Links and Notes for June 24th, 2022

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Science & Nature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

Economy & Finance

Seven ‘surprising’ facts about the Italian economy by Philipp Heimberger and Nikolaus Krowall (Social Europe)

“Even Germany, Austria and the Netherlands have recorded a comparable positive ‘primary’ budget surplus less frequently than Italy. The Italian state has not been as ‘profligate’ as is often claimed: it has consistently collected more in taxes than it has spent. But the interest burden—high due to legacy debt—has repeatedly pushed the overall budget balance of the Italian state into negative territory. By the way, Italy has so far also been a net contributor to the EU budget.”

Public Policy & Politics

The Apolitical Society (Russian Dissent)

“Russians quickly agreed to consider politics as pure drudgery best left to those in the Kremlin’s corridors of power, and collectively decided that it was better not to get involved. They might listen to talk about it on TV, but understood that it had nothing to do with their own personal lives.”

But this sounds like the citizens of any country. The States. Switzerland.

“Sentiments such as these would become the bones of support for the authoritarian regime. Authoritarianism depends on the civilians’ disinterest in politics. All that is required is official apathy. You can think whatever you want, you can say whatever you want, but also you can do nothing about it.”

“Out on the streets, just try to count the number of placards or stickers bearing the letter Z on cars or non-state buildings. In the present moment, the staunch civic passivity of most Russians may be regarded as a virtue. Indifference itself can become an attitude; to paraphrase Pushkin, the law may not be mute, but the people certainly are.”

“This is the main difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Authoritarian power relies on the passivity of its citizens and acts on society only when necessary. The totalitarian regime, on the contrary, requires the permanent mobilization of society, and the control of all public activity, all of private life, and even of the innermost thoughts of every citizen.”

“After the fall of the regime, a society will be split. Supporters of the former government do not simply disappear, and their victims refuse to be recognized as victims. It is not enough to restore the political structure and punish those responsible for crimes. It is necessary to restore the dignity of the victims and to build trust between the opposing groups.”

“[South Africa’s] goal was not to punish the perpetrators, but to discover the truth about the crimes, to listen to the victims, and to give them the opportunity to call the criminals to testify. Moreover, the truth could now be told from all sides of the conflict. Such mechanisms are part of transitional justice reform. We must recognize that a change in the direction of a society does not mean starting from scratch, but that the past leaves a special imprint on the future.”

“We require faith in public order, and faith in the ability and the duty of citizens to influence the life of their society through conscious, responsible actions. This has been destroyed but must be restored, because without this no institutions, no laws, and no society can function.”

The Triumph of Death by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“The plan is not to reform. It is to perpetuate the corporate pillage. This pillage, more and more onerous for the global population, necessitates a new totalitarianism, one where the billionaire class lives in opulence, workers are serfs, rights such as privacy and due process are abolished, Big Brother watches us all the time, war is the chief business of the state, dissent is criminalized and those displaced by conflicts and climate breakdown are barred entry into the climate fortresses in the global north.”

“Workers, whether in the vast sweatshops in China or the decayed ruins of the rust belt, struggle on subsistence wages without job protection or unions. They are cursed by trade deals, deindustrialization, austerity, rising interest rates and rising prices.”

“Prices are not rising because of wages. They are rising because of supply shortages and price gouging by corporations and oil conglomerates. US corporations posted their biggest profit growth in decades by raising prices during the pandemic. Corporate pretax profits rose last year by 25 percent to $2.81 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s the largest annual increase since 1976, according to the Federal Reserve. When taxes are included, last year’s corporate profit rose to 37 percent, more than any other time since the Fed began tracking profits in 1948.”

“Antitrust laws and breaking up monopolies would ease the strain of inflation and lower prices. Rationing would break inflation. So would a wage-price freeze.”

“[…] the billionaire class is not about to impose measures that diminish their profits. They will keep their monopolies. They will keep their grip on what were once public assets. The message from the billionaire class is this: the economy is run for our benefit, not yours.”

“The rage of the betrayed is articulated by imbecilic demagogues vomited up from the social and political swamp. Corporations and the billionaire class will continue to exploit, but under a cruder and crueler authoritarianism. The social, political, economic, and environmental breakdown will accelerate.”

“Truth and lies will be indistinguishable. The vulnerable will be cast aside, blamed for their own misery, as well as ours. Those who resist will be criminals. Mass death will sweep across the planet. This is the world our children will inherit unless those who control us are wrenched from power.”

Robbed by Law Enforcement by John Kiriakou (Scheer Post)

“The Supreme Court, unfortunately, has ruled that civil asset forfeiture is perfectly legal. But there have been some lower court decisions and executive branch actions that could force Congress to address the issue, which is wildly unpopular among voters and rife with police abuse.”

How? How is that legal? I’m dying to know.

The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages by Michael Hudson (Scheer Post)

“[…] public discussion of today’s U.S. inflation is framed in a way that avoids blaming the 8.2 percent rise in consumer prices on the Biden Administration’s New Cold War sanctions on Russian oil, gas and agriculture, or on oil companies and other sectors using these sanctions as an excuse to charge monopoly prices as if America has not continued to buy Russian diesel oil, as if fracking has not picked up and as if corn is not being turned into biofuel.”

“The decline got underway with President Obama’s eviction of nearly ten million victims of junk mortgages, mainly black and Hispanic debtors. That was the Democratic Party’s alternative to writing down fraudulent mortgage loans to realistic market prices, and reducing their carrying charges to bring them in line with market rental values. The indebted victims of this massive bank fraud were made to suffer, so that Obama’s Wall Street sponsors could keep their predatory gains and indeed, receive massive bailouts.”

“Lowering the discount rate to only about 0.1 percent enabled the banking system to make a bonanza of gains by making mortgage loans at around 3.50 percent. And despite the stock market’s plunge of over 20 percent from nearly 36,000 to under 30,000 on June 17, America’s wealthiest One Percent, and indeed the top 10 Percent, have vastly increased their wealth in stocks, while the bond market has had the largest boom in history.”

“The Biden Administration is trying to blame today’s inflation and related distortions on Putin, even using the term “Putin inflation.” The mainstream media follow suit in not explaining to their audience that Western sanctions blocking Russian energy and food exports will cause a food and energy crisis for many countries this summer and autumn. And indeed, beyond: Biden’s military and State Department officers warn that the fight against Russia is just the first step in their war against China’s non-neoliberal economy, and may last twenty years.”

“The economy cannot recover as long as today’s debt overhead is left in place. Debt service, housing costs, privatized medical care, student debt and a decaying infrastructure have made the U.S. economy uncompetitive. There is no way to restore its economic viability without reversing these neoliberal policies. But there is little “reality economics” at hand to provide an alternative to the class war inherent in neoliberalism’s belief that the economy and living standards can prosper by purely financial means, by debt leveraging and corporate monopoly rent extraction while the United States has made its manufacturing uncompetitive – seemingly irreversibly.”

“The [Democratic] Party’s identity politics address almost every identity except that of wage-earners and debtors. That does not look like a platform that can succeed.”

Blue and Red Do Have Something in Common. They’ve Both Been Ripped Off, Repeatedly by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

It’s funny that almost no-one every cites the entire quotation—just the last line.

“The last two years are really just the same old rehashed bubble economics heist narrative. A gang of insiders talks up a new asset class, and aided by a titillating infusion of institutional money and/or Federal Reserve largess, the public is enticed to jump in, perhaps also inspired by the stick of punitive savings rates. This time around, in place of Alan Greenspan telling people to hop into the counter-intuitive “new paradigm” of growth without inflation (during the Internet bubble), or recommending people use their home equity savings as ATM machines (in the heat of the wealth-eating mortgage Ponzi), we saw the Yellens and Powells of the world telling us inflation was “transitory.” Come on in, the water’s great! And jump in people did.”

“That means the Fed dumped roughly $4.7 trillion in printed money into the economy in the last two years, creating the illusion of a boom: Where did that $4.7 trillion go? Virtually across the economic spectrum, we watched people at the top of the income distribution magically achieve personal net worth increases that bore eerie resemblances to the near-doubling of the size of the Fed’s holdings.”

“Bailout servicers also made out. Banks reported a record $297 billion in profits in 2021, following a 2020 that saw those same institutions smash records for underwriting fees, a direct consequence of underwriting vast amounts of bailout lending in the form of bond issues. Bank after major bank in 2020 and 2021 either reported doing record business, or having their best years since 2009, which by an extraordinary coincidence happened to be the last time the Fed and the Treasury flooded the system with rescue cash.”

“(Such stories, in which chin-scratching business leaders warn of disaster ahead if the Fed stops handing them risk-free billions, have become a dependable news genre).”

“[…] the recent developments mean someone, or a bunch of someones, suffered nearly $2 trillion in losses in a very short time. Who got out, and who took a beating?”

“When companies buy back their own stock, they retire the shares, raising the stock’s value overall. The maneuver pays off top shareholders, who again by extraordinary coincidence are often the very executives approving the buybacks, while investing vast sums not in growing the firm or creating jobs, but in increasing the worth of the stock shares often used as compensation. During the pandemic, we had example after example of firms rushing into buyback plans the instant they got splashed by the COVID cash waterfall.”

“The moment the Fed slams on the brakes and accelerates any program of “quantitative tightening,” the pain will spread, as it always does, to the general population. Asset values will drop, pension funds will take it in the face, and all the things that we saw happen to innocent bystanders after 2008 will recur. Also just like 2008, the moment everything crashes, the predators left with cash on hand will scour the landscape, look for “babies thrown out with the bathwater,” as one finance-sector friend of mine put it, and go on a buying spree, again, as they did with mortgages after 2008. “That’s when they make the real money,””

“The Democrats, in a decision that lays bare their admirable consistency in underestimating the public’s intelligence, are trying to pass off the ridiculous notion that inflation and other market disruptions are the fault of Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and not due to the $4.7 trillion in central bank subsidies that 1%-ers have been gulping like Jell-o shots for over two years now.”

“The new emphasis will be on making sure culture-war issues prevent the losers in this latest bubble — be they millennial day-traders who became collateral damage to the crypto crash, or inner-city wage earners forced to watch their purchasing power wiped out via inflation — from realizing they may have shared antagonists in seats of financial power.”

“Really we don’t live in two Americas but one, whose obvious problem is that too many of its citizens have too much in common, having been repeatedly ripped off, in the same types of scams, by the same people, for decades. Sooner or later, the public will figure it out, and come running toward Washington all at once, pitchforks drawn. All the Bidens of the world can hope for is that that day comes later. As the “Putin price hikes” idiocy shows, they’re running out of ways to stall the inevitable.”

The End Of The World Is Just Beginning For Shipping by John Konrad (gCaptain)

“The world needed bigger ships that provided economies of scale and it needed to cut costs in other ways including slow steaming which significantly reduces fuel costs and carbon emissions but lengthens the amount of time a ship spends in hostile waters. US Naval protection eliminated hostilities which enabled companies to slow-steam an increasingly large amount of valuable cargo through historically dangerous waters. With naval protection, insurance companies could underwrite the risk at rock-bottom prices.”

“America has not only paid Trillions of taxpayer dollars over the decades to secure world trade but – as I have stated in my own words, above – the US, with the help of the US Maritime Administration – has also systematically dismantled its own maritime interests in the process.”

Or to build an empire.. Depends on how you look at it.

“You may not agree with Zeihan’s premise even after reading the book – in my experience European shipping leaders tend to scoff at any suggestions of American exceptionalism in the maritime domain regardless of how factually accurate it is”

The Fantasy of Fanaticism by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“But the reduced capability means that Ukraine is only able to fire some 4,000-to-5,000 artillery rounds per day, while Russia responds with more than 50,000. This 10-fold disparity in firepower has proven to be one of the most decisive factors when it comes to the war in Ukraine, enabling Russia to destroy Ukrainian defensive positions with minimal risk to its own ground forces.”

“In recognition of this reality, NATO Secretary General Jen Stoltenberg announced that Ukraine will more than likely have to make territorial concessions to Russia as part of any potential peace agreement […]”

He knew this was coming all along. They prolonged the conflict to make money. Thousands and thousands of dead and grievously wounded soldiers later, they’re finally conceding what was obvious from the beginning.

“First, Ukraine is requesting 1,000 artillery pieces and 300 multiple-launch rocket systems, more than the entire active-duty inventory of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps combined. Ukraine is also requesting 500 main battle tanks — more than the combined inventories of Germany and the United Kingdom.

“In short, to keep Ukraine competitive on the battlefield, NATO is being asked to strip its own defenses down to literally zero.”

“The question now is how much time the West can buy Ukraine, and at what cost, in a futile effort to discover Russia’s pain threshold in order to bring the conflict to an end in a manner that reflects anything but the current path toward unconditional surrender.”

Europe Dumps Its Climate Commitments After Facing Shortage of Russian Gas by Abdul Rahman (Scheer Post)

“While announcing the decision to shift to coal-fired power plants to produce the required electricity to meet its needs, Germany’s Economy Minister Robert Habeck said on Sunday that “to reduce gas consumption, less gas must be used to generate electricity. Coal-fired power plants will have to be used more instead.” He added that this was a bitter but necessary solution.”

Habeck is from the Green Party. Chapeau. “Necessary” because cooperation and compromise is not an option. Instead, Europe will abandon all climate-change plans—which it never wanted to do anyway—and go to an early grave, self-satisfied with the knowledge that they can blame Russia for it all. They don’t care if the world ends; they just want to think that they won’t be blamed for it. The path of least resistance was always to capitulate to the German coal industry; Putin provided them all the perfect excuse. Their only problem is figuring out how to look reluctant instead of gleeful.

“These decisions have raised serious concerns about the future of the global climate campaign. Several commentators have pointed out Europe’s hypocrisy as it keeps on suggesting to others, mostly third world countries, to shift away from fossil fuel often at the cost of their economic development, while refusing to make similar compromises and rushing to fossil fuels when hit by an energy shortage.”

Supreme Court to Progressives: Wake Up by Ted Rall

“When a majority of voters arrive at a societal consensus on an issue like those mentioned above, a functional political system responds with a corresponding law negotiated and passed by a legislature. The U.S., however, is too riddled with partisan dysfunction and corrupted by corporate lobbyists to effectively address advances in culture and technology. Thus Congress can’t or won’t accommodate the 7 out of 10 Americans who want a European-style national healthcare system and higher taxes on the rich or the 56% who want to slash Pentagon spending.

“Because Congress is impotent, the highest court of the judicial branch has been stepping in to legislate from the bench rather than limit itself to its intended role as arbiter of conflicts between laws and the constitution.”

That last part is not true. The supreme court rules according to the laws on the books. It does not enact new law. That’s why Roe fell—because there was no law supporting it. If the court had upheld it—and, indeed, when it originally passed it—that would have been “legislat[ing] from the bench”. Congress is dysfunctional. This is 100% the fault of the Congress, as he stated above.

“Or pro-choicers can bemoan the HandmaidTale-ification of America, attend one or two photogenic parades on a conveniently-scheduled Sunday afternoon and recite ridiculous fantasies about packing the Supreme Court (you’d need a 60-vote supermajority) or hoping that its conservative members die under Democratic rule. Meanwhile, Southern women will have to drive a thousand miles to terminate a pregnancy

“Roe was unsustainable. The liberal court was never going to last. Now that the bubble has burst, don’t whine. It’s time to organize.”

Science & Nature

The Computer Scientist Who Parlays Failures Into Breakthroughs by Mordechai Rorvig (Quanta)

“In my office at MIT I had two couches. That meant Shang-Hua and I could both work — like, literally just spend all day lying down thinking about something, and when you have an idea, get up and talk about it. He was very happy to spend a lot of time thinking about things and talking about problems. Like me, he was happy to work on absurdly hard problems that we probably wouldn’t solve. Failure was the standard result of anything that we worked on, even if we were working on it for years. But that was OK.”

Philosophy & Sociology

No Minds Without Other Minds by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“Of course the machine says it’s sentient; that’s what it was built to do. It bullshits in other ways, too, constantly and verifiably — claiming to have sat in a classroom, and so on (Lemoine’s transcript is in fact quite illuminating as regards LaMDA’s own account of its habit of making stuff up). It is literally a bullshit machine, as its function is to sound convincingly like something it is not.”

And all of these fools debate its “sentience” without having read a single word of what has been discussed for millennia about what the word even means.

“Through the magic of several different technologies —some ancient, such as writing, and some more recent, such as video editing and AI—, you can pretty much make anything say anything. You could, if you wanted to, make up a semiotic system in which Koko giving you the finger stands for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, and every time she unfolds it in thy face thou couldst imagine that she is comparing thee to a summer’s day. But that would be silly.”

It is very silly. That sounds like a Monty Python script, actually.

“In particular, early humans became increasingly adept at modelling other humans’ minds, an ability which relies on a deeper “theory of mind”, that is, an ability to think about another person’s thinking about something.”

“Nor is it much of a leap, in turn, from here to the forces that cause a highway patrolman to strut cockily from his car to yours on the side of the road, as Charles Taylor vividly describes in his Sources of the Self (1989), embodying as best he can the idea in his mind of what a highway patrolman ought to be. It is just this sort of performance, as exemplified not by a cop but by a waiter, that Jean-Paul Sartre sees as the pinnacle of inauthenticity in his Being and Nothingness (1944). Yet it is hard even to begin to comprehend what sort of authentic self is left over once all this work of channeling of others is subtracted.”

“Not only are octopuses peculiar in that their higher cognitive abilities seem to be distributed throughout their entire bodies rather than being located within the centralised treasury of the brain; they are also exceptional in that unlike most other intelligent species they are both very short-lived (two to five years), and generally very solitary. Why get so smart at all, one wonders, only to spend the brief glimmer of your life alone?”

Maybe they think and experience more more quickly than we do and, thus, live long lives, at least from their viewpoint.

“Pain is bad intrinsically, for the utilitarians, even if it is only a flash of experience in a being that has barely any episodic memory or any ability at all to regret the curtailment of its future thriving.”

“If this is correct, then it seems that the “Fake it till you make it” strategy simply cannot work — no amount of improved modelling of consciousness in an artificial system is going to cross over into actual consciousness, if actual consciousness is dependent on sensation grounded in the activity of a nervous system.”

“Lemoine takes conversation-like machine output to be relevant to assessing LaMDA’s sentience/consciousness (no distinction between the two is made), while not noticing that you can get effectively the same “output”, if much less dazzling, from words written on paper. The fish does not come close to simulating communicative speech, and yet most of us would still hold it up as a vastly more promising candidate for sentience than the piece of paper. This shows, at the very least, that facility in “messaging”, which we are getting very good at training machines to do, cannot possibly be the only criterion, nor does it seem to be the best criterion, for identifying the undifferentiated capacity of sentience/consciousness.”

“I am inclined to suspect that this is hard for me because the thing I am trying to imagine cannot exist. Just as there can be no consciousness, but only sentience, where the sensory inputs are not integrated into a unified self, correlatively it seems to me that wherever there is consciousness there must be sentience, since this is the stuff that, in getting integrated, makes the integration possible at all.”

“If I remain mostly skeptical, even as I have come around to finding the social-mind hypothesis compelling, this is because it seems to me that affective connections must have played a role in the evolution of our social cognition, thus implicating not just neurons, but hormones, and breath, and a good bit of skin-to-skin contact. The arms race of rapid encephalization, in which early humans got better and better at finishing their potential mate’s sentences, surely would not have happened if they had not been hoping, by virtue of this skill, to get laid.”

“I think most speculation about the imminent emergence of machine consciousness is deeply sloppy and irresponsible. I agree with Daniel Dennett that for the most part we are just setting ourselves up to get duped — particularly when we couple natural-language AI’s with Max Headroom-like heads and arms and android bodies, and allow our own evolved systems for experiencing affective attachment, even where we would otherwise not be inclined to imagine that there is any sort of ghost in the machine, to be played like the strings of a maudlin violin.”

“By contrast any attempt to imagine what it would be like to be LaMDA, or an uploaded consciousness such as DigiDave (to invoke a thought experiment from David Chalmers), seems to me to produce only a false idea, like the idea that George Berkeley said we could not in fact have of the heat of the sun — all we really think of when we try to come up with it is the heat of, say, the stove, whose heat is in fact so different from that of the sun that we might as well be thinking of something cold.”

Technology

GitHub Copilot and open source laundering by Drew DeVault

“Any approach which lowers this figure is thus very desirable, even if the cost is making ethical compromises. With Amazon, it takes the form of gig economy exploitation. With GitHub, it takes the form of disregarding the terms of free software licenses. In the process, they built a tool which facilitates the large-scale laundering of free software into non-free software by their customers, who GitHub offers plausible deniability through an inscrutable algorithm.”

“The free software community is no stranger to the difficulties in enforcing compliance with these obligations, which some groups view as too onerous. But as onerous as one may view these obligations to be, one is nevertheless required to comply with them. If you believe that the force of copyright should protect your proprietary software, then you must agree that it equally protects open source works, despite the inconvenience or cost associated with this truth.”

“Essentially, the argument comes down to whether or not the model constitutes a derivative work of its inputs. Microsoft argues that it does not. However, these licenses are not specific regarding the means of derivation; the classic approach of copying and pasting from one project to another need not be the only means for these terms to apply. The model exists as the result of applying an algorithm to these inputs, and thus the model itself is a derivative work of its inputs. The model, then used to create new programs, forwards its obligations to those works.”

“If Microsoft’s argument holds, then indeed the only thing which is necessary to legally circumvent a free software license is to teach a machine learning algorithm to regurgitate a function you want to use.”

“To GitHub: this is your Oracle v Google moment. You’ve invested in building a platform on top of which the open source revolution was built, and leveraging this platform for this move is a deep betrayal of the community’s trust. The law applies to you, and banking on the fact that the decentralized open source community will not be able to mount an effective legal challenge to your $7.5B Microsoft war chest does not change this.”

“[…] if it occurs to you that you don’t actually pay for GitHub, then you may want to take a moment to consider if the incentives created by that relationship explain this development and may lead to more unfavorable outcomes for you in the future.”

“You may also be tempted to solve this problem by changing your software licenses to prohibit this behavior. I’ll say upfront that according to Microsoft’s interpretation of the situation (invoking fair use), it doesn’t matter to them which license you use: they’ll use your code regardless.”

“I would update your licenses to clarify that incorporating the code into a machine learning model is considered a form of derived work, and that your license terms apply to the model and any works produced with that model.”

“[footnote] Typically exploitative labor from low-development countries which the tech industry often pretends isn’t a hair’s breadth away from slavery.”

Introducing Tailscale SSH by Brad Fitzpatrick, Maisem Ali, Maya Kaczorowski and Ross Zurowski (tailscale)

“Recall how Tailscale works: Connections between your devices in your private tailnet are already automatically authenticated and encrypted using WireGuard. Tailscale’s coordination server distributes the public node key of your device to the peers in your network that it’s allowed to communicate with. This node key is your device’s identity: It’s what’s used to authenticate your device and encrypt connections to or from the device.”

Programming

The Grug Brained Developer: A layman’s guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained by Grug

“[…] early on in project everything very abstract and like water: very little solid holds for grug’s struggling brain to hang on to. take time to develop “shape” of system and learn what even doing. grug try not to factor in early part of project and then, at some point, good cut-points emerge from code base good cut point has narrow interface with rest of system: small number of functions or abstractions that hide complexity demon internally, like trapped in crystal”

“grug try watch patiently as cut points emerge from code and slowly refactor, with code base taking shape over time along with experience. no hard/ fast rule for this: grug know cut point when grug see cut point, just take time to build skill in seeing, patience sometimes grug go too early and get abstractions wrong, so grug bias towards waiting big brain developers often not like this at all and invent many abstractions start of project grug tempted to reach for club and yell “big brain no maintain code! big brain move on next architecture committee leave code for grug deal with!””

“remember! big brain have big brain! need only be harness for good and not in service of spirit complexity demon on accident, many times seen”

“(best grug brain able to herd multiple big brain in right direction and produce many complexity demon trap crystals, large shiney rock pile!)”

“grug instead prefer write most tests after prototype phase, when code has begun firm up but, note well: grug must here be very disciplined! easy grug to move on and not write tests because “work on grugs machine”! this very, very bad: no guarantee work on other machine and no guarantee work on grug machine in future, many times”

“in-between tests, grug hear shaman call “integration tests” sometime often with sour look on face. but grug say integration test sweet spot according to grug: high level enough test correctness of system, low level enough, with good debugger, easy to see what break”

“however, grug note that many times in career “refactors” go horribly off rails and end up causing more harm than good grug not sure exactly why some refactors work well, some fail, but grug notice that larger refactor, more likely failure appear to be so grug try to keep refactors relatively small and not be “too far out from shore” during refactor. ideally system work entire time and each step of finish before other begin. end-to-end tests are life saver here, but often very hard understand why broke… such is refactor life.”

Chesterton’s Fence:

“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” many older grug learn this lesson well not start tearing code out willy nilly, no matter how ugly look”

“generics especially dangerous here, grug try limit generics to container classes for most part where most value add”

“grug hear screams from young grugs at horror of many line of code and pointless variable and grug prepare defend self with club”

“grug still catch grug writing code like first example and often regret, so grug not judge young grug”

“grug warn closures like salt, type systems and generics: small amount go long way, but easy spoil things too much use give heart attack”

“javascript developers call very special complexity demon spirit in javascript “callback hell” because too much closure used by javascript libraries very sad but also javascript developer get what deserved lets be frank”

“if “request” span multiple machine in cloud infrastructure, include request ID in all so logs can be grouped”

It’s called a correlation id, grug.

“[…] now you have two complexity demon spirit lairs and, what is worse, front end complexity demon spirit even more powerful and have deep spiritual hold on entire front end industry as far as grug can tell”

I love that expression: “complexity demon spirit lairs”.

“react better for job, but also you become alcolyte of complexity demon whether you like or not, sorry is life”

“grug make softwares of much work and moderate open source success, and yet grug himself often feel not any idea what doing! very often! fear make mistake break everyone code and disappoint other grugs! is maybe nature of programming for most and be ok with is best, nobody imposter if everybody imposter any young grug read this far probably do fine in program career even if frustrations and worry is always to be there, sorry”

“Don’t Mock What You Don’t Own” in 5 Minutes by Hynek Schlawack

“We’ll follow Mr. Lampson’s advice and add a very thin layer around the HTTP library, which becomes the façade between your clean code and the messy outside world. Layers like this are notoriously difficult to test 3, so they should be kept cyclomatically as simple as possible: go easy on conditionals and loops, otherwise you just kick the testing can one layer down and win nothing.”

“Every rule and principle can be broken once you’ve fully understood its purpose. For example if an object already does have an idiomatic API, it’s probably not worth wrapping in an identical façade, just so it belongs to you.”

“Sometimes it’s also easy enough to fake actual HTTP responses by running your own in-process HTTP server within the tests – but I prefer to isolate these kinds of tests when testing the thin outer layer. It also gets more complicated once you have to interact with an opaque SOAP servers or CLI utilities.”

This is true because you probably need the integration test. If you get problems interacting with the server, those are the hardest to debug outside of tests. You really want to verify the JSON or HTML that is being returned and not just the controller method.