Having used several external orchestrators I can see the appeal of the simplicity of this approach, especially for smaller teams wanting to limit the amount of infrastructure to maintain. Postgres is a proven tool, and as long as you design `@step`s to each perform one non deterministic side effect, I can see this scaling very well both in terms of performance and maintainability.
The embedded seems to ignore that most modern systems are distributed now and an operation will spawn multiple services. So an external system is better for that usecase I would say.
Where is the state stored? What if I have 5 copies of my service now, and 3 later. What happens to the "embedded state"? Was it on the container? Did it just evaporate? Was it on a volume? Is it stuck in limbo? Even if it was put into s3 it would be stuck in limbo.
DBOS solves this problem by storing state in Postgres, which is really good at coordinating multiple copies of the same service. Essentially, Postgres does the hard parts of external orchestration, letting you work with a simple library abstraction.
This issue always boils down to the LOTR argument for me: the surveillance power is too great, and no individual or group can or should be trusted with it, regardless of its actual current or potential future benefits.
The crux of the debate then is where to draw the line between safe and unsafe amounts of power?
It's not the amount of power that makes it unsafe, but rather its nature. In order for it to be safe:
1. It must be granted through democratic means.
2. It must be under strict oversight by an independently elected or appointed group that's free from both private conflict of interest and popular pressure.
3. There must be reliable mechanisms to quickly and efficiently strip said power away from the authority if they are determined to have used it irresponsibly.
One fact that mitigates the risk of large scale abuse by government is that the power to surveil is easily gained by a bad faith government.
Bush administration is a good example. They just did warrant-less wiretapping. It wasn't hard or particularly expensive. No public debate. And that was a government that more or less followed the rule of law. Imagine one that no longer follows the rule of law.
You don't even need an apparatus. Just send an FBI analyst to pick up Sundar Pichai and Zuckerberg. Have the companies run queries on their own database.
Our government already has the power to mass murder. Obama can order entire continents destroyed. The air force can drop a JDAM on any house in America. The police can arrest any political enemy of the state. The government already has immense power.
Comparatively the sort of privacy issues we are talking about are smaller powers. And like I argued above, they are easy to acquire.
Any government willing to abuse the power of surveillance would be willing to flaunt the law to create a surveillance program overnight (well not literally, but they could do it in months).
I'm not arguing that there is no downside to surveillance power, just that it's not as dangerous as many make it out to be. For example, there is still risk in official abuse by government employees acting rouge. There is risk of data leaks. And smaller scale abuses that can be covered up or that the public wouldn't care about.
But I think the fear that we shouldn't give the government power to surveil because they might go full nazi/communist/theocracic/etc. is silly.
Is there research to back this up? Ie is it really the case that 'non-executive' workers have no negotiating power? Is this true in all sectors or only some? Anecdotally I've seen instances where non-execs successfully negotiated a salary increase, etc.
Not that I'm going to dig out right now. I mentioned 'terms' because I wanted to address things like the contract period and so on, rather than just pay.
Edit: @sneak - apologies, my comment may have lacked empathy of its own. It's quite possible you have a really good reason for the anger that came across in your comment. Not all of us have positive relationships with our families, for example. I understand these subjects can stir powerful emotions, and I'm sure you have a valuable perspective to share on the matter - it's hard to tell, though, from such a curt and seemingly confrontational comment. At any rate, I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings with my own rash and unconsidered response.
> It's quite possible you have a really good reason for the anger that came across in your comment.
Anger? This is news to me.
I think you may be reading a lot more into my two lines than are actually there.
> I understand these subjects can stir powerful emotions, and I'm sure you have a valuable perspective to share on the matter - it's hard to tell, though, from such a curt and seemingly confrontational comment.
My own emotions regarding the matter are anything but powerful - which explains my resultant near-total apathy about it quite plainly.
Confrontational it was, though. I'm rather tired of people reciting platitudes as if close personal bonds to one's immediate family are universally beneficial. In many cases, it's far more destructive than helpful, yet people insist.
Society should endeavor to reject mindless duckspeak when possible.
To be clear, it's nothing to do with my own family circumstances, I just think it's incredibly rude to assume that some one-size-fits-all attitude is something to be espoused to random strangers as if you could possibly know better than them how to interface with their own family— A simple case of inappropriate presumption.
It seems to me that while we have deconstructed certain normative ideas (e.g. that everyone should be heterosexual), there is no general interested in pursuing a truly liberal agenda where people define for themselves who they are and how they want to live, rather than live by arbitrary rules.
What is happening is that the old rules are now being replaced by new rules. And people who break these rules are no longer called degenerates, they are called autists.
Are you kidding me?! Are you completely devoid of empathy? He's not trying to command that anyone do anything, so drop the indignation. This is what we call a human response to grief; his mother is no longer here, and knowing what a wonderful and life-giving relationship that was, he is imploring the rest of us not to take our relationships with our mothers for granted.
I at least knew my mother. She would take me to bars with her, or leave me with her sister while she went out (but she usually made sure to drunkenly wake me up when she got back to tell me again and again how much she loooooorved me).
Eventually she left me and my siblings and fled to Holland, where she promptly stopped paying child support and started helping to raise the other guy's children instead. Occasionally I would get cards. Even less often I would get phone calls full of guilt and awkwardness.
She's actually on my FB now, but I'm not calling her.
It gets better though, my dad later remarried to someone who means well but didn't exactly contribute to a loving upbringing... but at least she stuck around. But how does Happy "Stepmother's" Day fall into this weekend?
And every single year I get to go through this dilemma anew. Thanks, Hallmark!
So I suppose the point is that for those who do have the doting, loving mother, by all means don't skip out on making that phone call. But not all of us are going to be in that situation, so Ed's advice isn't going to apply to all of us.
My grandmother had a drunk for a father, so I am told.
He left the family and kept to himself, but that didn't stop my grandmother from visiting him every week. Bringing food and making sure he was doing OK.
To this day, I have never once heard her speak a bad word about the man. In fact, she wasn't even the person who told me this story.
I don't know if he paid "child support" or any form of it, but I would assume not as he was constantly penniless.
He couldn't help being a poor drunk, but it was nothing to punish him over is how my grandmother saw the situation.
Sometimes forgiveness and acceptance is the best medicine.
> Sometimes forgiveness and acceptance is the best medicine.
Sometimes it's not. I don't wish ill of my mother even at this point, hopefully she's happy over in Holland with her new life. And I would certainly never deign to tell your grandmother what she should do, I'm assuming she maintained contact because she had good reasons to.
But I have kids of my own to think about, a wife of my own, and a very short life of my own to live, so I'm not going to waste a minute of it worrying about someone who could not reciprocate in kind. I stress myself enough worrying about the people who do care for me.
If my kids still respect me when they grow up I want it to be because I demonstrated a reason to earn their respect, not because I guilt-tripped them into feeling they have to live up to some familial bond which society imposes upon them.
Edit: I did end up calling my stepmother earlier today as well. Pays to stay involved, I guess.
I've lost both my parents. Everyone does. It's nothing that deserves any special sympathy or empathy. It's part of life. I miss my parents, but beyond the initial short-term sadness after their deaths I don't grieve their loss, since it is inevitable. Far worse it would be to lose a child.
Technically most of them are separate libraries whose version numbers happen to be in lockstep with Rails as they are part of the same project, so it's not as senselessly repetitive as it might appear at first glance. (There's still some repetition — just not as much.)
Neat idea. I think reliability is an important feature to call out on the landing page. If I'm a business owner that depends on this service as a funnel for new clients, for instance, I would want guarantees regarding uptime and reliability.
