generalk

I saw that. The title did not make me think it was related. But fair enough.

It sure fucking is bonkers.

Ruby Central as an organization touts that it is responsible for RubyGems. Assuming this narrative is accurate, they needed to get agreements in place with contributors to appease some funding partners.

This shit happens. Especially as an open-source project started by one dude in 2009 turns into critical infrastructure managed by a 501(c)(3) non-profit.

That they failed so fucking spectacularly speaks incredibly poorly of their board.

Wait, what?

A maintainer of RubyGems was forcibly removed from the RubyGems GitHub org — which was renamed to Ruby Central — along with every other maintainer. Then access was restored, then revoked again. There was no explanation, no communication, and no understandable reasoning for this.

And still! If there is an "official" statement, I can't find one on https://rubycentral.org/.

This wildly transcends "issues with both internal and external communication" or "we're just a bunch of makers who can't be expected to be good at organization or communication" (to highly paraphrase TFA). This is an absolutely disastrous breach of the community's trust.

It does not, for me.

Given that access was cut, then restored, then cut again, then days, then someone finally says "hey were were going to lose critical funding" makes it seem like a post-facto excuse for a hostile takeover.

And the whole "oh, well, we're bad at comms" makes it sound even worse!

Which is the whole crux of the issue. At no point in any of this did Ruby Central do anything reasonable. The they tried to explain that their unreasonable actions were reasonable, if you only knew the things they knew, which they were for some reason unable to tell people until just now.

Could it be true? Sure, absolutely.

Does it seem reasonable at the moment? Hell no.

Folks did this plenty prior to Electron, either by using cross-platform GUI toolkits (GTK and Qt both run on Windows, Java's been doing this forever with Swing and JavaFX, etc), or by writing GUIs for multiple toolkits/OSes that work with the same/similar core application logic.

Electron makes it easier to build cross-platform apps, and certainly cheaper, but it's not like it's the only way to do it.

Of course, and I can't fault Microsoft for that, even if (having been on the bad end of a similar acquisition and IT merge) it sucks for GitHub.

My point was: GitHub as an organization didn't choose Teams willingly, and are still paying for Slack and only using Teams for video conferencing. Of all the explanations of why that might be, the easiest to land on is "because Teams just isn't that good."

Bingo. Nearly impossible for our staff to do their jobs and not discuss something considered PHI.

Regardless of what you think of Teams -- I myself have had nothing but poor experiences over 2.5 years of using it daily -- it's telling that Microsoft has to require folks to use Teams.

I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses Teams.

I know non-tech folks who chose Outlook 365 because of familiarity and then end up on Teams because it's free, but there's a difference between "I chose an email/identity platform that I know and I guess I'll use its chat app too" and "I evaluated team chat offerings and Teams is our top pick."

Hell, at my most recent company (which was founded on O365 before I arrived) I replaced Teams chat interface with self-hosted Mattermost (Slack's HIPAA-compliant tier is way too expensive for a startup) and it was roundly loved. We did still lean on Teams for its video chat, because most of our non-tech staff know how to schedule and join video meetings, but even then the top complaint I got was from folks on Windows laptops whose Teams plugin for Outlook somehow got corrupted (or something?) and suddenly Outlook's Teams integration was gone.

Just an awful product all around -- said with no offense meant to the team building it.

_Update_: I now notice the text "for the sole purpose of video conferencing" which lines up with my use case, but still -- of all the video apps I put Teams down with Webex as "bottom of the barrel choices" due to the constant performance and functionality issues.

Oh no, the stuff I put in quotes was not Robbi speaking during the hand, but my imagining of what Neganeau would have sounded like in his typical confident chattery thinking aloud.

Right but chasing what - she can't beat J8, QJ, KQ, any high flush draw.

Fair, there are definitely semi-bluffs that beat J4 here, and of course if Garret had a made hand she's toast.

There's also (and I think she says this at some point, "purely a bluff-catcher" IIRC) tons of pure air bluffs that J4 beats.

I simply do not understand the stance that if a poker player makes a call with a crap hand that turns out to be good, and then holds up, that she must be cheating. Not for nothing, but I have never heard such accusations leveled at a male player like this.

If you're questioning someone's credibility, you can't really go with their own story about what happened as a reason to exonerate them.

I am not questioning her credibility.

Because there is no reason to.

The only reason anyone thinks she might be cheating is because her heads-up opponent angrily accused her of it. Not even after a bad beat! After his hand, which was never ever the best hand of the two, failed to make any of its draws over a river that was run twice.

I question the credibility of the accusation. Garret has every reason to accuse his opponent of cheating, especially given that he successfully intimidated Robbi into returning his chips, which to me is just insane.

Why the conversation isn't "poker player doesn't catch his outs, demands his money back" is beyond me.

https://twitter.com/RobbiJadeLew/status/1575758837465812992

"He cornered me & threatened me. If he has the audacity to give me the death stare ON camera, picture what it’s like OFF camera. I was pulled out of the game & forced to speak to him in a dark hallway."

It's not marginally +EV to call given the pot odds and she doesn't need to know her exact equity to be cheating, she could be getting binary "you're good" / "you aren't good" signals (and that's much easier to transmit and read without being noticed). [...] The play on the turn is way too ridiculous.

I watched the hand. I've been in that spot. You think you have a good read on someone such that your not-great hand may actually be best, say, they're chasing an open-ender and your high card is good. (Which it would be, barring cards folded by other players.) You're nervous, you're facing an all-in decision, you know the safe move is to fold and move on, but damn all you just can't shake the feeling, and you have to gamble.

Poker player trusting a soul read is the Occam's Razor answer here.

You didn't say this, but I fear that if this were someone like Daniel Negraneau monologuing about what to do and stating his read aloud ("I'm pretty sure you're chasing. I'm probably beat but if you're holding 8 9 I'm beating you right now. I'm right aren't I? sigh I call. Show me I'm beat.") then this wouldn't be an issue at all.

The other thing is why did she return the money after the hand if she won it fairly?

"He cornered me & threatened me. If he has the audacity to give me the death stare ON camera, picture what it’s like OFF camera. I was pulled out of the game & forced to speak to him in a dark hallway."[twt]

Shit, if I was in that position, and producers/officials pulled me out of the game and put me in a room with my opponent where I was accused of cheating and told to return the money, damn good chance I'd return it just to make a scary situation stop. Maybe you're different, but that doesn't mean intimidation doesn't work pretty damn well.

[twt]: https://twitter.com/RobbiJadeLew/status/1575758837465812992

  > Say, initially you were told "if I click this button the status should  
  > update to complete", you write the test, you implement the code, rinse and 
  > repeat until a demo. During the demo, you discover that actually they'd 
  > rather the button become a slider, and it shouldn't say Complete when it's 
  > pressed, it should show a percent as you pull it more and more. Now, all the 
  > extra care you did to make sure the initial implementation was correct turns 
  > out to be useless.

This is an issue that's solved by something like Agile (frequent and regular stakeholder review, short cycle time) and has little to do with whether or not you've written tests first and let them guide your implementation; wrote the tests after the implementation was finished; or just simply chucked automated testing in the trash.

Either way, you've gotta make some unexpected changes. For me, I've really liked having the tests guide my implementation. Using your example, I may need to have a "percent complete" concept, which I'll only implement when a test fails because I don't have it, and I'll implement it by doing the simplest thing to get it to pass. If I approach it directly and hack something together I run the risk of overcomplicating the implementation based on what I imagine I'll need.

I don't have an opinion on how anyone else approaches writing complex systems, but I know what's worked for me and what hasn't.

+1 on "well defined spec" -- a lot of Healthcare integrations are specified as "here's the requests, ensure your system responds like this" and being able to put those in a test suite and know where you're at is invaluable!

But TDD is fantastic for growing software as well! I managed to save an otherwise doomed project by rigorously sticking to TDD (and its close cousin Behavior Driven Development.)

It sounds like you're expecting that the entire test suite ought to be written up front? The way I've had success is to write a single test, watch it fail, fix the failure as quickly as possible, repeat, and then once the test passes fix up whatever junk I wrote so I don't hate it in a month. Red, Green, Refactor.

If you combine that with frequent stakeholder review, you're golden. This way you're never sitting on a huge pile of unimplemented tests; nor are you writing tests for parts of the software you don't need. For example from that project: week one was the core business logic setup. Normally I'd have dove into users/permissions, soft deletes, auditing, all that as part of basic setup. But this way, I started with basic tests: "If I go to this page I should see these details;" "If I click this button the status should update to Complete." Nowhere do those tests ask about users, so we don't have them. Focus remains on what we told people we'd have done.

I know not everyone works that way, but damn if the results didn't make me a firm believer.

  > tl;dr I can't understand getting mad at the Internet for being the Internet 
  > in 2022, it will never get better, if anything it will only get worse [...]

  > The question here is: "Is this a really innovative graphical design that 
  > will get praised by future generations but is misunderstood now" or "Is this 
  > just a bad decision that the creator is unwilling to own". I tend to think 
  > it's the latter. Ultimately the sales will tell.

  > Play it or don't play it but don't ruin it for everyone else.

[0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

"continue to blame the customer?" He's never said that folks were wrong, or blamed anyone for anything. Seems to me like he just wanted folks to not be shitty.

Take, for example, this comment by someone calling themselves _Proud Retro Fascist_:

  > Nice attempt at silencing critics. The game will fail because it is 
  > objectively hideous and you will only have yourself to blame.
  >
  > Inthe end all you will have achieved is killing off Monkey Island once more. 
  > This time permanently.
  >
  > All you had to do was make a game with an art style that appeals to 
  > everyone, whatever it might be. Instead, you opted for the most repugnant, 
  > revolting and hideous TRASH art style that anybody has ever bared witness to 
  > in a video game. You must be out of your mind.
  >
  > All said, try hiring good artists next time... if there is a next time, that 
  > is.
  >
  > RIP MONKEY ISLAND

Stay strong, Ron Gilbert, don't let the assholes get you down.

Definitely, better marketing around differentiation.

I'm a huge dork for open standards, I frequently miss the days of Gaim/Pidgin and having Google Talk be Jabber/XMPP underneath, and being able to IM my friends wherever. Personally, I'm probably going to dork around with Matrix/Element because it sounds like my kind of thing.

But I can't figure why I'd switch to it for work.

I moved my company recently from Teams to Mattermost. The UX was the biggest selling point. Collaboration happens in Mattermost in ways it simply couldn't happen in Teams.

Putting aside the fact that we're not going to churn company comms every quarter for funzies, why would I switch us to Element? What can I do with Element that I can't do with Mattermost or Rocket.Chat or Slack or anything else?

  > If self-hosting Sentry is a problem I would start doubting the skills of your 
  > tech team.

However, my experience is by and large at early-stage startups, and so I also can't think of any instance where I'd want to have my team working on that when they could be working on adding value to our product. If I can pay Sentry to handle setup, scaling, maintenance, etc (and I do!), then that's worth it when weighed against the dollar and opportunity cost of having my team handle it.

That's not to mention maintenance or other issues.

The quoted text is vague and non-directional, whereas the biting response to the GitHub issue screenshot posted in TFA are incredibly directed. I'm new to all of this, and so I dunno if the author was being catty and insulting when making their suggestions, but the responses posted certainly are.

I tell my kids this all the time. An apology has several parts:

1. In clear terms, admit fault. "I responded to a comment with some vitriol, and at the time that seemed okay but looking back that was insulting and rude, and not how I want to address our community members. This is true in any case, but doubly so when the original commenter turns out to have provided good advice that I was ignoring." 2. Express remorse. "I'm sorry. I regret letting my passions get the better of me and hope I didn't damage any relationships." 3. Offer to remediate. "As you can see, we're embarking on doing exactly the work that $AUTHOR suggested, and I'd like make sure they receive appropriate credit. If it helps, I'll link to the original thread and this apology." 3. Do better.

The quotes above are just examples off the top, I have no horse in this particular race, but I do have a lot of experience eating crow and having to apologize for being an ass to someone who later turned out to be right.

  > Like he wants to move the clock. Oh my god just leave it where it is 
  > and get on with your job.

This is impossible out of the box, and maybe possible depending on what third-party tools I hack together. IIRC command-dragging used to work on the clock, but either it never did and I'm misremembering, or the clock and the iOS-replica Quick Settings panel are special and exempt.

  > I'm amazed that people don't just use the software as it's designed.

  > Blocking the faces of children in the prime of their 
  > life, where they need to develop social skills through 
  > interaction and facial expression, is madness.

  > The covid risk for children is a rounding error.

Assuming what you meant is "children are less likely to develop severe symptoms," and also that that's true: they can still spread the virus to the adults they live with in their homes, or the many adults that share the school building they're in. (Did you think we just shove kids in an adult-less environment, or that teachers are somehow immune?)

[1] https://coronavirus.ohio.gov/wps/portal/gov/covid-19/dashboa...

Sure, a cloth mask won't STOP Covid. But the science indicates that community mask wearing does decrease transmission rates as mask wearing rates go up.[1]

Similarly, the current vaccine does not prevent infection, but it significantly reduces symptoms and helps reduce the amount of people who'd otherwise be hospitalized with COVID-19.[2]

Death rates are the most serious metric to look at (and it's abysmal), but certainly not the only metric. Long-term effects of the virus aren't well understood, but individuals have reported brain fog or lack of sense of taste/smell long after clearing the flu-like symptoms.[3] Folks who get sick and transmit the virus, or are severely hospitalized, have still been affected.

Most children do not have issues masking in school unless trusted adults are telling them it's a problem. I have two sons, both of whom mask at school with no complaint, and the school has a full mask mandate except at mealtimes for those eating. Neither the school nor the district have reported any instances of psychological or social harm, and I'm having a hard time finding a credible source that believes that's true.

So, we have a set of assumed (or just plain made up) negatives, and a whole host of scientifically proven benefits. When folks say we are not a serious nation, they mean that this debate is even happening in the first place. The reasonable asks: a facemask indoors in public, and a vaccine. Against a worldwide pandemic that's killed over 700,000 in the United States alone and shut down our hospital systems in some cities.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... [2]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/keythings... [3]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/keythings...

  > but i think this is actually kind of smart 

  > the fact is that steve and everyone he's in the room 
  > with are there because they worship money. that's the 
  > social contract with every job

I'm lucky in that I no longer work because if I don't my family won't eat, but that was once why I worked, and it's why most folks hold jobs.

Even the folks in that room probably cared about their career/power/influence/personal mythology more than they did about their bank account balance -- and yes, those two things are related but distinct.

  > So, you could have delayed the app by the same amount 
  > but now have a mongo environment for production as well?

  > Seems a bit of a waste to rewrite the app instead.

Is what I wish had happened. Instead the developer jammed the huge JSON blobs into a column on an MSSQL table and changed a few lines. lolsob.

This is the way.

My previous company had a HUGE problem with Devs cowboying off and doing whatever and dumping it on the Ops team at the last minute.

One of the biggest (but for damn sure not the last) issues was a dev who designed and built an entire new product around a MongoDB database, which wasn't something we had in production, and something he didn't mention during the months of development and demos to stakeholders. Week before the launch date he hits up our Ops folks to get production set up.

Ops was calm and collected about the whole thing. "We don't have MongoDB in production. Are you volunteering to learn how to correctly install it, write monitors for alerting, be paged with issues, figure out backups and how to ensure our data stays safe, secure, and available? You're not? Then get the [redacted] out and rewrite your app. Yes it will affect the ship date, and yes it's your fault."

I'd love to say we used that opportunity to shore up our processes involving kicking off new applications and including Ops folks in from day one, but that took years more.

I find this response surprising, as I fully agreed with TFA.

I've had an Ops team that had a similar attitude, and they did a lot to help me become a good developer. Part of that was requiring that I come to them with identified problems. "Hey I'm getting this error, can you take a look at a stack trace in a language you've never used and tell me what's wrong?" would have gotten me booed/laughed out of the office, and for good reason.

It's not at all unreasonable to expect the developer to come around instead with "hey my application can't write to this NFS mount like I expected. It's running as $user, the permissions look right but I'm still getting permission denied. Any thoughts?" (A real situation I ran into, turns out SELinux had further permissions I was unaware of, and my Ops lead Chip was happy to show me what was what.)

Yeah, we're all on the same team, and that cuts both ways -- Ops should ensure Dev has what it needs, and Dev should make some actual effort to understand the landscape their production applications run in. Which seemed to me to be the entire point of TFA.

I've gotta agree. We replaced webpack with esbuild in our Phoenix 1.5 app. The migration took a bit of time to get right, and I was questioning whether it was worth it, but having seen the results -- faster builds, fewer dependencies, generally not having to worry about webpack at all -- I'm thrilled this is becoming the default.

Gorilla arms are definitely a thing, and purely touch-based UIs on the vertical monitors we have now don't work very well and will never become popular.

However, I had a touchscreen XPS 13 a while back. And being able to tap the occasional button or slider was _super_ helpful. Certainly more helpful and less jarring than the touch bar my Macbook has.

And consider things like the Microsoft Surface Studio, a desktop PC with a touch display designed to angle at a position that would be more usable with a pen or touch controls for longer periods of time.

We're getting there.

  > The web sucks [...]

The web as an app-delivery platform is amazing. I don't miss documents that only open in WordPerfect 5.1, or having to UUCP files around, or being forced to write non-platform-specific software once for Windows, once for Mac, maybe once for Unix, and hell with anything else.

To the point of TFA, the desktop as a concept is well past its expiration date. Apple ships amazing phones and tablets that are touch-based, and is migrating their touch-based UX to MacOS, but for some damn reason refuses to ship touchscreens, which is just bonkers. We're halfway between paradigms right now, so it's rough going sometimes, but I'm hopeful we'll get somewhere great.