I've seen A LOT of public sector projects starting out with loads of Azure services and >$3000 montly bills for applications that could've easily run on a single VM.

I've seen Big Data pipelines (Hive tables, Spark jobs for queries, data engineers setting it all up) for what was ultimately a 5-10 GB dataset.

Companies cargo culting Big Data stacks when their data is nowhere near big is very prevalent.

This a structural problem not an awareness one. Is not like they don’t know they can run it on a 5$ VPS, the problem is that there are no incentives to do so. You’d be surprised to know how much of engineering is there to address organisational challenges rather than technical ones (ie: micro-services)

Same. They've been sold a bill of goods by big cloud tech and company.

Yea, that's ugly. I'm sure it could've been done more gracefully with 15 minutes more effort. But judging from the general wear and tear on this poor Mac I guess they don't even consider the resale value.

I can't even imagine prioritizing resale value here over one's own comfort. The purpose of a tool is to be used, not to serve as an asset class.

Sure, but comfort != abuse :D Apart from the filing, I can't think of ways to make such a recent Mac look like this. Did it suffer a plane crash? Acid attack? Thermite fire?

I appreciate the customization, but would probably make an effort to make it not look like (another) accident.

I think he is not worried about the resale value.

> This was on my work computer. I expect to similarly modify future work computers, and I would be happy to help you modify yours if you need a little encouragement.

I don’t understand the actual decision but I appreciate the gusto with which it was made.

The main reason to consider resale value is 1-2 years later you may want to upgrade and selling it to another person typically yields you more money than trading it in with Apple. Doing something like this may decrease how much you could sell it for later.

If you’re not planning on doing that then it’s not really a factor for you.

> work computer

Seriously, I have several mac laptops dating back to 2004 and they all have less wear than that.

Invisible characters are there for visible characters to be printed correctly...

I'll grant that a space and a newline are necessary. The rest, nope.

You're talking about a subset of ASCII then. Unicode is supposed to support different languages and advanced typography, for which those characters are necessary. You can't write e.g. Arabic or Hebrew without those "unnecessary" invisible characters.

Please explain why an invisible zero width "character" is necessary.

if you write كلب which is an arabic word written right to left in the middle of an english sentence, you want to preserve the order of the characters in the stream for computer processing purposes. meaning the chararacter ك must come before the ل and after the e and the space with respect to the memory layout. whereas when displayed, it must be inverted to be legible. the solution is to have an invisible character that indicates a switch in text direction. if you were wondering, the situation where you want to write text in a foreign language within your text is very common outside english speaking countries.

Look I'm writing sdrawkcab (amazingly, I did it without using Unicode!). Layout is the job of your text formatting program. It's easy to fix a text editor to support right-to-left text entry.

The switch in text direction has resulted in malicious code injection attacks, as the reversed text becomes invisible. I had to change my compiler to reject those Unicode characters for that reason. It can be used in other cases to have hidden, malicious text.

Have you checked your SQL code for invisible backwards text that injects malware?

I don't know what "sdrawkcab" means. I'm not a native english speaker, and nothing indicates that it's not a real word or that it is spelled backwards

> Look I'm writing sdrawkcab

How would that work with Text-To-Speech output?

Good question! Two possibilities:

1. Tell the TTS program that the text is RTOL.

2. If the TTS program can speak Arabic, it can detect RTOL Arabic text.

The only purpose for RTOL English I can think of is to insert hidden text for malicious purposes.

how do you search for strings in the text ? how do you search for half the word ? as you do in autocomplete or in that search box in your browser

To prevent ligatures from forming when you need that.

That's the job of a typesetting language.

To mark linewrapping-breakpoints in strings.

Leave typesetting to a proper typesetting language, like Latex.

And how do you call into the typesetting language? Slugging around byte-arrays?

Most people using Slack, Teams etc. and especially those making purchase decisions have no idea what XMPP is and what it's capable of. Heck, even Facebook used to federate XMPP until they decided to go proprietary. Not in the interest of their users, but because it makes the most money for its shareholders.

What's next, bribing Trump with gold bars and donations to "charity"?

You got me wondering, so I checked to see how much Anthropic's bribed Trump so far. According to Dario, Trump has been soliciting bribes, but they refused to pay, and the contract "renegotiation" is retribution:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47269649

"Amodei claimed that tensions between his company and the Trump administration stem partly from the firm’s refusal to financially support Trump and its approach to AI regulation and safety issues."

They have a crypto coin for explicit bribing

You can also "invest" money for Trump's family to "earn" their "management fees."

Sloppy memory management is what uses memory. But those apps are in a class of their own, along with Electron apps.

Slack is an Electron app.

Sales tax is actually very different beacuse it is usually either cumulative and added to each part of the chain, or only the last one; whereas VAT is deducted in all but the last part of the chain.

Yea, the idea is that the VAT effectively taxes the added value in each step of the value chain because there's a limit to how much you can charge for an item or service. E. g. a 25 % VAT does not necessarily mean the goods become 25 % more expensive; most of those 25 % would have been profit for the reseller, intermediates and manufacturer if it were not for the VAT. Perhaps a little contra-intuitively, a high VAT keeps prices down and business efficient because every intemediate is indirectly taxed even though the VAT is only charged to the final consumer.

This is not basic income, it’s a grant for artists.

Still a good idea though.