Fragile against upgrades, tons of unmaintained plugins, admin panel UX is a mess where you struggle to find the stuff your are looking for, half backed transition to nicer UI (Blue Ocean) that has been ongoing for years, too many ways to setup jobs and integrates with repos, poor resource management (disk space, CPU, RAM), sketchy security patterns inadvertently encouraged.
This stuff is a nightmare to manage, and with large code bases/products, you need a dedicated "devops" just to babysit the thing and avoid it becoming a liability for your devs.
I'm actually looking forward our migration to GHEC from on-prem just because Github Actions, as shitty as they are, are far less of an headache than Jenkins.
Maybe I have low standards given I've never touched what gitlab or CircleCi have to offer, but compared to my past experiences with Buildbot, Jenkins and Travis, it's miles ahead of these in my opinion.
Am I missing a truly better alternative or CI systems simply are all kind of a pita?
I don't enough experience w/ Buildbot or Travis to comment on those, but Jenkins?
I get that it got the job done and was standard at one point, but every single Jenkins instance I've seen in the wild is a steaming pile of ... unpatched, unloved, liability. I've come to understand that it isn't necessarily Jenkins at fault, it's teams 'running' their own infrastructure as an afterthought, coupled with the risk of borking the setup at the 'wrong time', which is always. From my experience this pattern seems nearly universal.
Github actions definitely has its warts and missing features, but I'll take managed build services over Jenkins every time.
Jenkins was just build in pre-container way so a lot of stuff (unless you specifically make your jobs use containers) is dependent on setup of machine running jenkins. But that does make some things easier, just harder to make repeatable as you pretty much configuration management solution to keep the jenkins machine config repeatable.
And yes "we can't be arsed to patch it till it's problem" is pretty much standard for any on-site infrastructure that doesn't have ops people yelling at devs to keep it up to date, but that's more SaaS vs onsite benefit than Jenkins failing.
My issue with Github CI is that it doesn't run your code in a container. You just have github-runner-1 user and you need to manually check out repository, do your build and clean up after you're done with it. Very dirty and unpredictable. That's for self-hosted runner.
> You just have github-runner-1 user and you need to manually check out repository, do your build and clean up after you're done with it. Very dirty and unpredictable. That's for self-hosted runner.
Yeah checking out everytime is a slight papercut I guess, but I guess it gives you control as sometimes you don't need to checkout anything or want a shallow/full clone. I guess if it checked out for you then their would be other papercuts.
I use their runners so never need to do any cleanup and get a fresh slate everytime.
Sometimes, I'm wondering if Mozilla did not get too much money.
With an order of magnitude less money, I think they would have been more focused on improving Firefox rather than trying to diversify with projects like Firefox OS, VPN services or AI.
Even today, given their ~$1.5B in the bank, at the cost of a really painful downsizing, the interests alone could probably pay for a Firefox development focused on standard adherence, performance, quality and privacy.
Mozilla is not a company trying to reinvent itself to survive. If it becomes irrelevant because the Browser becomes irrelevant in the future, that's fine in my book, the organization would have fulfill its mission.
But it is sad to see it become irrelevant because of mismanagement and lack of focus.
Perl was pretty much first in the wave of interpreted languages from the late 80ies and 90ies. It set the bar on what to expect from such ecosystems.
But being the first meant it got some oddities and the abstractions are not quite right imho.
A bit too Shell-esque, specially for arguments passing and the memory abstractions are a bit too leaky regarding memory management (reference management fills too C-esque for an interpreted language, and the whole $ % @ & dance is really confusing for an occasional and bad Perl dev like me). The "10 ways to do it" also hurts it. It lead to a lack of consistency & almost per developer coding coding styles. The meme was Perl is a "write only language".
But I would still be grateful of what it brought and how influential it was (I jock from time to time how Ruby is kind of the "true" Perl 6, it even has flip flops!).
In truth, these days, I feel the whole "interpreted languages" class is on the decline, at least on the server. There are a lot of really great native languages that have come up within the last few years, enabled in large part by LLVM. And this trend doesn't seem over yet.
Languages like Rust, Swift, Go, Zig or Odin are making the value proposition of interpreted languages (lower perf but faster iterations) less compelling by being convenient enough while retaining performance. In short, we can now "have the cake and eat it too".
But the millions of lines in production are also not going awywhere anytime soon. I bet even Perl will still be around somewhere (distro tooling, glue scripts, build infra, etc...) when I retire.
Anyway, thank you Perl, thank you Larry Wall, love your quotes.
I think Apple has kind of a culture problem where the whole organization has to look-up way too much to its chief to make key decisions.
This could have worked in Jobs times, because of the personality & vision of the latter, plus a rapidly evolving market.
But this was no longer possible once the dust settled, specially with a logistician/beam counter like Tim Cook.
Every bet he made was an abject failure, from the Apple Car to the Vision Pro.
His only success was the M series macs, a really good but by no mean revolutionary step-up on a now minority segments of Apple's main market (i.e. internet terminals).
Even the chaos relating to Apple's AI efforts seems to clearly indicate a clear lack of leadership and vision.
For me, he will probably be remembered like Apple's Steve Ballmer. But even with a Nadela-like replacement, Apple needs probably a good hard look at itself and its internal culture.
It's actually kind of worse. Because you get a mix of Dassault (the company)'s agenda (defense spending, pro-industry) and a push for the fairly conservative views of the Marcel Bloch/Dassault descendants themselves.
To be fair, le Figaro was The French conservative newspaper long before the Dassault's ownership (like +100 years prior), so it's more a case of "Le Figaro has a more comfortable budget to push its views".
The closest I can think of in the US context is Bezos owning the Washington Post to both push his personal views and Amazon's interests.
Or maybe lately, Larry Ellison's take over of Paramount/CBS (but it feels more like he is buying a toy for his son).
Or Musk, who heads a few businesses that directly benefit from government contracts, including some in the defense sector, owning one of the largest online media platforms (fka Twitter).
> Or maybe lately, Larry Ellison's take over of Paramount/CBS (but it feels more like he is buying a toy for his son).
If it were just a toy for his son these things wouldn't have happened
- Stephen Colbert canned
- Bari Weiss hired to head the news division
- $32 million settlement for an easily winnable lawsuit
I've probably missed some. Ellison is a huge Trump supporter and is clearly reshaping CBS to at least go easy on Trump, if not to make it yet another right wing propaganda outlet.
No, it's not some kind of clickbait strategy to drive views. Driving an agenda is.
Most of French media, specially newspapers, are money sinks only surviving because they are useful to push the rent-seeking business or ideological agenda of their owners (Dassault, Bouygues, Lagardere, Arnault, Bettencourt, Saade, Pinault, Niel).
Also, just for context, Martin Bouygues, Bernard Arnault and Vincent Bollore, the respective owners of TF1 (main French TV channel), Le Parisien (major newspaper) and CNews/Europe1 (major TV channel & radio) are personal friends of Sarkozy (a la "witness at your wedding, god father of your son or let's celebrate your election on my yacht" kind of way).
The Figaro (main right-wing newspaper in France) and its owners, the Dassault family, are also not far away.
Seeing the Figaro website was actually quite funny. Because the evidences are so damming, their main page was textbook "how to propagate fake news with plausible deniability". It was mainly pro-Sarkozy Editorials/Tribunes from non-journalists people, articles titled with quotes from Sarkozy's supporters and the few articles actually on the case were about the side stories.
There are only two truly independent major media left in France: Mediaparte (the ones we have to thanks for Sarkozy's well deserved condemnations) and Le Canard Enchaine (a bunch of scandals, but lately, the "Affaire Fillion").
The rest is either owned by billionaires, state run, or is far smaller and doesn't have the aura, size & credibility to reveal such scandals.
Groupe Le Monde (Xavier Niel, founder of Free and 42 schools, wed to Bernard Arnault's daughter (French Bourgeoisie is a small world)).
But Le Monde Diplomatique's redaction has been able to remain independent thanks to it's 49% shares and veto right.
It's also fairly small (~10 permanent journalists + independent contributors, ~150k monthly readers).
It's not really the kind of journal able to sustain a long investigation, it's more "social commentaries with a left-leaning/alter-mundialist point of view".
In April 2024, Le Monde Group’s majority stakeholder became a financial endowment, or fonds de dotation (FDD), named Fonds pour l'indépendance de la presse.
This structure is also used by Mediapart, owned by Fonds pour une presse libre, and Libération, owned by Fonds de dotation pour une presse indépendante, with Mediapart being inspired to emulate The Manchester Guardian (which has been operated by a trust since 1936): https://www.lesechos.fr/tech-medias/medias/le-monde-appartie...
Yet, it might be reasonably true: as stated in the Wikipedia page, Le Monde Diplomatique is read mostly by educated people, who probably are 1/ less susceptible to/more aware of coarse manipulation 2/ much less numerous.
That's to say, influencing (too much) the redaction might have too low of a costs/benefits ratio.
Personal anecdote: I've read it a few times about a decade ago. At that time, I perceived some of the articles to be more emotionally grounded than rationally, and the prose to be at time needlessly heavy, "sophisticated".
Those are the main reasons why I didn't kept reading it more often.
I had the same experience as you with Le Monde diplomatique. The language used in some of the articles felt a lot like propaganda ( hyperbolic language, us vs them, anger/emotional language, basic facts being ignored etc ). I was very surprised since the paper had a good reputation , and gave up. Maybe ( hopefully) this has changed.
This stuff is a nightmare to manage, and with large code bases/products, you need a dedicated "devops" just to babysit the thing and avoid it becoming a liability for your devs.
I'm actually looking forward our migration to GHEC from on-prem just because Github Actions, as shitty as they are, are far less of an headache than Jenkins.
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