Benjammer

It's also so much more complicated than this. I've known more than one person who didn't act as a cynic, they outwardly preached and proselytized this sort of "change the world" viewpoint, in order to attract attention and twitter followers. In a professional context they wanted to play the part of a "visionary" or whatever, and always acted positive about change. Yet, if you really get to know them and manage to ask the right question in a vulnerable moment, you would suddenly realize that their internal worldview is just about as cynical as it's possible to be.

If you want to make it interesting again after playing through it once, you could try using a user script plugin (like Tampermonkey) to automate the game.

SOLID[0] is always somewhere to start if you really have no idea where to begin understanding what makes code more maintainable. There are plenty of books out there, but those can be a minefield in terms of knowing which ones to really commit energy to learning. The only real answer that I know of here is personal experience though.

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

Are you not allowed to shoot someone in Germany if they fire a gun into the air and then point it at you? What about if someone is swinging a blunt object violently at your head? Is there just not such a thing as "self defense" in Germany?

I feel like I sound like one of the right wing sympathizers but I'm honestly just curious how things work over there, are you willing to explain?

I mean, yeah. Doesn't make it reasonable. You can either argue it's unreasonable or argue that Facebook should behave "ethically" here, I don't think you can have both. It seems like people want Facebook to help everyone to have a strong opinion based on zero knowledge, but they want everyone to have the "correct" opinion.

I think social media doesn't give people "the wrong opinion," I think it gives people opinions in general when they shouldn't have any.

Was this suppressed on Twitter? What about the NYT publishing an objective analysis of the situation? Aren't we discussing Facebook, specifically, here?

In your scenario, do I not have any other options for showing my side of the story other than Facebook?

Somehow I watched 1 or 2 videos on twitter right at the time, and got a good sense of what happened, that ended up being consistent with the jury ruling. These weren't even political posts, just some OSINT people I follow. I was not aware of any "misleading media narrative," since I don't consume any mainstream media outside of occasional twitter posts. Once the trial started I was actually very surprised how many people had zero clue what really happened, yet had strong opinions one way or the other.

This decision by Facebook probably does reverse something that was a mistake in some vague, ethical sense, but I disagree with the characterization that Facebook should be responsible for people's personal worldviews. You can't just give up all personal responsibility to Facebook and then complain when they do bad things with that power. They made a decision for business and legal reasons and we can criticize them from a business or legal perspective, but the narrative that "Facebook should have known better and it's their fault that people were misinformed" is just odd to me. It feels like a "have your cake and eat it too" situation with personal responsibility for being informed about the world.

Ugh this is way worse and actually seems far more likely and easy to accomplish than the public wifi thing...

I have seen stories of smart TVs doing active scans for any unsecured wifi network in range, then connecting and phoning home without ever informing the user or showing anything in the menus. Is that a real thing?

I think the horseshoe is almost coming back around to the point where people criticizing NFTs are bringing them up more often and in more annoyingly-out-of-context ways than the crypto people themselves...

The mind-blowing part of this is that the "mindshare" includes the perception that the apps have more predictable prices than yellow cabs... That was never why people switched in the first place, it was because of cheaper prices and convenience, not "predictable" prices. The whole thing from the start was that the price on Uber fluctuates a lot. That's central to the entire idea. Surge pricing, etc.

>at the end of the day he has no interaction with the actual filesystem contents or what they mean. They're just bits flying around

Whatever helps him sleep at night I guess. I doubt history will make this distinction when talking about "legacy," as this sub-thread is.

>"monsters of humanity"

You have to realize that this exaggeration contributes poorly to the discussion, right? Are you seriously trying to satirically hyperbolize the characterization of Facebook's effects on society in order to make it seem like people are overreacting to the whole thing? This is a wild take on the matter, to me, in 2021.

I would absolutely give you a break if you don't join the Peace Corps. I won't give you a break if you choose to take a lucrative job at Facebook. This is not a black-and-white issue.

>I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most

So, I would posit that working at Facebook is, thus, "more egregious than most" other jobs. That's the point here. Nobody is saying that it's either work at Facebook or join the Peace Corps. I, personally, think an engineer at Facebook is contributing more harm to society than an engineer at any of the other companies you mentioned, yes. Substantially worse? Depends how we define that. But, worse? Definitely.

>People work at Facebook because they offer among the highest salaries, and are insulated enough from the bad PR to not feel bad about it

I'm curious how you draw a line between "the bad PR" and everything else at Facebook? Are you distinguishing the media coverage of the company as a separate thing that employees have to deal with other than the actual actions the company takes, and the ramifications of its real effects on society?

If someone is "insulated from the bad PR," does that mean they are insulated from anything working with or enabling the bad actions/effects? Or just insulated from the "PR"? If the former, how could we possibly make that distinction with an organization as large and complex as Facebook? How can you be so sure that anything any given employee touches does or does not connect to the bad effects on society? If you just mean insulated from the "bad PR," then can you see why history might look unfavorably on someone who hides the greater negative effects of their actions from themselves?

Thank god, this guy[0] can finally cut over to native generics in his code.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...

There was a whole Friends episode about this where Rachel starts smoking so she can be privy to the conversations out on the smoke deck at work.

I think it's sort of a type of double standard where you say that "your side" is only acting out of fear/confusion/emotion/ignorance/etc but the "other side" has a long, complicated game plan that is surely going to fail, and everything they do is committed towards their bad plan, so you feel the need to "call them out" on it. You can't really "call someone out" in the same way if they are just confused or upset, rather than evil.

It's important to self-motivation to not beat yourself up over these "bad days." For example, without these bad days, you have nothing to contrast with the "good days," so it's possible it makes you appreciate those times more. It can also give you insight into what produces a good or bad day for you, personally, if you start to monitor the circumstances around good and bad days in terms of how much sleep you get, your diet, general mood/feelings, etc.

I know for a fact that at least some teams at Google are hiring for full-time remote right now.

Yes, I meant that priorities and metrics changed, not that they intentionally sabotaged one metric in order to "cheat," and directly boost another metric, it just wasn't a priority anymore to optimize for usability. In fact, when you look at it from a market/systems level instead of any individual product or company, it doesn't even need to be one designer or product or company moving A-to-B from "usable" to "moar white space." It could be a totally different company who never optimized for usability who comes in and steals lunch.

>there are a lot of parallels with the lack of care for security

Absolutely, 100%. Same idea.

I kind of disagree, I think this was more based on ad-tech taking over and pages optimizing for SEO and session-length and things like that. The metrics changed when the customer changed as we moved to free software.

I tend to think this is only true for activities where the enjoyment/experiential part of the activity is separated from the "meta business game" of the activity to a large enough degree. While this may be true for a lot of hobbies, I don't think it's always the case. If you love to play a sport, the meta game of being a pro athlete is very close to the part that a player loves, which is playing the actual sport. The sport itself is the main focus, everything else like coaching and contracts is window dressing compared to actual playing skills. If you love to cook elaborate dishes for your family from various world cuisines, you should probably consider the meta game before you try to become a chef or open your own diner or restaurant. Do you like thinking about ingredient prices versus dish prices? Marginal efficiency of how a dish is cooked and constructed? Seating layouts and service rotations? How to design, implement, maintain, and update a profitable menu, etc.

If all you have is passion, and you're not able or willing to closely examine the step-by-step process for how your passion translates to cash, and how that cash makes its way to your bank account, then of course you won't enjoy a hobby as a career or business venture. You need to actually enjoy the business aspects directly if you want to be happy with a hobby-turned-career.

I think you can probably get the same "batching benefits" if you use a global ID generation service of some sort, with sequential IDs to improve indexing. Using sequential IDs doesn't necessitate using auto-generated sequential IDs.

>code should be written to be easy to delete

This article tends to make the rounds on here every once in a while: https://programmingisterrible.com/post/139222674273/how-to-w...

Isn't the only thing here that is enabled by microservices the separate tooling part? Couldn't the rest of it be achieved somewhat easier with a standard service-oriented architecture in a monolith? Why do we need to insert network calls between everything?

>you just need to shut your phone off

These arguments are frustrating to me, they are completely missing the point. It's a misunderstanding of the difference between incentives and choices. When someone says "I have to be online all the time," they are not saying "I have no free-will and am being legally and/or physically compelled to stay online." They are saying "If I don't want to make substantial changes to my lifestyle and drastically reduce my career opportunities, not to mention possibly get fired from my job and/or lose personal relationships, I have to stay online all the time."

I went to a Phoenix show at Madison Square Garden last-minute with a friend in 2011. After Phoenix played a 3 song encore, the stage went dark and then a DJ booth lit up in the back, way above the stage, and Daft Punk walked out and they did an ~8 minute remix/mashup of Harder Better Faster and Phoenix's 1901. One of my favorite concert memories ever.

> junior high is often the worst

I worked at a summer camp for a few years. It's split into "sessions" for different age groups by grade level: 4/5, 6/7, 8/9, 10/11/12. It was staggering how bad the bullying was in the 8/9th grade session compared to all other grade levels. The rest of the groups barely ever had any issues at all other than isolated, subjective cases, while the 8th/9th grade sessions would almost all have HUGE drama with kids (boys and girls both) changing friend groups, kicking kids out of their group, and joining new groups, all within the span of one week at camp. More drama than a reality TV show, it was nuts.

I agree about eliminating middle school / junior high. It's too narrow a band of ages, they aren't exposed to enough more mature kids to learn how to act, or much less mature kids to show them a reflection of what they used to be like.

Remember the adage:

A specialist will tend to underestimate how much a generalist can accomplish, when they choose to specialize, and a generalist will tend to underestimate how deep any given specialty really goes.

So the options are either "mug for the camera" or shut off your camera completely? You don't think there's any middle ground here?