dannypgh

If the tickets cost $50, there's no way anyone would have thought "this is a good idea." But they charged so much people who could afford to pay for the tickets assumed competence. Parallels with the Titanic are obscene...

I think the separate QA before release step I bet was mostly killed by modern methods of software distribution. It's true that automated testing is great, but let's be real: automated tests have existed for many decades, and certainly overlapped with orgs having manual QA steps as part of release engineering.

If you're duplicating floppies, minting CDs, DVDs and so forth it's very expensive to make corrections. If you're pushing remote updates and digital downloads, or just running the software as a service and making it available over the network (e.g. a website) there's not the same expense associated with correction.

These methods of distribution also let careful organizations release to a small things out to a fraction of users first, which can minimize the costs and risks associated with a bad software push as well.

This does not sound right to me.

If you're talking about GFS, that's been gone for a decade, and was not a filesystem as far as the kernel was concerned.

I am Black. I'm not ignoring the other Black people posting, I'm just letting the audience know they don't speak for all of us. We are not a monolith.

I don't particularly care about blacklist/whitelist (as there's a clearer connection to light) but a lot of the defenses against even considering that change sound racist as fuck to me -- there's lots of people who explicitly argue the status quo is OK and that it couldn't be worth any changes here.

Master/slave, however, does bother me. It's led to one too many conversations where people need to, or so, say things like "the slave isn't keeping up with the master" or "the master should detect that and kill the slave" or "we should add more slaves" and those words are grating to me. I don't want to say them, and if a coworker is saying them sometimes I'm not sure if they're enjoying getting to use those words a little too much.

I also want to add, none of this is as important to me as meaningful reparations for slavery and institutionalized racism. But the fact that other things are more important doesn't mean this isn't important. If I meet someone who is in a position to significantly advance reparations or rename these tech terms, I'll be talking with them about the former, not the latter. But most people are not in a position to move the needle on both of these issues.

I don't appreciate my psychological safety being referred to as "nothing... at stake... of any real value."

I know that's probably not what you intended, but I've reread it several times and that's how I'm interpreting it each time. I think this disconnect between people -- a modicum of safety in a world that doesn't value our lives is seen as huge and worthwhile by some, but trivial and unimportant by others.

I don't view any of this through the lens of changing our language for language sake. I view it through the lens of trying to rectify the injustices of slavery and legalized discrimination, and the inequality that permeates our society as a result.

So if we gain momentum here, I see the next step as seeking other forms of reparations, not going after other words.

If there are others who are suffering who want to advocate for ways to improve our language to reduce the unintended harm it has, they're of course welcome to.

Also c'mon this slippery slope argument sounds like this to me: "Where does it stop? Will people object to every word and I'll be forced to express myself just through grunts? What if they then come for my grunts? Therefore I should continue to call things whatever I want because slippery slope."

Where does it stop? It stops when people stop pushing.

I appreciate knowing my colleagues have virtues. How is that doing nothing?

I'm a black engineer who disagrees with you. I appreciate seeing colleagues and peers make an effort, however small, however symbolic, and that helps motivate me to ignore bullshit and continue working in a team and company where i'm a visibly underrepresented historically oppressed minority. That in turn leads to others seeing me and - people have literally told me this, this isn't me guessing the impact of coming to work - feel like this is a place where they too may be able to survive if not thrive.

This change barely moves the needle on Black representation in tech, but I think it does, however little. Improving Black representation in tech /barely/ moves the needle on racism, but I too think it does, however little (these are good jobs and I know it's helped me and my family close some of the racial wealth gap).

This is not about the feelings of processes. It's about the feeling of engineers who have to work in this environment. Names are arbitrary; why not pick a better name that isn't tied to scars in our society that have not healed, and wrongs in our wealth distribution that have not been corrected by reparations?

These hypothetical scenarios don't "flesh anything out a little," they distract from the real world in front of us.

It's very obnoxious when as a real world person with a real world request, I hear "but what about [insert hypothetical here that isn't actually happening]?" and there's an easy answer: "if that arises, let's deal with it then."

I am descended in part from African slaves. I work in tech. I have dealt with, because of my racial characteristics, a variety of micro and not-so-micro aggressions from my coworkers and that's on top of the bullshit I've had to deal with from neighbors and society. All of this causes me to consider walking away to find something where I don't have to deal with as much BS, and that also makes me sure that the diversity issues in tech are not just a pipeline issue, it's an issue of this work environment not being welcoming to people with different backgrounds. All of these issues are additive - few people want to enter a pipeline for hostile working environment in the end, and those that did have to endure constant bullshit in order to be retained.

Efforts to use more inclusive language aren't going to fix nearly any of the big problems, but it is very, very nice to see /any/ effort here, given the history of none at all. Seeing the effort makes these space more bearable, and in my estimation that justifies the very, very minimal cost of committing to trying to use inclusive language going forward (as a software engineer I'm not keen on renames for renames sake, but we're not talking about renames anywhere - we're talking about preferring inclusive names for new things). Likewise it's disheartening to see how many white folks want to proclaim that there are no diversity and inclusion issues in tech.

I think in the scenarios where the military decides to no longer respect civilian rule (a coup), it's not particularly hard to occupy the Treasury and the mint.

One thing that makes SCOTUS interesting is that they have no enforcement mechanism. It's mainly only tradition and respect for the institution that causes people to follow Supreme Court rulings

You're underselling this, I think.

It is "respect for the institution" why the military accepts the civilian authority of the POTUS as commander in chief. If we are only considering the ability to use violence to enforce one's position as legitimate, it's the military and police forces who rule. Once you factor in laws, the SCOTUS is authoritative as to how the laws can be legally interpreted.

The worst cases of people losing their shirt tend to be people speculating with options, and it's definitely up to the broker what options trades (beyond those secured by cash or securities) they want to permit their customers to do.

There are different levels of options trading for a reason. Giving level 3 options trading out to anyone is reckless; in the hands of many people these are tools that are pretty much being used for making leveraged speculative bets, not careful hedges of risk.

If it didn't work with process substitution, that's not likely to work either.

I'm guessing it is trying to seek, or running a stat first to check filesize or similar.

I would suggest things that use the hydraulics analogy, like this: https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~dwharder/Analogy/

All 57 members of Buffalo's emergency response unit resigned in protest of disciplinary actions taken against the men who shoved a 75 year old man and then walked over his body while he bled from the ear. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/05/buffalo-off...

It's not at all obvious to me that the majority of policemen don't support the abuses, even if they aren't all getting their hands dirty.

I agree that fines are not ideal, and I think these are interesting discussions we need to be having to think of better solutions, but I also want to be clear that fines are several orders of magnitude better than jailing people (and I think it goes without saying, even more orders of magnitude better than summary execution).

I do think there's potential for more mandated community service as a response to antisocial behavior. Structure it so people don't have to miss work.

A very large amount of the crimes we prosecute people for are either drug crimes or crimes because of poverty/economic inequality, and these are best addressed with public health and investment.

Even some of the remaining economic crimes - like selling untaxed cigarettes (what Eric Garner was killed for) if they still happen probably don't need public enforcement. Give those that pay the taxes standing to sue those who don't pay the taxes. If those who are paying it aren't bothered enough to pay for enforcement, I don't see why others should be.

Most of what we do in the name of policing is deal with problems that we'd be better off preventing or dealing with by someone other than a man with a gun. This is the low hanging fruit we should pursue immediately, and when we see what's left the opportunities and alternatives for further improvement should become clearer.

You cannot incapacitate multiple people with a taser (once the rounds are in the first person it's unavailable to be fired again) and there were multiple cops there.

If the threat of a taser is a threat that warrants lethal force in self defense, the police are reaching for them far too quickly when they deal with people who are non-compliant. It takes very little provocation for most police officers to deploy their taser. I believe they are almost always used against unarmed people (armed people get shot, not tased).

It's really just one bad apple.

Unfortunately the apple is the police and it's everywhere and armed.

The economy depends on peace and geopolitical stability

Well, we're boned.

Laws are passed by Congress, policies are created by the executive to define things left unspecified by law, pursuant to broader powers granted by Congress.

Policies that aren't laws carry the same effective force of law, but they can be changed on a whim by the president with an executive order.

The Federal Home Loan Bank Act established the agencies that would create redlining, but the redlining itself was created by the administrators and independent agencies created by the act.

Post US Civil war, we encoded a set of rules that on their face did not discriminate on race. But their effect was basically to prevent black people from voting and enjoying their civil liberties.

The laws about voting (poll taxes, grandfather clauses) did claim to not be about race to pass muster regarding the 15th amendment, but the same is not true of laws concerning exercise of other civil liberties. The bulk of Jim Crow laws were quite explicitly discriminating on race.

In the late 90s on efnet's #computers we used to say "don't get a maxtor, just write your data to a dead fish instead. It's cheaper, and you have about the same chance of reading your data back."

I am curious as to when these good ol days are for you.

I think this just means employers will still have incentive to hire people to be employees (as then they benefit from the employee's growth), rather than contract out work to firms which may reassign or replace the (now valued, experienced) employee. When you contract out instead of hire, you're giving an incentive to a firm to get the work done as cheaply as possible, and that's not always the right trade-off.

The earlier waves of outsourcing were about shifting things like management responsibility out of the company, and I think that was shown to have unintended negative consequences for a lot of firms. I don't think there's much reason why an employer wouldn't be excited about hiring good, talented people from cheaper labor markets now.

I doubt you've got a good data stream about sell-by dates, tho - the old and new have the same UPC generally. Maybe OCR of sell by stickers? And this doesn't help things that don't have dates, like produce.

bash.org isn't curated; linking to it doesn't seem worse than linking to twitter.com? I'm sure a lot of things on bash.org are awful.

And this is coming from someone who is on the opposite side of you for A, B, and C.

It's been about 12+ years since I've regularly dumpstered food, but my experience is that more food was being thrown out before (but maybe not much before) the sell-by date than after.

I think the issue is that of given the choice between something with a sell-by date a few days in the future or 10-15 days in the future at the same cost, nearly everyone is going to take the food with the better date. Which means the arrival of a new batch of inventory makes the older inventory barely salable.

Technical solutions could help here: it is taxing on humans and most POS systems to have to adjust the price of older inventory, but if that could be done automatically (or the labor pushed onto the customer to identify the condition in exchange for a discount) people looking for deals might help reduce this type of waste.

heard someone refuse to buy eggs because they farmer got them from her own chickens

OK, I'll bite- where else could a farmer get [chicken] eggs from besides their own chickens?

I'd assume a lot of the losses would be the same across all devices - e.g. GSM and associated preprocessing will result in dynamic compression in a uniform way regardless of placement, no? It's an interesting idea but it seems like you'd need a mixture of different compression types.

Emacs and Emacsspeak in particular. Emacs is the richest text-based user experience out there;

My naive expectation is that non-visual editors like ed and ex would be easier to use than visual editors like emacs and vi, but I'm curious to learn more about how people work here. How well do visual editors interact with screen readers? The screen readers would presumably need to offer an interface to reread parts of the screen, and this seems redundant with the non-visual editors that take commands to print like ranges.