Since 2010
I don’t think I’ve heard about Goodhart’s law before. It’s a good one. I was introduced to it in this post by Ibrahim Diallo who muses:
We spent astronomical sums of money to build AI because we believed it was valuable. Now, we must prove it is valuable simply because we spent all that money.
Like everyone else does, and in violation of my concerns about handing my browsing activity over to an advertising company. The number of paper-cuts I’m getting from using Firefox has crossed a line for me though.
The tantrum you’re currently reading was prompted when I triggered bug 1890697 a few moments ago. Now this isn’t entirely Firefox’s fault, but it is the only mainstream browser which behaves this way when opening developer tools. I encounter it every single day when I’m working on the ridiculous web application I maintain at work.
Next on the list is bug 1941693, which destroys my Mac’s battery life when watching full screen videos. This is also an every day occurrence.
Those are the big ones, but I could list a dozen other stupid things I run into almost every day. A lot of them are specific to the way macOS does things and it therefore does feel like macOS is way down the list of Mozilla’s priorities. Which is fair enough - they can do what they want - but Mac people like polish and Firefox fails in that regard.
And look, I don’t give Mozilla any money and they don’t owe me anything. Quite the opposite in fact: as a developer I should be contributing, but I don’t even know where to begin with the Firefox codebase. I’m a web developer for crying out loud!
It’s a sad situation but once I tune out the Google-ness from Chrome it’s the only mainstream browser that gets out of my way.
From the Python 3.15.0 release announcement on Python Insider:
To celebrate the new 3.15, Barry Warsaw has a present for us!
I had this idea to whip up a little TUI adventure game that takes you through a What’s New in Python 3.15.
…
The easiest way to play it is to run:
uvx --python 3.15 whatsnewt
Barry Warsaw is a core Python developer, and Python Insider is an official Python blog. That is… kind of an official endorsement for Astral’s uv!
Oh here we go a-fucking-gain. This time it’s a process called “dasd”:
It’s been like that for hours. log stream and log stats show this process spewing the same 30-ish lines into the system log at a rate of about 180 messages per second. Something about running ArcadeResetPO over-and-over. What is ArcadeResetPO? Not a clue. What is dasd? No idea:
% man dasd
No manual entry for dasd
At least this time I don’t seem to be the only one with this problem, and there are even suggested workarounds.
I have the same questions that I did with mediaanalysisd: what is this stuff doing (when it works) that benefits me? I assume it’s something to do with Apple Arcade, a service I have never used and have no interest in. My Mac isn’t even signed in to iCloud.
That’s where we are. The people making the right call are being mocked by the people making the short-sighted one. And nobody stopped to ask the obvious question: if nobody hires juniors, where the fuck do seniors come from?
And:
Right now, every company is fishing from the same pond of experienced engineers. Nobody is restocking the pond. Do the maths on where that goes. In three years you don’t have enough mid-levels. In five years you’re in a bidding war for seniors that makes the 2021 hiring market look quaint. In seven years you’re hiring “senior engineers” with three years of experience because that’s all that’s left, and you’re pretending that’s fine.