The letter or the intent though? Because if it’s the letter, we’d better throw in wheel chairs, surfboards etc. as well. The law does not specify motor vehicles, even though I would believe that to be the intent.
> End of the day, landlords don’t deserve more money and I don’t know why anyone here argues for it. It’s like you want bezos to have even more money - it’s super weird.
See, to me, this vitriol is what seems super weird. It seems like you must be talking about some sort of property shark that owns 8+ figures in property and extracts the maximum possible from the poor peons that dare to want a roof over their heads. Maybe with some large company thrown in the mix for good measure.
My father and grandfather are both in rental (well, they did whatever they could to make their way, primarily carpentry; rental is only part of the picture). Both of them started with nothing and managed to bootstrap their way into some properties, fixing them up as they went. They do all the work on their respective properties themselves. There isn’t a management company involved. They aren’t some evil men trying to extort the populace, the goal is just to live, provide for family, etc. Yet by definition, they are landlords - that thing that so many here despise unilaterally with such passion.
Probably there is considerable diversity (or at least two classes of landlords). But laws are going to apply to both groups.
End of the day, landlords aren't doing any labor for the rent they are collecting.
If you do something that drives up the value of the property - you'll get some amount of that when you go to sell the property. If your father buys properties, rehabs them, and then rents them out... Guess what? He's double-dipping. He's going to charge more for rent and he's going to be able to sell the property for more later. In one instance (selling the property), yes, he's doing labor and will reap some reward for his labor. In the other, he's not really doing any labor to keep charging more rent.
I had "small time" landlords many times. They always jacked up the rent 10-20% every year. You think they're doing that because the 1920's house I was renting was getting improved every year or they were doing anything to make it better? Nope... They just wanted more money and because no one was building more housing - they knew they could get it.
Improvements to property often bring little to no return at time of sale —- especially if those improvements have worn in a few years. More than a few years? Forget it. Improvements are generally made to improve immediate rental value (similarly maintenance repairs are made to retain existing value). Gains realized on sale are mostly from natural appreciation of real estate over time (on which capital gains will be paid). This is why house flipping is not a more popular enterprise.
> going to charge more for rent
You mean, be able to charge anything at all.. it’s not like we’re taking about buying turn-key properties and updating the cabinetry or something.
> not really doing any labor
Properties require upkeep. (N) properties require N times the upkeep. In addition to normal expenses, there are also risks; for example a tenant may damage your property, and then you need to fix it. You may think your security deposit covers that; in reality that amount of money can usually only cover minor repairs / cleaning. Landlords need to recoup that sort of thing over time, so it ends up getting rolled into your rent.
I really don’t think you understand how expenses for these things work. The way you’ve been talking, it sounds like you think your rent check goes directly into the landlord’s bank account as profit. Maybe you should try home ownership, and see what the actual ledger (expenses + time) looks like over time. Compare that plus your mortgage to rent. You may need to do this for the long haul to see the real picture though, not just a couple of years.
Better yet, acquire some properties and try your hand at rental yourself —- either you’ll end up filthy rich for nothing like you seem to think it works, or you’ll learn a valuable lesson about the true cost of services…
Because, while you assert that landlords offer no value, the fact remains that there are people in this world who want to rent, not own. Without landlords, how is that supposed to happen?
> If an engineer spends an hour writing a commit message that no one reads, that's an unproductive engineer, compared to where they should be.
Okay, maybe don't spend an hour. It would take a special kind of commit to need more than a few minutes writing a decent commit message.
> And I would argue we shouldn't cater to developers who make documentation difficult to access for everyone else by hiding it where only crappy tools can reach it.
Yeah. Like web browsers. And PDF viewers.
The non-caustic point here is that clearly different people have different ideas about what is accessible.
> I think it's optimized for discussions before integration, which is largely what PR descriptions and comments are largely used for now.
This isn't even a git concept though; it's something that was tacked on top of it. What you seem to be saying here is that a third-party tool building on top of git spawned a social movement that moved this layer up a level. Not every project uses github or a github workflow.
> I think it's optimized for discussions before integration
It's optimized for discussion of the purpose of the code unit in question. That discussion can be useful before integration; but pre-integration discussion can happen any way you like. PR discussions work, e-mails on mailing lists work. Face-to-face discussion works.
The real value (for me, I guess; apparently you just don't see it that way) is explaining the purpose (and possibly circumstances) of the commit, after the fact, when I'm looking at it for some reason or other. Not finding the commit, but explaining it once I'm there. A well-written commit message can be absolutely priceless.
Maybe this last point should go in a top-level response to your original comment, but I'm already here, so I'll just say it here. Saying that commit messages are terrible because only short-messages (the "subject line") are shown by default, seems to me about the same as saying e-mail bodies are useless for the same reason, or that file contents are terrible because `find` only lists file names by default. You 'have' to collapse by default, or you'd drown in a sea of commit messages anytime you tried to list anything.
> Like say you are trying to determine why a 10 line function is the way that it is. You blame it. Not even with the stupid-simple GitHub UI that _I_ originally wrote, but with the more expensive CLI interface that follows renames and ignores whitespace changes, etc. Now you get a list of SHAs of commits and the first 50 chars of commit messages for each line for the last modifications, etc. How do you even stitch those messages into a useful story (in order) to tell you how that function evolved to what it is now and why?
Okay, I hear you, this is not the most ergonomic procedure to one-off. But seriously, you have the SHA commits. If you need to do this often, write a tool that takes those SHA commits, orders them based on log order (or chronological order, w/e, pick an ordering mechanism), and prints out whatever information is interesting to you. A simple display that can expand/collapse full messages, diffs, etc. would probably do nicely. It can be a GUI tool, a CLI tool (menu-driven, maybe); whatever works for you. This should not be a big deal to write for the common case, and if you think it's that critical to the community, publish it.
I mean clearly he’s a menace. Something needs to be done about him. That can be true, and it can simultaneously be true that he is not 100% “evil” or anything else.
A few incidents (or even many incidents) can paint a bleak picture, but they can’t really prove an absolute.
On the other hand the tools are mostly very simple and highly standardized. The simple tools are applied to the problem through a combination of applied experience and constructed jigs. I guess the equivalent in the software world would be classic non-fat Unix as your base tools, and building your own libraries and toolkits as your jigs (no or very limited third party deps), while aggressively avoiding complexity. You’ll get reliability this way; of course, there are serious tradeoffs.
Don’t misunderstand me, though. I agree that the modern software treadmill is horrible and needs to be tamed.
You know, I'd actually like to add to my earlier comment.
> Yeah, it’s not quite the same.
I actually don't know quite why I wrote what I did, because the concession really isn't true. I can only imagine we were discussing some romanticized view of the subject. My own experience, however, shows that reality is otherwise.
Cheap tools usually don't work well or last; you end up constantly complaining about them and constantly replacing them. This is true whether you're talking about power tools or simple hand tools. (How much do you pay for most of the software and libraries that you use?)
For the hand tools --- some things like hammers basically work, but other things, unexpectedly, do not. Handsaws and handplanes are two good examples of simple tools that are fundamentally broken from the manufacturer, and in many cases simply cannot be fixed due to design. Other tools can be salvaged, but don't work out of the box. You can shell out inordinate amounts of money to a company like Lie Nielson, or hope to get lucky on the purchase of an antique, but the typical products you might expect to work, don't.
For power tools, the cheaper tools might technically do a job, but they often function in ways which are detrimental to the work or to personal safety, and don't last long.
You might think the solution is to spend more money for quality tools, but this doesn't always work out either. I'm thinking of a DeWalt biscuit joiner and a Makita pin-nailer; both are well-respected brands for "real contractors" who rely on their tools and expect them to work. The Makita pin-nailer doesn't load its nails right, so I have to futz with it after every nail --- which kind of defeats the purpose of the tool (it didn't do this originally, but it didn't take much use before the problem developed). The biscuit joiner, despite being a well respected model, cuts slots that have so much slop in them that there's no point in using the tool at all.
Now lets talk about machines briefly. My radial arm saw (no longer a common tool, but once quite common both in homes and on jobsites) cannot be calibrated to proper specifications. One of the adjustments cannot be made to spec and it throws off several of the others. The result is a tool that, while useful, is only half-functional. I have theories, but don't know exactly what is causing the issue (I got it second-hand); I would need to completely tear it down and grok the entire design, then rebuild it, to properly fix the issue. By the way, the calibrations it does have need to be periodically checked and corrected (the RAS takes a lot of flak for this, but I find this is true of any machine with adjustments).
This is usually about the time where the internet gets up in arms and tells you to throw away the RAS and use a table saw, so lets talk about my table saw --- the fence can't be calibrated to lock parallel to the miter slots. I don't think the fence is broken by design, but I don't know exactly what's wrong. The calibration process is logical, it just inexplicably doesn't work. I suspect one of the fence rails may be slightly out of alignment. I could fix this by building my own high-quality fence system --- I have the skills --- but this is analogous to throwing out your third party library or tool and writing your own.
In all of the above cases concerning power tools, the answer is maintenance/repair, but in all cases (aside from building a new fence), it is not the work I want to be doing, nor is it work in which I am experienced, nor is the necessary work obvious through casual investigation.
Of course, I have plenty of tools that work great and never give me trouble, other than periodic maintenance, but it's the problem tools that stand out. Software is the same for me; most of it works fine, some of it breaks down due to bit rot (maintenance required), some of it is broken from the manufacturer (out-of-box repairs required), and some of it is just piss-poor in design (see hand tools above).
I still hate the treadmill just as much as you appear to, but romanticizing the life of a tradesman is probably a mistake. Entropy is everywhere, poor design and unfortunate occurrences are everywhere. I don't know if you have any personal insight into the life of a tradesman, but they deal with all kinds of BS, from all angles, that just isn't commonly discussed outside the field in question.
===
Addendum:
I keep mentioning software libraries, but those really aren't tools. They're more analogous to prefab construction components, so in that case we could talk about items such as pre-hung doors and prefab cabinetry that is supposed to save time and require less skill to install. That's great, until you discover that the item was assembled out of alignment at the factory, defeating the entire purpose. I could go on ad nauseam, but I imagine you probably get the point by now...
God, it's all just miserable and depressing when you really start digging into it, isn't it?
> It's also why certain groups respond very lively when you call them by their true name: they are utterly in denial about their possible futures give or take an unlucky turn of events or two.
I don't think that follows. Or rather, it might be true, but I'm not sure it's meaningful. I'm a pretty peaceable individual, generally wish good things for others, consider people as individuals, etc. I stay away from political activism. I would still be pretty upset if someone called me a Nazi.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, offensive terms tend to be offensive regardless of the underlying reason. When someone gets upset about it, you can't infer that it's because you struck close to home --- it could be utter indignation about the injustice of the situation, or something else entirely.
“Now Lisp and Smalltalk are just niche languages – but once, both of them were whole other universes. Full-stack systems, all live, all dynamic, all editable on the fly.
The closest thing we have today is probably JavaScript apps running in web browsers, and they are crippled little things by comparison.”
I have tasted development on Smalltalk, with Common Lisp on modern tools, and even with Symbolics Genera 8.3/8.5. The kind of environment they provide pretty much by default an environment that at best you're going to have to bring with yourself in case of JS - in case of modern Lisp, it's usually a matter of installing an IDE plugin first though, but commercial stuff comes with IDEs as well.
The best of "built in" support for JS in browsers pales in comparison to what was one mouse click away under Genera. Similarly most desktop/server environments except niche ones (Erlang ones? modern Lisps, Smalltalks). Even the better parts of less capable language tooling is often overlooked (advanced debugger support in things like Visual Studio, etc.)
That paragraph is nowhere near ridiculous to anyone who actually used the tools, even if they agree with the dissenting voice about NT with (D)COM that was written on symbolics lisp user groups ~1995 - because the process described there is also now often disregarded unless one develops exclusively for Windows.
In some sense, you might consider it to be a crude one. If you configure your computer to boot directly into full screen emacs, never leave it, and do your damndest to interact only with in-process elisp, you might get some feel for what such a machine could be like.
It will also be a frustrating experience, since emacs was never really intended to be used in such a way. There’s going to be a lot of friction and limitations. Still, it’s a fun exercise for the right sort of person :)
