Silicon Valley is stupid

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The SEC is currently petitioning a judge to hold Elon Musk in contempt, alleging that he has already broken the terms of his agreement with the SEC regarding his prior stock manipulation.

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The newest in inventing shit that already exists with new, idiotic names:

https://twitter.com/danjnich/status/1102186951858421766

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And I’d also suggest - that’s just the ones we know about. Remember how not too long ago, Reveal reported on how they were grossly under-reporting incidents? I would absolutely not be surprised if they were still doing it, but with stuff they thought was minor enough to escape notice or could be explained away. Or, that they just kept quiet with their weird, quasi-cultish corporate culture that introduces social pressure on employees not to disrupt or otherwise impede “The Mission.”

Edit: Also, many Tesla staff only found out that stores were closing and they’d be losing their jobs via the public announcement post. There’s also been some rumors of a lot of belt-tightening that seems to be specifically aimed at trying to get staff to quit, over being fired.

Ugh… Tesla, nice products, shitty (even more so than average) company…

The sad thing is that their upcoming Model Y has pretty much all I want/need out of an EV (AWD and a hatchback/station wagon/compact SUV form factor), but I haven’t seen anything comparable from anyone else as of yet. Fortunately, I’m in no need of buying a new car as of yet, but I’m hoping other car companies that are less shitty get off their butts and start doing something.

Well, on paper at least. Let’s not forget they are more than a little notorious for production issues, and I’m not just talking about their seemingly perpetual inability to make as many cars as they predict they will.

Wonky Panel gaps, bad paint, missing parts, bad software, breakdowns, poorly chosen components(Fun facts - their max temperature mode that got press recently is also, coincidentally, just a little ways below the temperature that their non-automotive grade screens start to suffer failures, at the same time they quietly revised their warranties regarding their screens), breakages, beta testing incomplete software with insufficient sensors for purpose on the general public, I’m not sure we can really say they make a good product, at least at this time.

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Okay, fair enough, though people who own them seem to rave about them, though I do wonder how much of it comes from “drinking the kool-aid,” so to speak.

That is one of the reasons why I want more EV options from companies other than Tesla – more traditional car companies that aren’t trying to shoehorn processes that work for a website that’s updated multiple times per day into a multi-thousand-kilo metal contraption barreling down the interstate at 100 km/h.

It’s 100% OH YEAH!

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Volvo has an “Electric Car Initiative” with the goal being that by the end of this year, every one of their new cars will be electrified:

https://www.volvocars.com/us/about/electrification

I don’t think their cars are going to be as cheap as Tesla’s $35K Model 3, but an electric Volvo sounds very appealing.

About the only thing I’ll give Tesla credit for is installing the required infrastructure for Electric cars. Which is something the big car makers have failed to do.

Everything else, Musk wants to be Steve Jobs, but he doesn’t have the legacy. Or at least in this day and age, he was too much a visible douche.

Tesla’s chargers are proprietary. In practice I find regular EV chargers right next to the Tesla plugs in public and there are some hacky adapters and things that I haven’t really looked into. Tesla made people realize that EVs don’t have to be like an under powered hybrid and probably the industry as a whole learned some things from having them on the road.

There are some minor things I don’t like about my Bolt, but for the most part it’s comparable to the model 3 and cheaper. A friend who has a 3 regularly brings up that he’s skeptical of other companies standing behind their EVs. I think is just the only argument left to the fanboys.

My boss happens to own a Model 3 and he has taken me for a drive in it, and it is really nice, I have to admit, although there are a bunch of human factors decisions that I think were very questionable (no above-the-wheel instruments, for one thing – you need to look over to a glorified iPad mounted in the center of the dash to see your speed, etc.).

The notion of an electric Volvo is pretty appealing, provided they have a model with my desired features. VW also has some electrics coming down the pipe that I hope also will give me what I want.

Hmmm… We’ll see what happens with this:

" The company’s focus will shift from a social network where people broadcast information to large groups of people, to one where people communicate with smaller groups and their content disappears after a short period of time"

Uhhh… So 4chan but encrypted? That doesn’t sound worse at all.

So… This is very silicon valley.

I’m not sure if that’s a thing people are saying but the more I work in this field the more I see this kinda shit. I feel like right here is a pretty decent spot to define the adjective silicon valley.

If something is silicon valley, it’s:

Subject to change at the whims of like one or two college bros.
Likely to change often (most common I see is a major release every 6 months).
Possibly change silently.
Likely to be flashy, sleek and pretty looking with function being secondary
Have a very large following of bros who believe it will change the world
Exist in the world of FM (Fucking Magic)
Absolutely full of tracking and such.

That’s all I got for now. Feel free to join in if you’d like.

The big thing my company seems to be fawning all over that’s very silicon valley is docker. They have a problem and that problem is they don’t wanna learn do deploy their own fucking product in Linux so they’ve shifted the focus of the dev team away from like, adding features and generally doing fine, to just making it work the way it does currently, but in docker.

Sysadmin/Software Engineer LFW (though not likely for much longer, Manhattan here I fucking come)

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Admittedly, I haven’t looked too deeply on what it takes to make something work in Docker, but given that Docker on Linux is just a bunch of glorified wrappers around Linux cgroups and chroot jails, it shouldn’t be too difficult to make a well-written Linux app run in Docker.

Eh, it’s all the little things. Each one has to be addressed. For instance, docker prides itself on it’s startup times. Running production systems in it though, where they have to be up constantly… It’s not designed with that in mind. A docker instance with an uptime measured in months is one that runs into little issues here and there. For instance, the size of the docker file grows with time unless designed to address this.

Also the systems inside the container can have all sorts of issues, like it connects to databases using connection strings with encrypted passwords in them. In large organizations, sometimes those passwords get changed without telling everyone that accesses them. This causes crashes. In the app there’s a handy dandy logfile to check but if it crashes in docker, the instance stops running and the log file is never written to.

The employees who modify the application’s content (different from ordinary users) can make a mistake and break it, again causing a crash which closes the docker instance before the logs get written.

The list goes on and on, you can design around them, but that’s just the thing, you have to design around them.

Edit: Also a funny example of the silicon valley-ness of docker, while I was getting it all set up so I could deploy the test builds, (in windows) the guy pushing me to do this insisted I install docker’s powershell autocomplete text feature because the commands get very long and he insists it’s just impossible if you don’t. We then promptly ran into the issue that while said autocomplete package was included in the version he installed a year ago, it’s stopped being maintained (not made by the docker folks) and so stopped being included in the official getting started guide.

Changed and made less useful, just cause. He seemed disappointed, I was amused as I contemplated where to apply next.

Well, Docker is meant to be lighter weight virtualization than full VMs, so startup time kinda makes sense…

So are you saying that if your app crashes, the entire Docker instance goes down? That sounds… wrong… but doing some research apparently that can happen if Docker is configured to run the app directly instead of doing something like running bash and launching the app from there.

The logging thing… hmm, yeah, that is annoying depending on what does the logging (i.e. the crashing process or some external process like a watchdog). Implementation detail I’m not privy here too, so I can’t offer much in the way of advice, even ignoring how little I know about Docker.

Docker does have the advantage of being much more lightweight than a VM, so there are legitimate use cases for it.

Then again, the code I work on has to run on the bare metal (though we use VMs for testing purposes), so I haven’t looked too deeply on what exactly Docker does to wrap the built-in Linux features it uses.