we end up with lost history

Oof, I felt this in my soul

There are a couple of things I do agree with in regards to the comments in code. They aren’t meant as a replacement for documentation. Documentation is still required to explain more abstract overview kind of stuff, known limitations etc. If your class has 3 pages of text in comments at the top, that would probably be better off in the documentation. When working with large teams there are often people who need to understand what the code can and can’t do, how edge cases are handled etc. but can’t read actual code. By writing proper documentation, a lot of questions can be avoided and often help coders as well with a better understanding of the system. Writing doc blocks in a matter that can be extracted into a documentation helps a lot as well, but I feel that does provide an easy way out to not write actual documentation. Of course depending on the situation this might not matter or one might not care, it’s something that comes up more when working in large teams.

Just like writing code, writing proper comments is a bit of an art. I’ve very often seen developers be way too verbose, commenting almost every line with the literal thing the next line does. Anyone who can read the code can see what it does. What we can’t see is why it does this or why it doesn’t do it in some other obvious way. This is something you see a lot with AI generated code, probably because a lot of their training was done on tutorials where every line was explained so people learning can follow along.

This also ties in with keeping comments updated and accurate when changing code. If the comment and the code doesn’t match with each other, which one is true? I’ve in the past worked on legacy codebases where the comments were almost always traps. The code didn’t match the comments at all, sometimes obviously so, most times only very subtle. We were always guessing was the implementation meant to be the comment and the difference just a mistake? The codebase was riddled with bugs, so it’s likely. Or was the code changed at a later point on purpose and the comments neglected?

Luckily these days we have good tools in regards to source control, with things like feature branches, pull requests with tools that allow for discussion and annotation. That way at least usually the origin of a change is traceable. And code review can be applied before the change is merged, so mistakes like neglecting comments can be caught.

Now I don’t agree with the principle of no comments at all. Just because a tool has some issues and limitations doesn’t mean it gets banned from our toolbox. But writing actual useful comments is very hard and can be just as hard as writing good code. Comments also aren’t a cheat card for writing bad code, the code needs to stand on its own and be enhanced by the comments.

It’s one of those things we’ve been arguing about over my entire 40 year career. I don’t think there is a right way. Whatever is best depends on the person, the team, the system etc. And like with many things, there are people who are good and people who suck. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

Can’t we just talk to the humans

A little understanding could make things better?

Can’t we talk to the humans and work together now?

Yes there’s also a mechanism in our brains that if a food is high enough in nutrients like calories, fat, etc. we don’t feel full and just keep eating. In the past such sources were few and far between, so when one came upon them, we needed to eat as much as physically possible. The issue is, these days we have a lot of food like that. Our brains can’t handle it, so we overeat very easily.

How does this work, if one person is sharing their screen, does the client get to see? Because it seems more like remote gaming kind of thing? Where the client controls the game/app running on the server?

Yeah EU VAT opened up a whole can of issues. It’s super complicated and annoying, with all sorts of weird exceptions. The exact opposite of what VAT was supposed to be. EU countries should have just gotten their shit together instead of this patch work.

I’ve actually seen that fraud in action. People used to ship around huge amounts of phones and CPUs, because they were high value, but took up very little room. A truck full of pallets of tray CPUs could be worth a huge amount.

I think now most of the holes are patched. But for a while there were special rules surrounding phones and CPUs just because they were often used in the fraud scheme.

The real genius behind VAT is that it isn’t just applied to transactions between business and consumer, but to all transactions. The rule is normally very simple, it’s applied to all transactions, with few exceptions. The rate can vary, but those rules are also usually very simple. The trick is: When a business has a transaction with another business, VAT is still applied, but the selling party has to levy the tax and forward it to the government and the purchasing party can ask the government to give back the tax they paid on the transaction.

This may seem a bit convoluted, where the tax goes through the government only to end up back in the business. But this ensures the tax is applied always. Normally a profitable company would sell their products for more than the components they purchased. The difference between these two is the value added. And by getting back less from the purchases as what they have to pay for sales, the tax is only applied to the value added. And for consumers it functions as a sales tax, being applied to all transactions and no way around it.

This system is way harder to mess with than any other form of sales tax. The rules are simple with few exceptions and thus very easy to reinforce. It’s also a more fair system, where each party in the chain pays a part instead of the consumer paying for all of it.

In the end the consumer pays most, but as the taxes are supposed to be used to make their lives better, it seems like a fair deal? Now if you have a government that’s more about filling their own pockets than actually doing what they need to do to improve the lives of the people living there, well then you are going to have a bad day. But that doesn’t happen in civilized countries right?

It would depend on how fast it runs. The faster it runs the more times it’s right. So if we extrapolate, once you get a clock running backwards fast enough, it will be right all of the time.

Intel actually bought AMD Radeon GPUs for their Hades Canyon (Kaby Lake G) platform. It was a NUC mainboard with a full Intel platform, combined with an AMD Radeon GPU. The Intel CPU and the GPU (including HBM2 memory for the GPU) was all on one package soldered to the mainboard.

I think they did a couple of follow ups on that as well, because it worked very well.