I follow a few landscape photographers on YouTube and really enjoy watching them go out into the field (whether it's an actual field or mountain or beach). They've got their art (at least their own style) so dialed in, that the technical details, the subject, the composition, those are almost a forgone conclusion. What matters at that point is light. And light is luck. The difference between an average image and an outstanding one lies in something beyond their control.
And when fortune smiles on them, they get positively giddy.
I really appreciate people who understand that they have to meet luck half way. Even though they've spent hours upon hours upon hours honing their craft, the thing that puts them over the hump is both unpredictable and uncontrollable.
Yeah, that doesn't mean we can't get lucky and run into the perfect circumstance. It means that when that circumstance happens, we'll be there ready to harvest it. Similarly, "the best camera is the one you carry".
And yes, these anti- magic formulas that dispell the idea of magic formula, are magic formulas.
> And when fortune smiles on them, they get positively giddy.
Yes! This is a great pleasure. Satisfaction. There is one series in particular I work on that operates like this. I'm just ready for it - don't even look for it, not anymore - but when I run into the "circumstance", that's a great feeling. And I'm ready for it.
In engineering or software there is still that idea of the back-burner stuff that does need to be done. This idea of staging or starting what needs to be done at the end of the previous day. So that you have something relatively mindless to get you launched the next morning. I also know that anti- "magic rule", even though it's one I have a hard time keeping to.
Yeah, from my experience the more helpful conclusion is "TTS is not commoditized yet". At some point in the next 5 years, convincing TTS will be table stakes. But for now, paying for TTS gets you better results.
Copyright law:
A reason that copyright trolls are less common than patent trolls is that under copyright law, works created independently are not infringing. In court, you might have to prove that you did actually create the thing independently, but I think most juries would be sympathetic to this case. "Oh, you think that the defendant combed through your giant library of millions of logos to find this one specific, rather simple looking specimen."
Also, a lot of logos are simply not "artistic" enough to be eligible for copyright. So in general, logos are more likely to be the subject of trademark litigation than copyright litigation.
Trademark law:
In order to claim a trademark you must have used the mark in commerce. So a catalogue of logos not used in commerce is of no real value from a trademark perspective.
Usually the method of a copyright troll never reaches the jury stage. It's mostly a racquet to get people to pay you not to sue them or file vaguely legitimate DMCA takedowns on their content.
Re: 5. building things: The only thing that keeps me sane since moving into a leadership role is that the what I love about building, namely watching things that didn't exist-- begin to exist, still happens. I guess I'm more of a farmer now than a carpenter, but I'm still seeing my environment change in a way that I contributed to and take pride in. That includes not only watching our product evolve, but also watching our team grow.
We use Elixir for our primary application, with a fair amount of Python code to manage our ML pipelines. But we also need real-time inference and it's really convenient/performant to be able to just do that in-app. So I, for one, am very grateful for the work that's been done provide the level of tooling in Elixir. It has worked quite well for us.
i agree that with statements aren't the easiest to understand, especially for a beginner, but I think the value in having the entirety of the happy path in the initial block is very helpful for understanding the flow of the feature, once you grok the syntax.
In the first paragraph, Fred mentions and links to Erlang in Anger.
When I was coming up to speed on the BEAM this was such an amazing resource. The fact that it's free is bananas. In addition to the load management stuff, he also talked about some observability details that are really helpful (like how to more accurately understand CPU load on the BEAM). Highly recommend.
Jose, if you come across this, I just want to express my gratitude to you for Elixir and for everything you've done for the Elixir community. The thoughtfulness and adeptness you bring to the language and the community is so very much appreciated. This change is such an excellent example of the steadiness and diligence you have led with. So rarely does a single individual that I am not interpersonally close to have such an outsized impact on my day-to-day happiness. Thank you, Jose.
Your work has raised the level of projects solo and very small dev teams can build.
Elixir has been one of the nicest things I've discovered since becoming a dev back in 2010. I hope this new feature can improve the experience for larger orgs while keeping it great for indie hackers and new learners!
I agree 100%. I have been using the language professionally everyday for a few years now, having converted our Erlang system to Elixir and Phoenix. The language is a joy to use, the community is great and José is doing a fantastic job in a kind way. I love being part of that community. Thank you for everything.
When I first started writing Elixir, I had no idea how much I would come to love immutable data as a language feature. "functional" can mean so many things, but for me immutable data as part of the runtime (i.e. not bolted on later) is one of the most important things. Never having to ask: did I pass by reference or value? Never having worry about data changing out from underneath you. It's pretty amazing.
Sure there are times that a need for performance calls for mutable data. But for me those times are pretty rare, and when they happen it's usually easy enough to quarantine the mutation.
And when fortune smiles on them, they get positively giddy.
I really appreciate people who understand that they have to meet luck half way. Even though they've spent hours upon hours upon hours honing their craft, the thing that puts them over the hump is both unpredictable and uncontrollable.