Why not just milk it until the money train dries up or you are rolling in cash? Just because one or more companies offer the same product doesn't mean you're going to squashed. What will tank your business is losing focus & giving up before you needed to.
Depending on what exactly it is it might be quite time consuming running the business, not to mention stressful to not have a reliable paycheque. An office hours job with salary might be starting to look desirable.
I usually buy brand name over generic stuff because it is quantifiably better to me in some way. Cereal that tastes better, garbage bag doesn't rip, etc.
I don't see any compelling reason to adopt IRC. It does nothing that I care about that Slack doesn't do. If Slack completely implodes, I would search for Slack alternative. If IRC really was my only option, I'd use it just long enough to write a basic alternative myself that replaced or extended IRC w/ the features I really want.
For one thing, an IRC client doesn't pin a core of my cpu at 100% and consume half a gig of ram...
(But I realise I'm well out on the losing end of this argument, even in groups of old-school hard core technical friends/colleagues, I've been given the "crazy look" when suggesting we just use irc for chat... )
Slack isn't perfect; I agree with that. I haven't experienced the CPU issue, but it does seem to like RAM quite a bit. I just opened it w/ one account active, and it was eating maybe 400MB of RAM. I bumped that up to 6 open accounts, and now it's chewing up maybe 2GB of RAM.
> pin a core of my cpu at 100% and consume half a gig of ram...
I'm not doubting you, and I acknowledge that I hear that kind of thing with some frequency, but I've not seen Slack (running in Chrome on Ubuntu) use anything like those amounts of resources.
I've had a pretty busy slack client running for several days, and it's using 204,484K of memory and 2.0% of one CPU.
I hear you! I've been using the Internet most every day since 1988, and am still occasionally struck by the amount of resources seemingly straightforward programs use these days.
Re: Slack resource utilization: I'm not passing a value judgment as much as expressing confusion over multiple claims I've noticed about Slack utilization that is far, far greater than anything I've seen.
I had this problem with Slack. I switched to using it within Chrome. I can't be sure why it performs so much better that way (Chrome throttling it?), but it does.
I don't see any compelling reason to adopt Slack. It does nothing that I care about that IRC doesn't do. If IRC completely implodes, I would run my own IRC server.
IRC is horrible on phones (shitty history when you drop out of an internet connection, no cross-device unread-count synchronization, no encryption or login, etc). There are add-ons that try to fix that, but it's still a giant pain.
I personally love Riot and Matrix as a "modern IRC".
The Lounge is an IRC client that solves the problems you describe (persistence on any device, synchronised unread counters, push notifications) - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge
It does require having your own server to host it on though.
That's nice for you personally, but how does running an inhouse bespoke IRC server have anything to do with whatever line of business your company is in?
IRC is just a particular implementation of chat. The only thing keeping it relevant is the several hundred thousand people currently connected to servers.
Within a more defined context, such as work communication, adoption network effects become irrelevant. You can just build your own system and set everybody up to use it.
For me it's mostly about gow people use metaprogramming.
In Ruby, if I'm trying to find the source of a dynamically generated method in a dynamically generated class, that usually requires me to run add a debug statement, run the program, and see what's being passed. Even if I have a stacktrace, I often find it difficult to understand what the code is doing without running it.
I find Elixir code easier to read, and grepping my way through the code base is often enough. And to be fair, a debugger is often less than useful in macros involving AST & when dealing with a process that got a random message from who knows where.
Disclaimer: I'm a maintainer but the next Dialyxir release makes a major improvement on this, thanks to contributions from Andrew Summers. He wrote a parser for the Erlangified term strings and uses the Elixir (1.6) pretty printer to print all the terms the way Elixir would. We're still fine-tuning the error messages and explanations but there is an RC on hex[0] - give it a spin if you haven't yet.
You should try Dialyxir 1.0.0-rc3! The error reporting is vastly improved by a GSoC student.
Now you can get errors like this:
________________________________________________________________________________
apps/activity_feed/lib/activity_feed/push_notification_listener.ex:10:callback_type_mismatch
Callback mismatch for @callback push/2 in ActivityFeed.ListenerBehaviour behaviour.
Expected type:
{:error, _} | {:ok, _}
Actual type:
:ok
________________________________________________________________________________
apps/activity_feed/lib/activity_feed/push_notification_listener.ex:24:pattern_match
The pattern
_ = {:error, _}
can never match the type
:error | :ok
Not quite -- that was me =). The GSOC student (Gabriel Gatu) is incorporating that work along with the incremental Dialyzer from the Elixir-ls project, and taking some of the new Dialyxir errors and morphing them a bit into a task that can be eventually merged back upstream into a more mainline mix task. You can track his progress here [0].
The lion's share of the work is now extracted into Erlex [1] which can be incorporated into other tools as needed.
Ooops! Sorry for getting that mixed up! erlex sounds like a neat project! I hope you make an Elixir Forum post about it so that more people are aware of it, I think it probably has quite a few good uses.
No trouble! I had unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate for Gabriel!) timing with its completion. Making a forum post is a good call! I need to throw some more docs in there, but I'll make one after that's in decent shape.
I friend of mine got a PhD in Electrical Engineering, which took him 7 or 8 years years. Right around his 30th birthday, I remember him saying that he'd been in school since he was 5. When I think of it that way, if my 20-something self could have been paid to delay entering the working world, I enjoyed school, and I was willing to be a professor's minion, getting a PhD would have been an extremely attractive option.
Have you considered that you stink are completing those puzzles because they are so damn boring? I hate learning that way. I never make it past the first chapter of CTCI when I try to attack it head on. Find another way that works for you. I did. My personal "learn all the things" path to success has been taking things apart and learning to understand the pieces.
Having a mild form can be even more difficult. You appear different enough that people can tell, but your similar enough to other people that people don't understand the difference between you not getting it and simply misbehaving. When someone who will never get why they're being disciplined for what to them is acting normally keeps getting repeatedly punished, it's usually going to go poorly.
Yes, it is difficult and stunting. Your actions and body language and even voice land you deep in the uncanny valley, and that makes people uncomfortable, even though they can't articulate why.
I've lost plenty of jobs because of it, and for the longest time I just figured people like to be mean, because when I was fired, nobody would ever say why, even when I pressed them for a reason. When I was shunned or excluded, people feigned ignorance and looked for a quick way out of the conversation when I asked why. It's incredibly frustrating and saddening feeling like people pick on you for no reason, when you know that there IS a reason, but nobody will say what it is, or how to fix it.
I've tried being extra friendly (people think you've got an angle), being strictly professional (people think you don't care about anything), more helpful (people think you're brown nosing), more talkative (people think you're a buffoon), less talkative (you become the guy nobody knows, and are the first to go at layoffs). And since there's no apparent rhyme or reason to their reactions, your life becomes a series of ticking time bombs until a relationship ends, a friendship ends, a job ends... Who you are means nothing if it slowly creeps people out.
The sad truth is that most people just aren't very self-aware.
I had one wake-up call when I was called wierd by my training buddy, him question why I even took part in the classes we were taking. I asked him why, he responded that my T-shirt was cryptic.
After explaining the print to him (it was a film reference), he thought everything was fine again.
Yup, people with severe autism get diagnosed early in their life, as child. They're clearly impaired by their autism, and get help.
People with a mild version get un(der)-diagnosed, especially women. They're expected to just blend in with society yet when they have difficulty in life, they're being told to e.g. "man up". Which might work with NTs shrug.
If you don't see a disability, its not there, right?!
I think the real question is where is the line between it being a character trait (aloof, stoic, introverted, a bit weird, you name it) and a disability. I don't think high functioning autism is a disability, it's a character type that is a bit out there - but with the person knowing it and other people learning about it, we can all get along just fine.
> I think the real question is where is the line between it being a character trait (aloof, stoic, introverted, a bit weird, you name it) and a disability.
Yeah, that's the one billion dollar question indeed, one even specialists are unable to answer. (Both me and my significant other asked our specialists this very question.)
Autism is a (developmental) disorder. In our society you're expected to behave in a certain way, and if you don't you get burned. You get called a witch, a hermit, an oddball, a nerd, or what have you. People with mild ASD can function in our society, but there will be situations where they have to adapt to society's norms instead of their own.
If the world worked the way I'd envision, a lot of small talk simply wouldn't exist. Simple example: I get fucking annoyed by this terrible, inhumane and fake way Americans seem to greet each other with how are you which they don't mean one iota of. I cannot stand it, but I have to endure it, and the American culture is coming for you. It slowly creeps up into the world, for good or bad (not saying its all bad!). Another example: looking someone in the eye when you talk to them. I don't want to! I get over-sensitised! I prefer to stare to something beautiful peaceful, such as clouds, nature, or some one point on the wall which has a slightly different colour.
The good news is that people with mild ASD, with adequate help and understanding from their peers, can have a functional, successful life and many have bend the positive side of their ASD to something fruitful. Whether that's some scientific advancement, great invention, financial success, or a plain happiness is less relevant than it might seem.
> I don't think high functioning autism is a disability, it's a character type that is a bit out there
If you don't understand how to interact with people, you don't understand. You need help to figure it out, or you need help to realize you don't need help.
But isn't that the issue? As this article describes, many people do not know they have it, let alone have people in their lives aware of it, and so they cannot understand the barriers that form in all of their personal relationships
Treated? You should know that may sound very offensive (I assume it wasn't meant offensive though). Autism cannot be treated as it isn't a disease; it is a development disorder. You learn to live with it, and its part of how you are as a human being; you don't know different. You learn to live with it without a diagnosis as well, but a diagnosis plus various therapies can help you being more functional in life. That's different than being treated. Heck, people with ASD can have positive effects from their disorder just as well.
I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend. Many people believe ADHD is related to Autism and, while I never heard it of being cured, it can be managed/tuned with medication. Maybe autism can be managed in a similar way - and we just don't know how yet.
BTW, I also don't think of ADHD and ASDs as diseases either. Like you said, it's more like the way we are wired. I am wired in a somewhat odd way, but I wouldn't trade my brain in for the standard model, even if it is inconvenient sometimes.
