A delayed response doesn’t mean it’s not automated, just that it wasn’t built to not feel automated.
I worked on an automated reply system like this previously and we had intentional delays with randomness as well as variance in our responses to make it “feel more human”.
Fixnum#times isn’t a great example, I only used it since the parent used it to illustrate their confusion and quite frankly a concrete useful example is to complex for this format.
ActiveRecord has changed a lot over the years, but as an example in the original ActiveRecord you used dynamic finders. None of the finder methods existed initially, but if you passed a message to an active record object for a non existent method rather than fail it would determine if that should be a method and then it would build and persist a method to the process for future calls.
It allows for some really interesting and powerful applications in horizontally scaling as well.
It’s not just about practicality. Ruby is using message passing, not method calling. This is fundamentally different and a bit foreign to the larger community. Then ruby layers syntactic sugar on top that hides this.
Behind the scenes everything is a message passed using __send__ and you can do this directly as well, but you generally don’t.
So when you write
5.times { puts "Hello" }
It’s sort of expected by the average programmer that you are telling 5 to call the times method and expect it to exist and do what it’s told.
In reality you have indirectly sent a message that looks like
5.__send__(:times) { puts "Hello" }
What we are really doing is sending a message to 5 (the receiver) and giving it the opportunity to decide how to respond. This is where method_missing comes in to allow responding in a custom fashion regardless if a method was explicitly defined.
So you’re not telling 5 to call the method times, rather you are asking, “Hey 5, do you know how to handle the message times?”
These are fundamentally different things. This is actually super important and honestly hard to really grok _especially_ in ruby because of the syntactic sugar. I came from a C/C++ background originally, then Java and then moved to Ruby. After a few years I thought I understood this difference, but honestly it wasn’t until I spent a couple years using Objective-C where message passing is happening much more explicitly that I was able to truly understand the difference in a way that it became intuitive.
I think you’re right, but I also suspect that doesn’t clear up anything for most people as in my experience they generally don’t grok the difference unless they’ve already spent a significant amount of time in something like smalltalk or Objective-C
No, they would know exactly what they know now. Employers already report your earnings to both the federal and state IRS agencies and pay your withholdings automatically adjusted for your dependencies. So a simple form that says you made X and claimed Y dependencies. Click submit to confirm…
That would be simple enough for most people (1 job, 1 home, maybe some kids) and it doesn’t require the government to know anything additional.
In that most common scenario no tax accounting service should be needed. Honestly a 1040 isn’t that complicated in that scenario either, but is still too difficult for a good number of people and it’s just unnecessary.
Sam Altman made a post on Reddit in 2023 implying OpenAI had achieved AGI internally. Later he “clarified” it was a joke, however there was some speculation that he didn’t understand what AGI actually meant at the time.
In both cases it depends on the area of the state and how populous. Far southern Iowa near Whatcheer for example is mostly gravel with paved roads only in the cities and major highways, but by contrast nearly the entire corridor area is well paved. Same for most of the Boone area.
Wisconsin is no different in that. Most of Jackson, Levis, BRF, and that whole area is gravel except for major highways and in town. Pretty poorly maintained gravel at that.
The roads do seem disorganized and wandering, but much of that is because the roads are built wherever they won’t flood since we’re nothing but marshes, wetland, lakes, rivers and ponds
We have 100s of queues processing millions of jobs in sidekiq queues at any given time.
These are data and compute heavy workloads that take anywhere from minutes to hours for a request to be completed, but the UI takes this into account.
Users submit a request and then continue onto whatever is the next thing they intend to do and then they can subscribe to various async notification channels.
It’s not the right choice for everything, but it’s the right choice for something’s.
Yes, yes, yes, everyone knows about Shopify and no that’s not the multi billion dollar monolith shop I’m referring to, but we definitely have taken some inspiration from their excellent practices. We also brought in a lot of best in breed from Microsoft and Amazon.
Bottom line is it’s about the talent and the discipline. At the end of the day it’s not bad languages that are the problem it’s bad engineers.
Hard disagree. I work on one of the largest Rails codebases out there. Millions of lines of code running in a monolith. I have learned more in this shop about scaling, observability, mature system designs, zero downtime upgrades, deploys, etc…
I been in this field for almost 30 years and have worked with whatever tech the job required. Still I learned more at a Rails shop with more than 200 engineers all working in the same monolith shipping to production multiple times every day.
I agree robots breakdown a lot, however if you think robots are more expensive to maintain you may want to take a look at the cost of American medical costs.
Insider trading from congress, the senate, and the offices of the president is nothing new. There is a reason people have been tracking and mimicking Pelosi's trades for years.
Equity for pre-IPO companies is often tied to an expiration. If there is no qualifying liquidity event before the expiration then your equity disappears unless the company takes action to reissue your equity. That sometimes happens for people who are still employed with the company, but almost never for former employees.
Most likely he is doing it for economic reasons. My preferred checker is an elderly woman that is slow, but very affable and likes to chat when there is no line.
Despite her positive attitude, she is working because social security isn't enough and grocery workers also get an employee discount.
Software "design space is high dimensional" is true in that storage, latencies, processors, memory we just keep growing and growing. Given that, software should be faster and better than ever because the dimension where software lives has gotten exponentially larger and more performant. Rather than use that like responsible engineers we all started writing bloatware because it was easy and we could get away with it.
Engineering with constraints builds discipline. Maybe we are lacking as engineers in software because the constraint bar just continues to raise.
I worked on an automated reply system like this previously and we had intentional delays with randomness as well as variance in our responses to make it “feel more human”.