throwaway936482

Yep, and from a bean counter but also "someone who likes to do work while at work" Point of view having a chat tool that feels like work at work rather than a typical social media time sink is a GOOD THING. Slack has been an absolute productivity killer everywhere I've used it because it contains all the usual Skinner box tricks to keep users engaged with it rather than doing actual work. Workplaces shouldn't be about "the joy if connecting with each other". shudder

Frankly if you want the kids to stop profiting from all your efforts without paying back, stop giving away your labour to open source projects that have none discrimination and free redistribution clauses that allow companies like Facebook et. al. to make massive profits from building Skinner boxes and generally increasing the grand sum of human misery. A lot of the "good people" have helped create this situation by pushing an ideology that says devs should give away their labour to increase consumer freedom without acknowledging that the people who benefit most are Zuckerberg, pg and the other hyper capitalists.

Depends on the test. There's been a move away from tests that require cultural or language specific knowledge and which instead rely on "which shape in the sequence comes next" type questions but they have their own set of problems in that they don't capture linguistic ability which is a part of intelligence, and are also useless for blind people. Earlier IQ tests required a lot of culturally specific knowledge, and were often quite up front about it because they considered the possession of such knowledge to be a marker of intelligence. Generally that viewpoint is out of fashion now so test makers try to come up with tests that measure "pure" Intelligence, whatever that means.

Unfortunately the BLM rhetoric I the UK is largely pushed by a bunch of (usually white) middle class students with a hard on for Kimberlie Crenshaw and an utter ignorance of the work done over the last seventy years by black and ethnic minority British anti racists to tackle the racism in British society that arises from our history as a colonising nation. Ironically by privileging black American narratives over those of BAME Britons BLM campaigners in the UK engage in a form of cultural colonialism that silences the voices of the very people they claim "matter." Arseholes.

I have a very simple rule when it comes to doing work, be it on open source software or otherwise. If you want me to do something for you, (and you are not a close friend or relative) you will pay me appropriately for it. Want me to fix a bug for you? Pay me. Want me to merge your drive by pull request? Pay me. Want "to arrange a zoom call between me and your team to discuss how we can better use your project to add value to our business". Pay me. This idea that we should all be giving away our labour in the name of the great God's FLOSS and freedom is bollocks and one of the great con jobs of late stage capitalism.

Especially if one is ideologically committed to light touch regulation / free market economics. This makes false advertising a particularly serious crime because it introduces a false information asymmetry between the customer and supplier that damages the effective functioning of the market.

Congratulations! You have just described capitalism! Have a lolly pop.

I see comments like this occasionally and I ask myself, what do people who make them actually do? Genuinely? My three main hats are developer, accountant and 3d designer and while most of my accounting work these days is done via web based services none of my dev work or 3d design work. Sure I consume a lot of stuff on the internet but the vast majority of actual creation is done via native software. Some of it is open source especially dev tools, but the most content creation tools are closed source and with the exception of Blender there are no or at least very few open source content creation tools that are widely used professionally in any field that I'm aware of. (Before the OSS fanatics start what abouting about gimp, Krita, openscad etc. please note the caveats of professional and widely used)

A suggestion - Stop burying the lede. Neither this post not the front page of your brand vantage website say what your service actually does, or what problem it solves. Instead it piles jargon on top of jargon and seems obsessed with talking about brands, despite the product you are offering not having anything to do with brands or branding. On mobile at least all that is above the fold on Brandvantage is a meaningless statement: "Data driven brands stand out" That seems to have no connection to the service you are actually offering - a way of extracting structured data from websites. It wasn't until I got to your use case page on brand vantage via the bottom footer that I managed to work out what your product does, which actually looks cool! You might have started by trying to build a "digital brand expert" Whatever that is, but that isn't what you've ended up with so I'd suggest to stop viewing and promoting it via this lens.

Yeah but there wasn't really an increase in covid related hospital admissions until recently. Given the issues with the uks testing (and reporting) regime it's rather difficult to draw any conclusions about infection rates from the most widely cited set of figures which are numbers tested (or tests mailed out, or tests manufactured or possibly some other definition of test known only to Matt Hancock). The ONS estimates based on random sampling however show that the infection rate only started increasing again at the beginning of September, which explains why we've only seen hospital admissions rising over the last couple of weeks and deaths haven't climbed much yet. Also, so far, it seems not to have started spreading through care homes again like earlier in the year, which is one of the things which seems to have driven up the death rate so high.

Largely because we locked down the entire country and had largely stopped community transmission by then I imagine. Now that lockdown has been lifted and what restrictions there are are increasingly being ignored we are seeing increased community transmission, a concomitant increase in hospital admissions and should start seeing an increase in deaths over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully this wave of deaths will be lower because we are better prepared and have better treatments, and also because the rise in infections is being driven by young people.

Because my customers are 90% on Windows and most of the rest are on Mac and it's them I need to worry about. Hence I develop in Windows and test on Mac.

So that's unions out then. Sounds like a political stance to me if you ban people from advocating for collective bargaining in the workplace.

If you think that the market is a apolitical I have some socialists who'd like a chat...

Never seen one in the wild in the uk

^^^this. Apple appear to be determined to prove that they are monopolists who will use their monopoly power to screw over devs. While apple probably could have got away with suspending just epics developing account and definitely could have got away with just suspending fortnite, attempting to cripple all devs who use unreal to create their games and other products was an idiotic idea, and a textbook example of abusive monopolistic practices. Also epic, because of fortnites success, are absolutely swimming in money and have other revenu streams on desktop and console that that they can survive and prosper on. They're also tapping into an increasing resentment amongst devs, but also political actors about the amount of power apple et al wield.

UK and $13 for 30gb 4g on a rolling monthly contract but there are a lot of more expensive plans out there and people don't switch as often as they could.

This is basically the "security through obscurity" argument that has been so heavily criticised and largely shown to be false. If they (and apple etc.) Open sourced their approval algorithm and allowed pull requests people with an interest in having a high quality app store could try and poke holes in it and make it more robust. I know there are humans in the mix making judgements, but those judgements are largely of the "does the app meet this tick box criteria" type.

Yeah but if you're an American you probably have more to worry about if American intelligence agencies and law enforcement are spying on you than if it's the Chinese and vice versa

This is not modelling a wealth tax. This is disingenuous whining because it fails to take into account that wealth taxes kick in at the point that where people have become wealthy. Lets say it kicks in at 100 million. So you still get to keep 100 million before you pay any tax on that wealth? Or in other words you still get to be incredibly, obscenely wealthy, you just reduce the chance to become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Not seeing how this is particularly demotivating to people want ting to found startups. Lets say it kicks in at 10 million instead. Again you still have the chance to become extremely wealthy before you have to pay it. And if you don't think being worth £10 million is extremely wealthy that's because youre comparing yourself to billionaires. Even if it kicks in a £1 million you still get the chance to become wealthy! Sure maybe at this point to you're reducing the number if people willing to put in 80 hour weeks in the hope of winning the startup lottery but given the number of people who pour their heart and soul into passion projects without the chance of becoming billionaires I don't see that as a problem. Seriously this idea that if we tax the wealthy to the point where they can only afford a single yacht and a modest private island they'll all go on some terrible Randian strike and well somehow lose the value they create is bollocks.

Of course paper ballots can be undermined. The point is that you can easily tell that they have been undermined by the big burly blokes following people into polling stations and threatening you if you don't vote for the preferred candidate, or the ballot boxes turning up in the swamp. You're asking us to trust a magic algorithm that, as I pointed out in another comment, is likely to be proprietary and back doored to hell and back because it is controlled and implemented by the sort of government that rigs elections. This opens up the possibility of subtle, undetectable election tampering, which is much harder to do with a properly run manual system that everyone can understand and participate in.

Again, I can be one of the people doing the counting. Not being funny but if you have an already corrupt electoral system then your government is not going to adopt your magical, totally secure, block chain based, bug free system. They're going to adopt a compromised, proprietary, back doored e voting solution say "look, magical block chain verification as recommended by geeks" and then attack / arrest / kill anyone who questions it's veracity. You're trying to solve a social problem, a corrupt government, with a technological solution that the government itself will undermine or reject. On the other hand you can run free and fair elections by leveraging the powers of observers and volunteers in a war zone or with a corrupt government using paper, pens, boxes and locks.

This is bull. You can be one of the people who does the counting or you can watch it take place. There should be no electronic voting machines involved, that's the whole point of having a manual system. That allows basically anyone who wants to, including a hypothetical five year old, to verify that the system is working as intended. Your system relies on me going out and getting a PhD in cryptography to verify that the system is working as intended. Your system requires basically everyone to rely on trust, a well designed manual system requires basically no one to rely on trust. I know which one I'd prefer.

Whereas currently they get a multi page document. Seriously, as logistical problems go, print separate ballots is really not a hard one and would cut down on the number if people who accidentally vote for the wrong candidate for the wrong thing. Counting may take longer. It may stretch over a few days. Well, fine. Count the presidential ballots first, announce the results and move on down the list until you get to the dog catcher.

Nope, it relies on me being able to go to my local church Hall and watch the ballots being counted or take part in the count myself. All the parties in the election send their own representatives along to watch over the ballot and they also keep a running total. It is a process that I can verify is being carried out correct with my own eyes. Saying "citizens would be much better off not having to trust and be able to verify" In an e voting situation is just wrong, since I can verify the current process by going and watching it or taking part in it, whereas in magical block chain land I am losing the ability to verify because i am replacing a simple process with one that relies me to trust a bunch of code written by and understood by probably a few dozen people. This requires much more trust than the current situation.

1. If there is more than 1 contest going on at a time you have more than 1 ballot. Again this is a simple solution to a dumb problem, you have poorly designed ballots.

Because it's utterly utterly unnecessary and can be solved by the very simple tick box, count ballot in public, let anyone watch or volunteer to do so system. The existing problems with the American system of dodgy ballots, hanging chads, OCR errors etc. are causes by too much technology. Get rid of it all and use a wholly manual system. Treat postal votes the same way and count them at the same time as other ballots.

Nope, it's an idiotic idea. In the UK we have an ENTIRELY manual process, no ridiculous voting machines, butterfly ballots or hanging chads and no OCR machines. Just marking a box with a cross, sticking it in a box and then a load of volunteers physically counting the votes while representatives of the parties and anyone else who wants to wander in watches. Postal votes are treated the same and counted at the same time in the same place. The system literally couldn't be simpler or less corruptible. There is no need for anything more complicated because the system works and can be understood by a five year old.

Now that is a valuable skill.

Yeah, I think that part of what makes a good engineer / good employee generally is the ability to recognise and work within the constraints of the organisation / team without spending all your time whingeing or proselytizing for the One True Way of doing x. This is quite difficult as developers as a breed have a tendency towards binary thinking and engaging in doctrinal disputes. I actually agree that dependency sprawl / hell is a problem best avoided... which is why I avoid web development like the plague. I think Rachel's broader point that the terms we use to describe developers / software engineers are very broad and sometimes unhelpful is right. I think she's being a snob in wanting to retain the high status term for what she does, while dismissing the stuff that she obviously struggles with as being not engineering, but I do think we shall take care to distinguish between high level engineering that largely consists of integrating existing libraries / modules etc. and lower level engineering that she engages in because they are different skills.