💻 Typescript/React dev. 🎸 Musician at https://xitter.cf/t.co/2mXx9QIg0t. 🧒🏻 🧒🏻 Father of 2 ✈️ Expat
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Joined February 2013
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Karen Grigoryan retweeted
Unrealized gains tax for Gen-Z:
You buy a Pokémon card for $50.
Someone offers you $500 for it. You say no. You love that card. You're keeping it.
The government says: "Cool, but that card is worth $500 now. You owe us $100 in taxes."
You: "…I didn't sell it."
Government: "Don't care. Pay up."
You don't have $100 lying around. So you're forced to sell the card you love just to pay a tax on money you never received.
Next month? That card drops back to $50.
Your card is gone. Your money is gone. And the government shrugs.
That's a wealth tax on unrealized gains. They don't pay you back the tax...
Now picture this.
Your mom calls you crying. She has to sell the house she raised you in. Not because she can't afford it. She's lived there 30 years. It's paid off.
But some website says it's worth more now and the government says she owes $15,000 she doesn't have.
So she sells your childhood home. The kitchen where she made you breakfast. The doorframe where she marked your height every birthday.
Gone.
To pay a tax on money that was never real.
Now picture the opposite.
Your dad put everything into his small business. For 20 years he built it from nothing. One year the business is "valued" at $2 million on paper. He owes a massive tax bill. He empties his savings. Sells his truck. Borrows money. Pays it.
Next year the market crashes. His business is worth $200,000.
He lost everything to pay a tax on a number that doesn't exist anymore.
Does the government give him his money back?
No.
Does the government give him his truck back?
No.
Does the government care?
No.
They sold this idea as "taxing billionaires." But billionaires have armies of lawyers, offshore accounts, and trusts. They'll be fine.
You know who won't be fine? Your mom. Your dad. Your neighbor with a small business. The farmer down the road who's had the same land for four generations and now has to sell it because dirt got expensive.
You're not taxing wealth. You're taxing people for owning things.
It's like getting a parking ticket for a car you might drive somewhere someday.
They want you to own nothing and be happy. To fund the fraud, waste and abuse of the welfare state they created.
There is enough money. More tax isn't needed. It's all a lie. But you've been gaslit into believing this is a rich vs poor debate.
I hope you understand what's at stake.
the software engineering wisdom distilled
github.com/zakirullin/cognit… by @zakirullin
Karen Grigoryan retweeted
Ok, I wasn't going to comment on Elon Musk and Ashley St. Clair, but I figured I should.
Here are my thoughts on it:
Microsoft, the supposed lover of open source and who "changed" continues to put this forward as their image (while VS C*de benefits heavily from the work of OSS contributors and general OSS sentiment), yet continues to go against the spirit of the Language Server Protocol - their own invention.
Pylance, with over 128,114,777 installs, has an explicit prohibition of RUNNING the language server outside of Microsoft Products:
> INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS. a) General. You may install and use any number of copies of the software only with Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Server, and successor Microsoft products and services (collectively, the “Visual Studio Products and Services”) to develop and test your applications.
So in spite of being the author, one of the primary beneficiaries and "champion" of the open source nature of LSP - Microsoft refuses to allow others to even RUN their LSP outside of their own products, let alone examine the code or use for their own purposes.
Karen Grigoryan retweeted
Just released the new Snacks Profiler! Check it out at github.com/folke/snacks.nvim… #neovim #snacks
Karen Grigoryan retweeted
Did you know Vim can read and edit Zip and other archives out of the box? Works with gzip, tar, and even files that use Zip under the hood like xlsx and docx!
👉 Read the post: bit.ly/31J7vlG
📨 Get our newsletter: bit.ly/vimtricks
Karen Grigoryan retweeted
Use :grep and :cdo to find and replace across your entire project. Substitute with the /c flag to have Vim ask for confirmation on every change.
👉 Read the post: bit.ly/3uO6GEs
📨Subscribe for weekly Vim tips: bit.ly/vimtricks
You can combine this with <ctrl-r>% to inject the value of % register (aka current file name) into your :w command.
Extract lines from a file by visually selecting them and then using :w path/to/file
Then reselect the last visual selection with gv and press d to delete.
👉 Tutorial: bit.ly/36SvyAb
📨 Subscribe for weekly Vim tips: bit.ly/vimtricks
Karen Grigoryan retweeted
Use ex commands to copy and paste lines without moving around:
• :28t. Copy line 28 and paste it below
• :t20 Copy current line to below line 20
👉 Read the tutorial: bit.ly/30GcvXm
📨 Free Vim tips: bit.ly/vimtricks
Karen Grigoryan retweeted
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Karen Grigoryan retweeted
Daily meetings are a micromanaging shitshow.
Most people know these 15-minute stand-ups are useless. But they do them anyway because "that's how it should be."
One day, the corporate world decided that Scrum answered every problem. Daily meetings became popular. Everyone. Every day. No exceptions.
When did we become numb to how inefficient this is? How much time do companies waste every year in this charade?
The funny part is that Scrum sells these by telling us they are a way to avoid other meetings. You gotta be kidding me!
Unfortunately, I've participated in daily stand-ups for decades. If I were to compress these years into a single story, it would read like this:
• We are still waiting for some. Where is he? We can't start unless we are all here. We are late already.
• There's a manager in the meeting. We know she shouldn't be here. Who is going to tell her?
• We take turns reading from a JIRA board shared on the big screen. Everyone can read, but we still do it out loud. She wants to hear us say it.
• Yesterday wasn't a great day, but I won't admit it. Instead, let me tell her, "I'm making great progress" and "I'm getting closer than ever."
• We are all talking to her. She said this is a "safe space." We trust her, of course. Now, she is questioning anyone who isn't moving fast enough.
• 15 minutes in, and we are still here. Same as yesterday.
The first time I led a team, I stopped daily stand-ups. One of the first principles of getting shit done is "maximizing uninterrupted time." Daily meetings are in direct conflict with that.
Why should I force everyone to be at the same time and place while stopping everything else?
I asked everyone to write instead. Some people wrote every day. Some people, whenever they had something to say.
10x improvement overnight. For the project and the team.
I've talked to many people about this. Many tell me developers will never communicate unless you force them into a room daily. They say I shouldn't trust them to put in writing what they need to tell everyone else.
They may be right. They need a better team.
ALT A comic strip making fun of how long are "super quick" meetings.
Karen Grigoryan retweeted
Software estimates are one of the oldest lies we tell ourselves.
We all know they don't work, but pretend they mean something and later feel enraged when shit hits the fan.
I focused a big part of my undergrad on software estimation.
After graduating, I wrote plenty about the topic.
Then, I started working for a company where I spent years researching how to make better estimates. We sold multiple millions of dollars of software using the tools I built.
I read everything there's to read. I could recite Steve McConnel's "Software Estimation" book from top to bottom.
Here is the most important lesson I learned:
People can't estimate software. It doesn't matter who they are or how much experience they have.
Estimating software reliably is science fiction.
And the best part:
They will ask you to estimate something. They will tell you they understand it's not exact. They will promise they won't hold you accountable.
And then they will. They always do.
There are two solutions for this. Let's start with my recommendations for those who don't have a choice:
1. Remove "quick," "simple," "straightforward," "easy," and every similar word from your dictionary. Never use them. Don't let others use them when referring to your work.
2. Never volunteer an estimate. Everything you say will be used against you.
3. When forced, estimate work you know you can complete today. Always estimate with a range: "It will take me 2 - 4 hours."
4. Estimate anything you won't do today in days and weeks. Say, "I should finish that feature sometime this week." Do not estimate future work in hours.
But we all know your manager will force you to give an estimate. Here is what you should do:
1. Estimate how long you think it will take you to complete the task.
2. Multiply the number by 3. This will be the lower range of your estimate.
3. Double the lower range of the estimate. This will be the upper range.
Example: If you think something will take you 1 day of work, say "between 3 and 6 days."
Here is the funny part:
It won't take you between 3 - 6 days. This is as much bullshit as any other method you can think of.
The true solution for this problem:
Work for a company that doesn't care about estimates.
ALT A Dilbert comic about software estimates.
Karen Grigoryan retweeted
Also, make sure you’re not using weak ETags. They change when metadata changes, which leaves us in the same predicament as Last-Modified. Prefer strong ETags.
Caching mini-tip. When revalidating resources, prefer ETag[1] over Last-Modified[2]. Writing the same content to the same file will update its last modified date, whereas its hash will remain unchanged. Last-Modified leaves us susceptible to refetching unmodified resources.
ALT Screenshot of a computer terminal showing the same file but with two listed last-modified dates.
Karen Grigoryan retweeted
🐣 Introducing `smol-developer`!
▸ Human-centric, coherent whole program synthesis
▸ your own junior developer
▸ develop, debug, decompile
▸ open source: github.com/smol-ai/developer…
▸ 200 LOC, half english
Insights:
💡 100k context can summarize both content and codebases
💡 Markdown is the best prompting DSL
💡 Copy and paste your errors as prompts
💡 Copy and paste curl output as prompts
💡 write CSS animation by describing what u want
💡 GPT4 >>> GPT3.5/Anthropic Claude for codegen
see README for more thoughts!
Karen Grigoryan retweeted
The recent WhatsApp accounts takeover is simple and genius.
This is how it works:
You're sleeping.
A "hacker" tries to login to your account via WhatsApp.
You get a text message with a pincode that says "Do not share this".
You don't share it, yet you still get hacked.
How?
Karen Grigoryan retweeted
I turn 45 next week. Been talking with close friends, middle aged dudes- modestly successful, community oriented, good dudes working jobs of responsibility in various systems
Common denominator: all the systems are broken. Everyone knows it and is doing time to pay the mortgage