throwaway_egbs

I wonder what people like this would do if faced with a real lifelong challenge?

Rethink this.

Same here, and I’ve worked at everything from mom-and-pops to a couple of household names. IME this (seemingly endless) discussion about how to manage commit history is the tabs-versus-spaces of source control.

The claim I was responding to is, "In a democracy, there is no reason to hide behind anonymity while fighting for a just cause."

What I'm saying is that there absolutely are reasons.

This is also not a binary proposition. In a group of activists you can have some people working anonymously and some people working out in the open.

Just when I thought tweetstorms couldn't get any worse, here's one where every tweet is a quote-tweet of the author. I don't even understand how I'm supposed to read this.

Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use.

Surely there's a limit to this. If I use a machine to produce something that just happens to exactly match a copyrighted work, now it's not infringement because of the method I used to produce it? That seems nonsensical, but maybe there's precedent for this too? (I have no idea what I'm talking about.)

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled repeatedly that anonymity is protected by the First Amendment, specifically because anonymity enables free speech. A person who does not speak because they've been cowed into silence is deprived of their rights. "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. … It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation … at the hand of an intolerant society." (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission.)

Ah, I see what you were saying now. It was a little confusing for me in the context of a discussion about police.

You can record on-duty police officers in California without their permission.

https://www.jmllaw.com/blog/keep-mind-9-rules-of-filming-pol...

https://www.solutionlawapc.com/criminal-defense/the-right-to...

https://www.vjamesdesimonelaw.com/can-you-film-police-when-s...

There was even a bill passed in 2015 (still in effect) that affirmatively declared a right to record: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

I've seen a lot of people lately making the "you’re made out of animal parts, so eat animals" argument, which is reasonable on its face. But there's a pretty serious problem with it: those animals get everything they need from plants. And now we're in very murky territory, because now you have to prove—not just hypothesize, but prove—that the human animal is different from other animals in some very specific ways, or you have to weaken the initial claim to the point where it doesn't really say anything at all.

This reply from @AzureDevOps is bizarre: "We understand. However, the way to report this issues related to Windows 11 is through our Windows Insider even from another device. Thanks in advance."

I think I'm gonna give "AI" a few more years.

https://twitter.com/AzureDevOps/status/1411018079849619458

Welp, guess I'll be taking all my code off of GitHub now, lest it be copied verbatim while ignoring my licenses.

(I'm no John Carmack, but still.)

Really wish you'd been on my last hiring panel. (Quit after six months.)

The article is about link rot, not cultural rot.

Yeah, I get all that too. I think my problem was that I sort of misunderstood what Node is. I've always thought of it as a web server, not a language runtime. So to me it seemed like using Node to run command-line tools was akin to doing

  python -m http.server my_cool_cli_thing

Thanks again.

Right, I get that. What I don't get is why Node is a requirement for a JS compiler. Is that just to get the runtime? I'd always thought of Node as a server on top of a V8 runtime.

(Thank you for your patience with this backend dev who finds your whole world very confusing.)

a working Node.js environment

Sincere no-snark question from someone who's been out of the frontend game for a while: Why do I need Node in order to do "quick and dirty" frontend development?

(FTR I'm with you that jQuery is silly these days. Today's built-in web APIs do pretty much everything jQuery ever did.)

Along those lines (I'm in my early 40s, been programming since I was a kid, working in software since I was 20) my tolerance for BS is at an all-time low and I've been at this long enough now to know my own worth. There are loads of jobs out there, but not many I can be convinced to sign up for.

Agreed, this is creepy, unnecessary, and possibly even damaging to whatever litigation is pending. (Assuming the litigation thing is even true, which I personally doubt.) Even if they do need an image of the drive, the people in IT shouldn’t be the ones pawing through it. That’s a job for a professional investigator or a lawyer. I ran an IT department for four years and if any of my staff did something like this, at the very least they’d be getting a closed door conversation about why this isn’t ok.

Honestly, I don’t know. I have some general ideas from my own experience but I also know better than to be confident they’d stand up to reality. Especially since I’ve dodged the issue by deliberately not having children. I’m not sure there’s a one-size-fits-all solution; I think so much depends on the specific circumstances of the child’s family, peers, and personality, and specific events in the child’s life. I, for instance, really needed my dad to take responsibility for his terrifying behavior, to see the harm it caused me; I needed friends who didn’t bully me; I needed support for coping with scary transitions, like starting middle school; and I needed someone to teach me about life. The drugs were just a symptom. So I don’t know what an effective intervention looks like for that.

*fist bump*

I’ve gone back and forth on that question a thousand times. I’m almost pathologically agreeable so it’s easy for me to minimize and slip into a place of, “oh, it’s ok, I was off my rocker and extreme measures were necessary.” But just because I needed help doesn’t mean I needed what that school was doing. So, while it introduced me to a way to stay clean, and kept me clean for long enough to clear my head, those aren’t, like, super unique things that one can only find in these horrible programs. For me it was a net negative, and I could’ve gotten the positives from any number of other places.

Thanks. I understand why my parents did what they did. I was addicted to meth and probably would’ve wound up dead without a serious intervention. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

(Clean and sober now.)

I was sent to an “emotional growth boarding school” in the ‘90s. I wasn’t kidnapped but many of my schoolmates were. A few years later the department of education (can’t remember if it was state or federal) shut the school down after stories got out about the horrific things that were going on there. Kids forced to sit in corners for days at a time, ambulances not being called for kids who had very seriously self-harmed, strip searches (administered by other kids), physical restraints... I could go on. The place had a cult-like atmosphere that was centered on the headmaster and his weird homegrown therapeutic method.

I had nightmares for years afterwards and still haven’t fully come to grips with what happened there.