throwaway19937

It is a call for more communication and understanding of different opinions.

It's a poorly argued rationalization for antisocial behavior from someone with a bad case of engineer's disease.

Since I’ve posted it this article got flagged and unflagged multiple times, the first flag appeared within minutes (i.e. the user pressing the button did not even have a chance to read the article).

You don't have to eat the whole apple to know it's bad.

I wonder what made people so aggressive and short-tempered about different points of view recently.

It might have something to do with the ongoing pandemic. I'm really not interested in yet another article from someone who's too precious to be vaccinated.

Back in college, I would go to house parties and bars and do everything that everyone else was doing; the only difference is that I would have a Coke in my hand instead of a Rum & Coke.

I have found that I get fewer questions about my drink if I have the bartender put a lime in the Coke.

(https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882) has a dated (2000) example of metaclass usage in Python 2.

Are you willing to name the company? The ability to move that fast is an attractive quality for an employer.

My guess is that the customer here is asking because of a mandate to prefer open source solutions wherever possible.

I don't think that HPC or the DoE have anything close to such a mandate. My guess is that the request comes from a a user who wants to try compiling their code with gfortran.

I think the customer is NERSC (https://docs.nersc.gov/); the commands in the bug report match those described at (https://docs.nersc.gov/development/compilers/base/).

I would respond with "F2018 conformance will be fixed sooner if you help."

I flagged it because it's a Well, Actually (https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html) that makes an unsupported claim.

Never assume malice when machine learning will suffice as an explanation.

AWS then stopped providing service to Parler due to the content they were hosting exposed by this action. Well within their rights! But they excuse the same sort of content hosed by Twitter....

AWS cut off Parler after several months of moderation problems (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-a...). They weren't motivated by Parler being hacked.

Every other automated system regularly screws up - why would Facebook be any different?

Both agencies have a long history of illegal domestic surveillance.

The NSA's warrantless surveillance program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...) and the CIA's Operation CHAOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS) are two examples of this behavior.

TL;DR the author thinks _GNU_SOURCE should be defined in the build system instead of in source files.

She doesn't give a rationale.

However, the manager of the other group should get some management training. He did a piss poor job at communicating. All it would've taken is explaining the group's prioritization and roadmap and the OP would've not left with "THIS COMPANY CAN'T DO SHIT!" feeling.

My impression of the OP is that he expects other teams to drop everything and make the change. He may have been told about the roadmap but feel that his project is more important. That seems more likely than the following excerpt from the post.

So I reach out to the manager and ask what is going on. This is a simple task, I said. Why does it take an entire quarter for your team to deliver? He doesn't have an answer.

I'm working on migrating our apps to the parent company's VM launching and deploy platform. Should be fairly straightforward, I think. Unfortunately, the deploy tooling isn't entirely compatible with our app so I ask the team if they can implement $X feature to support our app.

It's probably easier and quicker to change the app to work with their platform. If nothing else, it's going to be much easier to staff the project; your team knows the app.

The first engineer I talk to doesn't even attempt to answer my question but redirects me to their manager. Ok, that's odd, I think, but whatever.

That's not an unusual response (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070522-00/?p=26...).

Manager says sure, just fill out this feature request doc. It's a Google Docs template with 4 (!) pages of required documentation to just explain why I want this feature implemented. It asks for my team name, the motivation, why I can't solve the problem some other way, yada yada...ok, I guess it's good to document your work, so sure. I fill it out and submit it.

This strongly suggests that ad hoc feature requests are or have been an issue for the team. It's also a good way to weed out requests that the requester isn't serious about or has an available alternative.

No response after two days. Then I get an automated email that their skip level manager has approved the work. Huh? This is followed by an email that the team's eng manager approved the work. Why do two layers of management need to approve work on something they have no knowledge about?

These managers are running interference for their team so they can get work done.

Finally, after many rounds of arguing about why this needs to be done in the first place (ahem: you told us to migrate to your platform, and it literally does not work for our app), they quote us a delivery timeline of end of Q1 in 2022.

Most development teams have a backlog; I'd be concerned about the work quality of one that didn't.

At this point I am in absolute shock. This should take no more than a few days to implement.

The change might take a few days but the team already has a backlog of WIP (work in progress) (http://www.leanmanufacture.net/leanterms/wip.aspx). The time to completion is based on the other tasks in the queue. If the migration needs to happen sooner then that's between your manager and the manager of the other team.

So I reach out to the manager and ask what is going on. This is a simple task, I said. Why does it take an entire quarter for your team to deliver? He doesn't have an answer.

Every task is simple when you aren't the one doing it.

This was a bad move tactically; calling him out is not going to get you the results you want.

I tell him I'm happy to fix the issue myself, if they link me to the relevant codebase. "It shouldn't be too hard to dig in and submit a patch," I think to myself. He says he cannot give me access to the codebase for compliance reasons, and that only members of his team have R/W on that repo. What???

Maybe they don't want to support bespoke features for your app. You can check in the code and be done but they're stuck supporting the change forever.

If it's an enterprise (https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/10/02/why-are-enterprises-so-s...) the latter will be a much easier sell to management. Paying for support is a given but contributing developer time will require many approvals from different departments if it can be done at all.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t there open source licenses that don’t permit unauthorized distribution? If so, couldn’t they safely release the source code without worrying about competition from forks?

They would still be faced with knock-offs that either copy code or violate the license; Paint.net (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.net#History) is an example of this happening for an open source project.

If information security people would spend the same amount of time they are spending complaining about this vulnerability trying to educate their organisations on the importance of supporting open source solutions they depend on we wouldn’t be in this situation.

Security teams are stuck with securing the tire fire; they didn't choose the library or platform. If anyone should be advocating for supporting open source, it's the developers who benefit by using open source libraries.

The company that created Java went out of business and was sold to Oracle for a fraction of its original worth. So Java was a business failure -- or at least I'd be interested to see someone defend Java as a business success.

Sun and its peers declined because PCs running Linux became good enough; selling commodity hardware is a different business model (https://yarchive.net/comp/sgi_market.html) and it's incredibly difficult to move down market.

Oracle acquired Sun because they didn't want Java be owned by a competitor (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-alphabet-trial/ora...). Java was also why IBM offered to buy Sun; it seems hard to consider Java a business failure when it's most of the remaining value of the business.

Another possible reason is that the user can load help pages or search results even if the primary browser is broken, has a corrupt install, etc.

Python also makes breaking changes in minor releases; 3.5 introduced async/await and 3.7 made them reserved keywords.

TL;DR don't waste your time.

This is a transcript of a Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) talk with some substitutions made (SmallTalk -> Haskell, Ruby -> Rust, and others). The original talk was mediocre; the changes haven't improved it.

You can join the French Foreign Legion; there's an 80% attrition rate (https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-culture/french-foreign...),

If you liked this essay then you would probably enjoy his autobiography Born Standing Up[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Standing_Up

Personally I'd like to see more runtimes with some concept of capabilities. As a user, I'd like to be able to say "this package cannot make outbound calls" rather than doing so at the program or host grain via layer 3 or layer 7 firewall rules. I think maybe Deno allows this, and I wouldn't be surprised if JVM or .Net did as well.

Unfortunately both of these platforms have removed their security controls - the JVM's SecurityManager[0] was deprecated and recent versions of .NET have dropped sandboxing. [0] https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/411

These aren't conflicting beliefs. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that JavaScript has an inadequate standard library and recognize that other ecosystems can have dependency issues.

Presumably if I am alone in my passion for the subject then no-one will ever comment/reply/email/express their agreement.

You don't have to wait for others to agree with you. Part of activism is making other people aware of an issue and inspiring passion about it.

If however lots of people start to agree, to put their hands up and say they feel the same, then I can take a next step which is I'm guessing to do what you say which is to define a call to action - but what would that be, can you suggest?

The book Playbook For Progress: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer has a detailed description of how activism works. It isn't theoretical - the author founded the Bus Rider's Union (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_Riders_Union_(Los_Angeles)).

Have you read Game of Mates(https://gameofmates.com/)? It discusses crony capitalism in Australia and has some concrete policy recommendations.

If you're looking for other references on activism the Radical Book Club (https://status451.com/tag/radical-book-club/) series of blog posts has detailed book reviews and recommendations. It's targeted at right-wing readers but the advice applies regardless of your views.

1. Open VS, wait a minute. 2. New Project 3. Run, wait 10 minutes for dependencies to download. 4. Want to use Sublime Text or VS Code, haha lol.

You're playing on hard mode; try using Visual Studio for everything.

You could call it the Fifth Circle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)#Fifth_Circle_(...) of Hell as a service.