority of the population.
I hope the democratic party finds a way to become a real contender again. While not everyone on the right is a boogeyman, there are plenty of Project 2025 supporters, much worse than anyone we know about, who will steamroll this country if left unchecked. If the right doesn't have a viable opposition party with strong messaging, we're in for a bumpy ride.
I didn't see any "online outrage" from Brian here, just a sadly sober listing of all the direct attacks on the first amendment, with sources and explanation.
Heck, it's not even political despite the screeching to the contrary.
You're right that action must be taken too, but action does require an understanding of the battlefield one is entering.
YMMV, but I would argue that claiming Trump is waging an unprecedented attack against the first amendment, accompanied by a picture of the first amendment ripped in half, is calling for (rightful) outrage and is inherently political. The post is very informational and well-cited, but it's not the changing hearts and minds of those it needs to.
Action has to be taken, but by people with the power to change things -- namely democratic leadership, who have the funds & influence (albeit dwindling). Do they understand the battlefield they're entering? I don't think so, as I think they're sticking to that same outrage strategy.
I've found, since about the end of the Obama admin, a huge gap between the outraged base and the realities of politics on the ground that's made me quite despondent. The base just wants to talk about how outraged they are to each other on every piece of media they can. It's like social signaling; you have to tell every other upper middle class news addicted millennial or GenX how much you hate the current administration constantly.
But there's no effort to convince swing voters to vote against Trump. The midterms will be here before anyone knows it and it's going to be the first big chance to push back on the current administration, but I see so little work that's being done to create a coherent opposition party. Ezra Klein's book on Abundance was a great starting point. In Dem spaces though, reaction to the book was pretty much absent. Most of Dem base temporarily got busy trying to come up with ways that Klein has failed some progressive purity test (centrists are fascists, environmental injustice, etc etc.) Then after that, most just ignored his vision and went back to crying about the current administration.
IMO the Dems cranky, upper middle class news addicted base is its worst feature. They continue to kneecap the Dems from being a real opposition party. Telling people how bad the administration is won't make a good opposition party. It worked just enough for 2020 but ran out of steam by 2024. Dems need to create a vision of the future under Dem rule.
I suspect it's because the coalition that kept the Democratic party together has failed and its current base is just too small to win votes in elections. They've lost their bonafides among the trade unions, they've lost their appeal to the technology class, their strongest supporters remain the social-progress bloc which may be overrepresented online but is just too small of a force to win in elections.
The problem is that everyone who sits down to think about swing voters realizes the same thing: tariffs are going to crash the economy, DOGE is going to cut Social Security, and Congress is going to cut Medicaid. But none of these have happened yet, while other bad things swing voters care less about have happened.
So there's a fundamental tension. You can focus on the current situation to the exclusion of swing voters and their interests, or focus on swing voter interests and sound like you're lamely ignoring what's happening right now. It's a hard balance to strike, and while people make noise about it online I think most elected Dems understand everyone's trying as best they can.
> Instead of a solid, modern, coherent plan to keep the democratic party alive in a time of populism and radicalization in response to a crumbling economy and cronyism, it has solely been a "look at all the bad stuff Trump is doing!" and "oh me oh my how outrageous!" which does nothing but fall on deaf ears after 2020.
People by and large do not want "solid, modern, coherent plans". Both kamala and hillary clinton had those.
People want to be told the strong man will make everything better if you just give up a few rights.
Can the democratic party play that game? Sure. Should they? Maybe? I mean, it would be nice to have someone with an iq over 80 and at least a shred of morality and self-respect somewhere in our elected officials.
Does your post, in specific, say anything meaningful? Not really, you just throw out some vapid complaints and then tell us you hope the world will change.
> People by and large do not want "solid, modern, coherent plans".
Surely a mother-knows-best attitude will work.
> Both kamala and hillary clinton had those.
Surely denying massive campaign problems, such as "basket of deplorables" and not distancing herself from Biden, will work.
> People want to be told the strong man will make everything better if you just give up a few rights.
Surely strawmanning any solid, modern, coherent plan as stripping away rights will work.
>Does your post, in specific, say anything meaningful? Not really, you just throw out some vapid complaints and then tell us you hope the world will change.
Did you want me to go say some full-time working-class person working paycheck to paycheck can just go run for office and singlehandedly defeat Trump in a landslide victory?
> Surely denying massive campaign problems, such as "basket of deplorables" and not distancing herself from Biden, will work.
Yeah, those are totally "massive campaign problems". Massive. Gigantic. Career ending.
Oh wait, Trump constantly throws out insults and associated with morally repugnant people. He insults christians and veterans and still got elected. I don't think these are the real issues.
If calling half of your opponents supporters bigots while simultaneously giving the bigots the marketing opportunity of a lifetime isn't a massive campaign problem, then what is? I still see and block people who have "deplorable" in their name eight years later.
He insults christians and veterans, and yet they vote for him overwhelmingly. The rules and issues are obviously different for the left and the right, and whataboutism just doesn't work. Fighting the "fair fight" instead of the actual fight won't end well.
Calling young people stupid and idiots is a very poor way to get this point across, even if it's meant in an endearing way (which I'm suspicious of).
This cynicism is also entirely unwarranted, especially when your own personal example is, frankly, far more childish than anything in the OP. A company actively harming society through surveillance projects is a societal/ethics concern with the company essentially being a malicious actor. A company not properly securing their (presumably-internal) NFS is, at worst, a flaw/misconfiguration that was obviously not high priority.
The audacity of making some IT department's lives harder, people who are trying to tick a box, sends up so many red flags -- you can laugh about the inefficiencies in private with your mates, you can quit like the OP to find more efficient places to work, but you don't hold up other people trying to get that "god damn retirement money."
Don't compare your 20 years of technical tiffs with someone's desire to do what's right for their people.
This is the case for non-neurodivergent people too. Large companies these days are, largely, an exercise in corporate politics rather than solving technical problems.
This hits very close to home and I'm very glad to see I am (and you are) not alone. Thank you for writing it.
I'm currently in the process of leaving my "big tech" job. While I won't name my company, it is somewhat similar in some ways -- though ethics isn't my primary reason.
> I’ve decided that in the shitty job market, it’s not worth being a software engineer even if I make much less.
is a thought that has run through my head countless times over the past year, and when I finally gave my notice
>she kept telling me how “lucky” I am for working at Microsoft saying “it’s big tech” and “you’re neurodivergent” and “you won’t survive at a smaller company.”
was the loudest thing I heard, over and over again.
IME a lot of the pain comes from picking the wrong tool for the layer.
By that I mean saying everything has to be a JS framework or everything has to be server-delivered-HTML.
For very dynamic & interactive things maybe it makes sense to write it just in JS without a framework?
For full pages for data-powered applications (that heavily benefit from types & Typescript), maybe it makes sense to use something like Golang on the server.
And then you can embed those interactive dynamic islands inside the data-intensive application, with a thin layer of communication between the two.
Just my 2c - I've found that pattern to be super compelling
It was very disappointing to see Svelte 5 go the way of React. Yes, yes, I understand that it theoretically simplifies things and yadda yadda yadda, but after trying to actually use it, it felt like I was just using React with a much smaller ecosystem.
Svelte 4 felt awesome because it felt like I was just writing an HTML file, sure there was some magic ($:) but for the most part things were simple, easy to understand, and it all just worked. Runes totally changed that, maybe for the better because of all of the things previously cited, but not for my personal experience. I'll stop there because I'm 100% covering already-treaded ground.
I'm "joining the dark side" by trying the HTMX & Golang combo, just to see if I can hack together an on-par DX (which is going to be a herculean task, I know).
In practice, I've very rarely seen a downside: I compare it to something like Vite, where it uses esbuild in development and rollup in production, because the two libraries are for different things (esbuild doesn't bundle, rollup does, etc).
In development, I compile it with Go. In production, I compile it with TinyGo. Yes, you need to be careful about imports, and it does add complexity, but the benefits of not managing two different completely different languages (JS and whatever you're compiling to WASM) far outweigh that cost.
As for Cloudflare, I don't think their service's benefits outweigh the complexity, but I've had luck in the past with the dual setup on Workers.
Yep! You're right, it does have the ability to bundle -- that's my bad. Rollup is just much better at bundling for production, just like TinyGo. Similarly, esbuild is better for development, just like Go.
My struggle with Make and bash is that they're not very expressive - maybe that's something we want in our CIs, but I've always preferred writing an actual program in that program's native language for CI/CD, even if it has to shell out some commands every now and again.
If you stick with what is in common between ninja build and Makefiles, and comment any usage you do of what isn't, the file will mostly mention a series of inputs -> box -> outputs. What happens is make will dispatch in a way that the inputs are all satisfied. It works fine afaict, the only issue is make doesn't contain by itself the tools that it expects to be available in your environment, so you will still need something else to solve that.
