I love the references to Jacques Ellul's ideas, which I think are interesting to reflect on in an AI age. It helps make clear that what is fundamentally at stake in much technological "progress" is an (often only tacitly acknowledged) sublimation of "efficiency" to the place of highest value.
What's fascinating is that this value elevation seems to have gone largely unchallenged, despite being in essence an arbitrary value choice. Other choices are possible. And, I hope, still are possible, despite what the bigcorps declare must be the case in order to maximize shareholder returns.
I found myself frustrated with Node’s child_process library. Some great primitives but a lot of boilerplate to do simple tasks like return a Promise when a subprocess is known to have started. So I built teen_process as a wrapper with a nicer async interface, helpful defaults, and all around cleaner ways of doing subprocess management with Node. https://github.com/appium/node-teen_process
(NB: once the project was determined to be useful we moved it to the Appium org and it has seen lots of contributions from others, not just me)
Thanks for your thoughts. The point of my article wasn't to deny that there are any counterexamples to my overarching theme. No argument involving society is going to be free of counterexamples.
I disagree with some things you've said here but will just say 2 things:
1. I'm grateful you give everyone an equal chance. I thought I did too until I uncovered what I now believe to be an ingrained sort of bias. If you're free from that, more power to you! Far be it from me to tell you who you are.
2. I do believe that racism is one of the hidden engines of society, and inhabits each of us more than we know for that reason. That's why I was proposing to move the dialogue from an existential proof of racism to a question of how exactly it has shaped us. It's not (or doesn't feel like) "pseudoempathy" as another commenter put it. It feels like moving past denial to a more productive mode of engagement with this gnarled issue.
I'm surprised there's yet another JS implementation of the webdriver protocol. I wonder what was lacking in the existing frameworks from the author's perspective?
+1 on appium support (disclaimer: I'm an appium contributor). Shouldn't be too hard for them to add since it supports real devices. Opens up the door to Selenium library support and compatibility, which would be a huge win IMO.
(disclaimer: I'm an appium committer) While Frank and Appium provide a similar set of solutions to a similar problem, we're driven by slightly different philosophies. Two of Appium's core tenets are (1) you shouldn't have to modify your source code or add 3rd-party libraries to test, and (2) it's better to leverage existing successful "driver" protocols. To that end, we've designed things so that all of the interaction takes place between Appium and your un-modified app, whereas Frank requires compiling in its own libraries for testing. Likewise, we opted to make Appium a Selenium WebDriver-compatible server, so that the thousands of developers who are already familiar with using their favorite WebDriver library can jump in and start writing tests without having to wrap their heads around a new automation model. Frank is an extremely impressive piece of technology, but we felt the need for an approach born out of a different philosophy.
The application is in some sense basically a wrapper around a VNC connection. It's likely that the performance issues you're seeing are due to VNC latency rather than the power of the virtual machines themselves or the hardware they run on (which is pretty beefy). But your point is well made: given this architecture you can't really watch video or do things that require high framerates.
I was part of the team that built this and I can say from extensive use that it does work. It doesn't do everything that I'd love for it to do (for example, we're still working on supporting higher screen resolutions), but it's a really solid start. Please do check it out, and let us know what would make it more awesome!
I'm doing a machine-learning project for my company (Sauce Labs) and decided to give Ramp a try. Despite some effort put into understanding the API and digging into code to ensure I was passing in all the right kinds of parameters when I hit random errors, I think it was worth it. I was able to test and compare 20 different machine learning algorithms and even more feature sets really easily. I'd definitely recommend checking it out!