But it's only a dark pattern in the right (wrong?) context, no? For instance, my webmail has infinite scroll and it's damn convenient. Yet, I never find myself mindlessly scrolling through my mail. It doesn't increase the time I spend on the site... quite the opposite.

Likewise, I swear Google was playing with infinite scroll in their search results recently, where I didn't have to hit next to see the next page of results. Same result for me - it was convenient and I didn't find myself spending more time looking for/at search results.

But when the context is addictive content, infinite scroll is always there to spoon feed you one more helping.

More often than not, infinite scroll isn't actually the UX pattern you're looking for. But on occasion, it does make sense. However, when combined with insidious content, a dark pattern it does become.

I'm sorry for your loss. I had a similar experience in the US. In my case, a doctor flatly contributed the (impending) death a byproduct of COVID. All tests prior to COVID were positive and pointed to many more years ahead.

I'm not certain, but I suspect something was lost in the handoff to the hospice care company where they just didn't have the history and I assume they were the ones that reported the COD. Not certain about this. I plan on looking to see if there's anyway to have this retroactively updated, but I'm not optimistic.

This is one of the things I miss about Perforce - every merge was effectively a squash merge, but the branch was still there, just not visible by default (if I remember correctly). It was the best of both worlds - you keep a complete audit trail, but it was out of the way and didn’t interfere with your day to day view of the commit log. Moreover, there was never any discussion on merge strategies as there was just the one way to do it.

On top of that, they had some amazing tools for aiding in audits when you needed them.

I’m not suggesting we all switch to Perforce! But I do miss that aspect of it.

Apple isn't in the habit of treating end of life or soon to be replaced products in this way, so it raised some eyebrows.

MacRumors got a follow up from Apple confirming that it has been discontinued. I suspect with the upcoming performance of the Apple silicon, lines between an iMac and iMac Pro were about to get blurry... but that's just a hunch.

From MacRumors: "We've since confirmed with Apple that when supplies run out, the iMac Pro will no longer be available whatsoever. Apple says the latest 27-inch iMac introduced in August is the preferred choice for the vast majority of pro iMac users, and said customers who need even more performance and expandability can choose the Mac Pro."

ANY Apple Silicon iMac is going to kill, just kill, the top of the line Intel Xeon iMac Pros. Blurry is not the word. It's gonna leapfrog the Xeons for almost any purpose rendering the whole thing ridiculous.

Source: I literally have an 18-core, 64 gig RAM Xeon iMac Pro and one of the new laptops (Macbook pro, 16 gig RAM). If they don't have to get 20 hours of battery life and they do literally anything to expand the processing from what they have, they're going to obliterate the discontinued ones so hard that it'd be insane or criminally misleading to continue selling the iMac Pros.

They've already quit selling the machine I have, and I kinda wish they had half a year ago… because I spent more than $8000 in the belief that I was going to put a stake in the ground and rely on that computer for a goodly number of years and that it was relevant to where Apple was headed.

Now (if Linus Tech Tips is to be believed) I can get a baseline Macbook Air, pop the back off, put a thermal conductive pad to vent heat away from the heatsink to the aluminum surface of the laptop, and get observably better performance on at least some realworld tasks for literally one EIGHTH the price.

I won't say I feel ripped off, but I feel extremely blindsided and that's only going to get worse as Apple continues to put out more products. Not sure people quite understand how inferior Apple's 'top line' products from the last generation, are to what they're currently producing.

Right now if you need heavy processing of VERY specific types involving many cores and many gigs of physical RAM but that doesn't fit into a category Apple's covering already with the M1s, such as 4k and 8k video editing that's better done on any M1 machine, that's the last known good use of the iMac Pros and Mac Pros. Only the heaviest of heavy lifting that's not covered by the strong suits of the M1…

I give it four months before Apple has something maybe at the $2000-3000 price point that absolutely destroys all the previous machines, no matter how 'Pro', at any price. And this is why they've got to kill off the previous lines. People will be really angry when this becomes apparent. Better to not even try and sell the machines, much less try to market them as 'more performance'. Expandability, yeah, there's that.

Yeah, I had a hunch something like this was going to happen which is why I opted for a refurbished base model iMac Pro over something new. Still expensive (~$3500), but not nearly as bad for the period of time I was able to get use out of it. Will probably trade it in along with a 2017 MBP 15" to pay for the majority of a Mac Pro Mini or ARM MBP 16" and hopefully one of the lower-cost displays they're rumored to be releasing this year.

>Apple isn't in the habit of treating end of life or soon to be replaced products in this way, so it raised some eyebrows.

They have done the same thing time and again during similar transitions or new designs. The eat through the stock, and then the item is not available at all, until at some point a new design/version hits.

In fact, reports of "stock dwindling" and "while stocks last" etc and Apple stopping selling an item on the web Applestore are things Apple-focused news websites explicitly use to tell that a new version of some product is in the works or soon to land...

In this case, the iMac Pro is niche enough, that the new version is not soon to land, as other more staple products have a priority for the Apple Silicon treatment. That doesn't mean it's not in the works.

> They have done the same thing time and again during similar transitions or new designs.

Yeah, they usually do this without saying anything. What's crazy is that they confirmed. With MacRumors of all sites.

I was at Disney for almost a decade (possibly at the division ultimately responsible for Disney+, but I’m not positive - it’s hard to keep up with all of the changes and renaming) and this is 100% what I observed there. Over and over.

The ineptitude of the decisions that resulted from this were often hard to believe. And getting ahead was really a matter of getting in good with a new exec long enough to put you in a good position to move upwards to a different part of the company (or elsewhere).

Unsurprisingly, building strong relationships in the workplace and having a positive attitude are ways to advance your career.

This is sound advice that I can definitely get behind. However anecdotally it's not what I've observed to be true. In my above mentioned example, the people with the most and strongest relationships throughout the org were not the most upwardly mobile, nor was there a correlation with positive attitude.

Rather, aligning yourself with the correct (choose wisely) new executive and being a yes-person even to things that you know might have long-lasting negative impacts on the company (and thus your peers) was too often the winning strategy. Even then, it's navigating a political minefield, and one misstep could spell disaster.

The approach tends to put personal gain ahead of the well being of the company. I've seen too many people get ahead by setting vast fires and then walking away. That's not something I can get behind.

They almost certainly render two frames at a time. Thus bringing the render time down to only 100+ years per film.

I ran (self-hosted) TeamCity at a division of Disney for years with hundreds of projects across teams with lots of complex dependencies. To this day (though I haven't kept up as much in recent years), it's far and away the most powerful CI system I've ever used. Rock solid stability, to boot. And it's only become better and better over the years.

Does that mean it's right for every job? Not at all. Sometimes you just need simple and accessible. Things like CircleCI or Travis or Heroku's CI. But not Jenkins. I put Jenkins into the same category as TeamCity, and it falls far short.

If you've outgrown some of the other options and need really powerful CI, I can't recommend TeamCity enough.

Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Over 20 years of really solid experience here doing some awesome stuff for recognizable employers. I’ve had the exact experiences as the author.

One recent interview run by ex-FUAANG folks started with a non-trivial take home that represented their actual business. I come in, am told it’s one of the best they’ve seen. Which was great, because I was genuinely proud of it. Now let’s find all of the combinations on a boggle board. Which wasn’t even the worst of it.

So far, that’s been pretty par for the course for me. It’s been discouraging.

I haven't had to upgrade to 6, so it's a bummer to hear it's so painful. On a fresh Rails 6 project built with "--webpack=stimulus", I haven't had to muck with Webpack (on two ongoing products and a handful of experimental/toy codebases) and Stimulus has been just a delight. Everything more or less "just works".

I empathize with everything you're saying here, but I do humbly disagree. I've experienced exactly what you're talking about, and it's a nightmare. Frankly, I think the Rails codebase itself even suffers from an over use of concerns that can make figuring out where functionality comes from very frustrating at times.

That said, concerns are mixins, and mixins are, in the simplest of terms, more or less multiple inheritance. That's powerful stuff, and powerful stuff in the wrong hands (which includes every hand that'll touch it, not just the author!) will always get you in trouble. That could be the motto for Rails itself - powerful stuff, but in the wrong hands it'll get you into trouble!

My first exposure to concerns in Rails was a awful codebase for a well known company with massive classes that someone went on a weekend bender and shrunk down to less massive classes by introducing dozens of concerns. It made the classes _appear_ smaller, but they weren't actually. In reality, it was just hiding away much of the complexity and horrible decision making that made the code so hard to reason about and maintain and took things from bad to worse as a result.

That said, when you have a well architected code base to begin with (as in before you start introducing concerns) that has svelte classes with appropriate responsibilities, with shared logic broken out into "services" or whatnot, concerns can be a really nice way to share isolated functionality that can lead to cleaner classes without obfuscating what's going on. Quite the opposite - used well, they can tuck away (but not altogether hide) ancillary functionality allowing the meat of a method to be highlighted instead of drowned out by pre- and post-requisite behavior that might take up more LoC than the unique business logic of a given controller action thus obfuscating the functionality specific to that method.

On my current and previous project, concerns worked out great for the teams (which included junior devs) but were used sparingly and typically introduced by experienced devs. Also, taking a quick glance, it seems like Controller concerns are favored far more, and often involve calls to class-level ActionController methods such as rescue_from, overriding protect_from_forgery defaults, settings layouts, before_action, helper_method, etc. - things that you can't just tuck into a service class or method that gets called from the controller and would otherwise require someone remembering the correct combinations of code to sprinkle into a controller or creating a controller to inherit from (which isn't practically different from concerns but can paint you into a corner). They're also never used for the business logic of an action, only supporting functionality (again, pre- and post- requisite functionality or introducing class-level helper methods that can be reused).

All that being said, for a team that isn't confident in how to use concerns effectively, I'd also steer them away and guide them to consider alternative approaches. But at face value, I don't consider concerns an anti-pattern and have found that, when used appropriately, they can be a great tool in maintaining a clean codebase.