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Still quite like the windows log approach which (if logged) stores the template as just the id, with the values, saving lots of storage as well eg 123, foo, bar. You can concatenate in the reader.

So, it costs perf every time it’s read, instead of when it’s written (once). And of course has a lot of overhead to store metadata. Bad design. As usual.

Most logs are probably never read, but nevertheless should be written (fast) for unexpected situations when you will later need them. And logging have to be fast, and have minimal performance overhead.

Except it's always written, but almost never read. Something that is fast/non-resource-intensive to write is definitionally a better design for logging.

What metadata? The raw template? That's data in this case, data for the later rendering of logs. Yes, the template plus the params is going to be slightly bigger than a rendered string, but that's the speed/size tradeoff inherent almost everywhere. It may even keep seperate things like the subsystem, event type, log level, etc; which trades off size (again) for speed/ease of filtering. It's all trade-offs, and to blanket declare one method (the Windows method in this case) as just bad design is only displaying your own ignorance, or bias.


There might be a plan but more likely Chinese salaries have grown a lot in the last 20 years. 20 years ago US salaries were much higher - it makes sense to get a US degree and work here. Now you might as well go home again, it isn't better to be in the US any more.

There is no shortage of US families who would pay the $100k/yr for top 10 university education.

Do Europeans care if their health data is secret or not? I feel in the US its a big deal that people dont want insurance companies to measure them and deny coverage to those who need it most, but in most of the world that isn't an issue.

Yeah we do. For many reasons:

Privacy is privacy. I ideally don’t want any of my data sold to anyone, but health data is even more vulnerable.

In my country it was even a big deal when they allowed different doctors to access your health data via a common system, as there were e.g. concerns that the information recorded by one doctor might bias another doctor, so some felt that it should be your choice what data to share between different parts of the public health system (except for explicit referrals).

Moreover, most European countries do have private doctors, private hospitals, and private health insurance – it’s just way less used than the public system. Those would have the same concerns as in the US.


Health data is usually the highest level protected data under most laws. It's not about just insurance. Part of the problem is once data is out there, it can be used by any shady person.

You can be discriminated against a job based on health records. Scary diseases like AIDS and TB make it hard for unskilled labor to land a job since it's so easy to discriminate. Pregnancy history may hurt women who are in countries with more generous maternity leave.

Mental health history will hurt just about everyone - who wants a worker who can claim ADHD, depression, anxiety, etc as reasons to be unproductive?

Then people will simply deny getting diagnosed for fear that they may uncover something that puts their jobs at risk. That hurts the medical system as a whole.

Combine with weird stuff like eugenics. What if we identify a possible rapist gene and neuter them in advance? Or bar people with a klepto gene from working in finance? You may live in happy, sane, democratic societies today, but it may not be the case 30 years from now.


I once had to threaten to resign from a job (in the EU, pre-Data Protection Act) over the data handling of evidence of one of the things in your comment.

I think this has been something people have had an instinct about forever, and the only reason I had to threaten to quit was because of a misunderstanding of the level of data safety involved; put simply it was not common knowledge that socket connections could be snooped and that targeting a popular service would be easy for a malicious person to do. (This was before SSL was efficient or easy to manage, and in the days when only payment screens were encrypted).

Once the message was across, everyone's objectives were aligned again.

Health information is deeply private because disease is entangled with shame/weakness/vulnerability/taboo/intimacy.


> You can be discriminated against a job based on health records.

Just to make this clear, probably EU-wide, you can't legally be discriminated against. However, it's gonna be hard to prove leaked data won't be illegally integrated in e.g. ATS models, or was attributed as skill issue when it popped up during manual background checks.

Although, infectious disease like HIV or dystopian scenarios like eugenics are probably the classical discrimination examples for these privacy implications, I don't think they are very likely to be discriminated against (outside of jobs where discrimination is legal and require disclosure anyway, e.g. health workers, food industry etc.). It's easy to dismiss those worries, since most people aren't affected. But common issues with mental health (e.g. depression), hidden disabilities and chronic disease (e.g. PMS), or potentially severe recurring disease (e.g. cancer) realistically are going to be much more impactful. Everything which statistically increases chances to fall out the work force due to health reasons - especially in combination with strong labor protections.


> Do Europeans care if their health data is secret or not?

Can't speak for all Europeans, but in my neck of the wood, Germany, they do very much.


> Do Europeans care if their health data is secret or not?

Do Europeans care if their private and personal data is secret or not? What kind of question is that?


Why would they not?

You still wouldn't necessarily want a life insurance company to know stuff they haven't formally asked to know, you still have health information that could be used to blackmail you or whose reveal would be humiliating or upsetting.


Of course they do, don't ask silly questions.

Actually, please do ask silly questions! The overwhelming response has been interesting

The response is overwhelming because the question is almost insulting.

Yes, I completely agree, I did feel insulted by it. There is a real anti-European/EU narrative in the US, with European countries described as collapsing, failed, etc (which is pretty obvious bullshit). if people are on the fence and ask stupid questions I think it’s ok? I hope they will be corrected, like happened here.

Of course there is no way for me to know if the poster was trolling or pushing an agenda. Some other commenters in this whole comment section are more obvious to identify


Sorry, it was just a genuine question. No one in my extended family has had serious problems or issues with insurance companies and I genuinely dont care if my records or even dna are public. Probably would support it for research purposes.

Of course we do. And for exactly the same reasons, too.

Isn't an issue yet.

I mean, of course? This is why I opposed electronic health record ( EPD (elektronisch patiëntendossier)) back in the days. Even then, SSL (TLS) downgrade attack existed and was known to NSA. IIRC EPD was started as opt-in, then opt-out, then mandatory.

I received my daughter's ASD diagnosis via Zivver. This included very personal details about her life. No parent would want that to be public. For adults it is worse: they become vulnerable to extortion, and Mossad is known to go very far for the cause.


Deeply

As an European, I HATE when my data is mishandled or leaked (and this is basically the entire point of the GDPR)

For sure, yes!

Its super frustrating there is no official guide. I hear lots of suggestions all the time and who knows if they help or not. The best one recently is tell the LLM to "act like a senior dev", surely that is expected by default? Crazy times.

When the world is complicated, entangled, and rapidly changing, would you expect there to be one centralized official guide?*

At the risk of sounding glib or paternalistic -- but I'm going to say it anyway, because once you "see it" it won't feel like a foreign idea being imposed on you -- there are ways that help to lower and even drop expectations.

How? To mention just one: good reading. Read "Be a new homunculus" [1]. To summarize, visualize yourself like you are the "thing that lives in your brain". Yes, this is non-sense but try it anyway.

If you find various ways to accept "the world is changing faster than ever before" and it feels like too much. Maybe you are pissed off or anxious about AI. Maybe AI is being "heavily encouraged" for you (on you?) at work. Maybe you feel like we're living in an unsustainable state of affairs -- don't deny it. Dig into that feeling, talk about it. See where it leads you. Burying these things isn't a viable long-term strategy.**

* There is an "awesome-*" GitHub repository for collecting recommended resources to help with Claude Code: [2] But still requires a lot of curation and end-user experimentation: [2] There are few easy answers in a dynamic uncertain world.

** Yes I'm intentionally cracking the door open to "Job loss is scary. It is time to get real on this, including political activism."

[1]: https://mindingourway.com/be-a-new-homunculus/

[2]: https://github.com/hesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code


Thanks yes of course you're right, still frustrating. I'm nearing retirement so not really worried about job loss, just want to make use of the tools.

I get that. I probably could have been much more succinct by saying this: We can consciously act in ways that reduce the frustration level even if the environment itself doesn't change. It usually takes time and patience, but not always. Sometimes a particular mindset shift is sufficient to make a frustration completely vanish almost immediately.

Some examples from my experience: (1) Many particular frustrations with LLMs vanish the more I learn about their internals. (2) Frustration with the cacophony of various RAG/graph-database tooling vanishes once I realize that there is an entire slice of VC money chasing these problems precisely because it is uncertain: the victors are not pre-ordained and ... [insert bad joke about vectors here]


Speaking of better in the old days, MSVC in the 90s had edit and continue, where you could stop in a debugger, change the source code and move the current breakpoint back and run it again. Even VBA had this 30 years ago, why cant I do in Python?

The visual IDEs of the 90s (MSVC, Borland Delphi, heck even MS Visual Basic) were way more tightly integrated, performant and usable than anything we have today, despite running on hardware with a fraction of the power. It seems so bizarre how much we've regressed.

MSVC is still here in 2025.

Microsoft QuickBasic does too, which I sometimes still use when programming on DOS (one of the reasons for this being what efaref mentioned about performance and usability and being regressed); and also has a "immediate mode" that you can enter BASIC commands and execute them; I think this is helpful.

.NET can hot reload during debugging session. Even that I never get used on this feature and just restarting debugging from scartch.

You can still do it in Java.

The best I can do is rebuild the class, then when the function runs next time you get the new code. Is that what you mean? Quarkus is good like this too.


I call bullsh*t. None of those IDE's had any such feature.

I found a video! 14 years ago and its C#, but VC++ had this in the 90s too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6J34B37wUc

What? Excel has this today. Open your VBA/Developer window

Most (?) Kobos can run libby so you can get ebooks from your library.


> told me it was even more incredible during the height of the dotcom boom

I was a developer in the 90s before Netscape even came out. I didn't have a computer at home and dialup barely existed. If you wanted to do computer stuff you had to read. If you wanted to try a library you had to buy a CD from a bookstore or mail in an order which would get posted to you.


2020 was a special time where every child in America was given a Chromebook so they could do school from home.


I'm on Spark Scala 2 project and I hate it. Basically any good Scala dev would never want to work on our ETL projects, so we get second rate Python or Java devs like me who bastardize the language to get anything to work. Most of our new stuff is all pyspark, hopefully we can replace Scala asap.


What's so bad about it?

Why not try to learn it for good?


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