lastangryman

Meta-meta-comment, but "horrible" is your value judgement, which isn't shared by everybod

I do feel Rakuten's website is "horrible"

Sorry to hear you're in that situation. Having been responsible for hiring at a few places I would stress to keep yourself busy and your tech skills active. If you have a big gap with no explanation or activity it's hard to justify bringing you in for interview. Find things to do, and put it on your CV but in a way that shows this is part of a work gap and you're looking for FTE.

You could contribute to open source. This can take a few forms. A few small PRs on well known projects can go a long way. Many projects are looking for docs and better test coverage, these can be easy ways in.

You can make something on your own and open source it. I'd suggest something small but complete with some sort of interesting novelty to it. Make sure any projects have interesting READMEs. Don't just follow a TODO list tutorial in language X and stick it up GitHub.

You could volunteer your tech skills somewhere. Even contacting charities and seeing if they need help with anything.

You could try write a blog, but with a specific focus on an area that interests you. I was out of work for a while and planned to do this for horizontal database scaling for example.

Any of these things look infinitely better to a potential employer than a blank space.

Finally, it's really important to own the narrative. Put on your CV you've been out of work but looking for a new opportunity. List the things you've been doing. Maybe there's a framing you can put on it, like a career break. Don't be ashamed by it, stay positive. Good luck.

Say “please” and “thank you” a lot.

I remember a previous role the team leaders all went on a management training course. Everyone came back and started adding "please" to every request. I found it really patronising and felt like I was being spoken to like a 5 year old.

"Can you run the SQL update in prod?"

Vs

"Can you run the SQL update in prod please?"

The "please" sounds like an exasperated parent that is fed up giving the instruction.

I'm also starting to get really sick of emojis everywhere. I don't think they added to this article at all. I hope it's just a temporary fad we are going through and this isn't the future of written communication.

100%. That's the first thing I want to see after a brief intro.

Amazing. I would absolutely love to sit down with the Secretary of State and test their knowledge of what does of does not consist of of computer.

This makes me hyper sad. Seems Amazon are just making things worse with everything they do. Ever tried to buy something like a USB hub or charge cable off Amazon? Endless suspect brands you've never heard of with poor quality. Now they are normalising books with blurry cover art and hard to read text due to budget printing?

Buy from a book shop.

Full disclosure didn't even read the article. But if you wanted to know what programming as a game would look like, play Factorio. Refactoring, decoupling, debugging, it's all there. I played it intensely for 3 weeks then had to force myself to put it down. It's a one of a kind game.

Also from a store perspective, any game where shortcuts like this are used tend to be shit games. They don't want spam games to be pumped. There's already enough indie trash platformers that nobody wants.

I find this hard to agree with. A game engine is a "shortcut" too, I can imagine people saying at some point anything developed with Unity would "tend to be shit games".

Associating quality with visual fidelity anyway is wrong, look at Terraria, I'm pretty sure anyone semi competent with AI generation could produce better assets, but it wouldn't help them produce a better game.

People will use gen AI art in good games, and people will use gen AI art in terrible games.

I chuckled at:

NewsGuard has a clever way to identify these junk AI-written websites...For example, one site called CountyLocalNews.com had messages like “Sorry, I cannot fulfill this prompt as it goes against ethical and moral principles …

`if str_contains(body, "Sorry, I cannot")` thanks NewsGuard, you've solved the problem pats NewsGuard on head while giving them an encouraging smile

I find it extremely upsetting that `networkQuality` is the only command that is not entirely lowercase. How did this get through PR??

I actually feel embarrassed for Amazon when I'm trying to checkout and can see all the deceptive tricks they implement to make you sign up. This is one of the richest companies in the world acting like dodgy internet scammers.

Good to see this is finally catching up with them in some way.

Apologies, I'm not up to date in this space, so probably a stupid question but how does this differ to docker compose?

My understanding of the value of codespaces was instant start up, literally zero to download locally, and centralised definition. Does this mean I would go back to have to downloading everything locally, albeit in a nice sandboxed package with a neat definition language and convenient command?

You should try Godot. Open source and extremely lightweight compared to Unity and Unreal. It's pleasure to use, none of the baggage of the other engines. I'm a patron contributor. Fantastic for hobbyist tinkering and also viable for full blown commercial games.

https://godotengine.org/

With all the those leetcode-style interviews and dynamic programming problems in the interview process, surely the genius "Googlers", the worthy few, that make it through this process wouldn't need to use AI to generate code.

There is such a small market for 4 player local co-op indie games, I think you need something really special to grab people's attention.

It was an interesting deconstruction though. The bit about the different trailer variations they needed to create is a great example of the value a good publisher can add. It seems like this team did a lot right though, just not the right game at the right time.

On long enough timescales, capitalism destroys anything good.

The root cause behind all of this drama is Reddits need to maximise their valuation, and the impact that has on their decision making.

Thanks - I'm sure there are other uses cases, I didn't mean to imply there weren't, just for me I always associate AOP with a time in my career where nothing useful was ever shipped, but there was lots of pontificating and philosophising about rather abstract things like this.

Ah this takes me back to my first job. Medical start up, working on a very long term project that the company was completely unequipped to deliver. I was young and keen so didn't appreciate the context, I just did stuff.

For some reason, we hired an "architect" from a large Bank that used Java. He used to make proclamations like "we should write tests", but never actually got into more detail than that. One of his preachings was about aspect oriented programming and how it was going to be future. He did a talk on it, and I remember someone asking "what else does it apply to apart from logging and Auth?"...no answer.

Not long after, I left. 2 years there, probably over 15 engineers, I don't think we built anything close to a functioning software product.

Wonderful story and very inspiring. Is programming the only field where you have this strange mix of people coding "as a job" with literally no interest beyond that, and projects like this? It's hard to explain stuff like this to people. Some will "get" this video, many won't, which is a shame.

EDIT: I strongly recommend to click through to the actual video and not just the article: https://youtu.be/l5MoOh4LkSs

How nice to read a long-from piece online, simply and clearly formatted, with no adverts, popups, affiliate links, or such nonsense. Just genuine writing.

The work was the only thing that kept me out of my anxiety.

I know it's a trope for knowledge workers to romanticize physical work, but I find the opposite when programming. The work increases the mental anxiety.

I got sinking feelings of dread and despair reading that, a terrifying insight in to the internal Microsoft mindset.

All these detailed, complicated arguments. Why is homelessness not the same level of problem in the UK? Maybe think about that then consider why it's such an issue in the US.

That API pricing, for what is mostly static content, is just insane. I've created pricing models for write heavy APIs that come out at a fraction of that, while still maintaining a margin. If that's a genuinely "fair" price then Reddit have some serious technical debt. It feels like this is intentionally overpriced to discourage any serious use.

It's a digital Tragedy of the Commons: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Surely a simple solution here is for Glassdoor to show removed reviews with a simple placeholder text and a reason for removal.

Glassdoor could also account for these in its overall rankings, and show a graph plotting number of removals against time. That way companies legitimately removing invalid reviews can continue to do so, but those gaming the system would have that activity show up. If they plotted submitted reviews as well you could see when these periods of mass removals and "forced" positive reviews happened.

Glassdoor could also provide a short summary of "X reviews removed in the last Y days - this is lower/higher/inline with the average".

All of this is easily within the power of Glassdoor to do and keeps the platform fair for both parties.

I read the article more as: take the leap, but recognise when to step back reassess.

I took time out to work on a personal project that sounds a lot like this article, a lot of what's said here resonated with me really strongly.

It's funny how the spark of an idea and excitement can fade once the reality sets in and doesn't match what was in your head. Endlessly plugging away at it, trying force the outcome you want through sheer will can be quite exhausting and defeating.

One surprising take away for me was that I missed having other people involved (it was a software project). Just having other people to be accountable to or some sort of other stakeholder that can help share the mental burden I think is key for the days when you feel unsure of the direction or purpose. I've done exactly what the article says and taken a step away for now, but hope to come back to it with a different approach and hopefully others involved.

Once Chat GPT comes with a realistic avatar and human voice, I wonder if pleasantries will become the default. I'm just thinking of K walking through the police station in Blade Runner 2049 and the other officers telling him to "** off skin job". Like in RPG games today it's almost a release to be a bit of a dick speaking to NPCs, will people blow off steam by berating Chat GPT? Seems like a light hearted article but interesting to see how this plays out.

That really sucks you were put in that position.

I see what you are saying, but susbscription according to OP was for "HP Instant Ink". I also assume the cost of the subscription was pretty much to cover the cost of the Ink. In my eyes, OP has already paid for the ink. If they want to make it fair, then they could define a charge per page and then bill you for actual pages printed at the end of each month. The fact that ink must be bundled in cartridges that print many pages is HPs problem, not consumers, and they can't work around that with a non-sensical subscription model.