They would use those 4 magic words in aviation: "I'm declaring an emergency"

I get that they need to try to do this.

However, it seems they learned nothing from the Napster/mp3 era.

The genie is out of the bottle. Movie industry will follow suit to try and prevent script writing in "the style of <insert director here>"

Wow. As someone that has written a fair amount of VBA in the past, this is a game changer.

Impressive feat of integration and I hope you're rewarded for all your efforts.

Clearly a passion project!

2013? That’s almost a decade ago.

Probably due to that provocative movie on cable TV by the same name.

It had that girl from the bus.

That movie showed ip addresses with fields greater than 255!

And the hottest band on the internet.

I love the Seinfeld joke!

The fact that you recognize this is a great first step.

It’s not abnormal to have a negative mindset. This goes back to our caveman days of having to think about the worst case scenario for everything since it was literally life or death.

I suffer from a negative mindset as well, and have found that therapy has been useful. Some things that worked for me:

As soon as you wake up, think or write down three things you’re grateful for. I found this very difficult at first, but it can be something simple: the sun is shining today

Think/write down 2-3 things that you will work on today to see the positive in - there’s usually a silver lining there, but you have to look at it hard, and honestly

Don’t watch the news. There’s never anything good there.

Cut back on social media. I went into a deep depression in 2016 and it was fueled by Twitter. I deleted every social media account I had, even LinkedIn. In fact, this HN account is the only thing o have now, and I mostly lurk.

Remind yourself that you can’t control other people - only yourself. Everyone suffers. Everyone can make bad mistakes and bad choices that may impact you. That’s a reflection on them, not you, so don’t let their choices and consequences live rent free in your head. You control you - that’s the best you can do.

Get adequate rest and exercise. It’s cliche, but those two things are the BIGGEST contributor to a healthier mindset.

Journal - writing stuff down helps me process negative thoughts and emotions. It can be cathartic. You may go through phases of wanting to write everything, and then nothing, and that’s ok.

Talk to a therapist. There’s no shame in this and it can help you understand where your negativity comes from and how you can change it.

Hope this helps. From another sufferer who’s still working on it himself.

Would it though? We haven’t had this tech for that long.

Has it made things better or worse when everything, including non-priorities, can be a distraction.

A few years ago, my city provided all residents with low flow showerheads - for “free”. They were even delivered directly to homes.

They included literature around reducing consumption and the importance of that for sustainability.

Enough residents installed these that it led to a city budget deficit, since water consumption went way down, and they therefore generated less revenue.

Their answer to this? Raise water prices.

It really is weird. We work hard to produce a lot of water and then we expect there to be a buyer for the water, simply because we worked hard for it.

I'd say reducing water usage was a good thing even if it lead to higher prices but unless the population of that city is growing it clearly is a waste of potential to have all that infrastructure sit partially idle.

Wasn't there anything else they could raise prices on? Something else with negative externalities?

Some that come to mind are garbage collection (our town reduced waste bin sizes) and parking costs.

At least were I live, raising parking costs is a surefire way not to get elected next time.

Saving water is a good outcome.

It would have been nice if the reward for doing so was less cost, since that was one of the big marketing messages of the campaign.

Instead they opted to give us less for more - perhaps that was the intention all along.

Reducing net water usage by a city == good thing

Raising taxes on citizenry because they're using less resources == bad thing worthy of riots

We wouldn’t make applications. Rather we’d deliver components which could interoperate via a binary contract.

Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application.

I suppose that pieces of this became true with the proliferation and adoption of open source. Rather than a binary protocol, HTTP came out on top.

SharePoint brought us WebParts which tried to put the power in the hands of business users, but it turned out they were still too technical and not flexible enough.

I don’t see the role of software developer/engineer going away anytime soon.

> Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application.

I’ve seen this with tools like Zapier. I know many non-technical people that put together amazing workflows just piecing things together with webhooks and similar tools.

> components which could interoperate via a binary contract

COM still underlies an abhorrent amount of the Windows architecture.

In the 90's COM didn't make a lot of sense to me because I never needed it. Then, around 2001, I needed it to solve some problems and I finally invested the time to figure it out. It's actually pretty neat as long as it isn't in your web browser (ActiveX).

Around that time I too thought I was seeing the future - component-based development that's language and platform agnostic.

COM was pretty neat indeed

UWP/WinRT is basically an improved COM, it never went away, rather took over most of the modern Windows APIs since XP.

Pity that WinDev keeps producing the same tools as back in MDIL 1.0 days though, the only good tool C++/CX, got killed by them.

At least it's possible to write COM in a measurable time. I did it in C++ although that was a pain. It became much easier in .NET.

CORBA - I did not even finish reading "Introduction to CORBA". A book of 500+ pages.

> We wouldn’t make applications. Rather we’d deliver components which could interoperate via a binary contract. Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application.

This is how .net got it's crappy generic name. Back in it's early days it (and SOAP) was sold as the glue that would stitch all this together, just add a web reference and you'd have all this functionality in your project. It was incredibly disappointing to get through all this marketing and eventually realize it was just an MS version of java. Enterprise java beans, CORBA, COM and probably some others were also efforts in this direction. These days it's REST and microservices.

There was also OLE before ActiveX/COM and later DCOM. But the DLL’s were always a constant.

Bret Victor alluded to these pieces in his digs on APIs:

https://vimeo.com/71278954

Wow, thanks for sharing that!

Hearing him name drop terms like markup language, stylesheets and internet is mind blowing. If only the promise of “no delay in response” had been achieved :-)

> Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application.

That's basically what Salesforce is.

This is really interesting and reflected in some things like dreamweaver and Oracle Apex.

I can actually see some of this happening in the crypto space. Things like MetaMask and now chainlink combining into some form of low code smart contract app tool. As you say though even in this scenario devs don’t go away.

Yes, it's very profitable for devs because you can just steal everyone's money, since the smart contract language was invented by people who did zero reading about safe program design.

So just like normal payment processing code then.

Except half the time the bank is also a scam and there's no legal recourse.

sounds like a beefed up unix philosophy, I think command pipes in the shell gave us something very similar to this idea way back, except that it doesn't really lend itself to complex programs like I think you're suggesting

Thanks for helping to restore my faith in humanity.