UweSchmidt

"Did you just..." is the phrase to avoid when you want a good, lively discussion.

OP offered a link and an explanation for some of Russia's trouble: the formation of government-backed oligarchies that prevented a healthy market economy to develop. Not the entire picture, maybe a wrong conclusion, but a valid point nevertheless.

The problem is that there are many useful tools and services that most of us are using for free: Text editors, browsers, email, forum software, all sorts of apps, cloud storage etc. It's not realistic to pay 5$ or 12$ a month for each.

Not saying that this is Slack's problem, and we really should cultivate more community organized tooling based on Open Source. But I would say 12$/month is a lot for OP's usecase.

What's your favorite alternative?

And for tennis if you go pure browser, no set-top boxes:

Normal tournaments on tennistv.com for 15€/month.

Australian, French and US Open on Eurosport (online over Eurosportplayer) for 7€/month.

Wimbledon however is only on Sky, that's 35€/month, I skipped that. (That is for Germany).

It's a lot of content, affordable, and you deal with slightly broken websites. Why can't they just show the unspoiled bracket, a notification if a match is complete or ongoing, allow manual unspoilering of individual matches or rounds, and a direct link from the bracket view to the individual match video or stream? /rant

Workplace surveillance is bad even if it "measures the right thing" and makes us all super-efficient, over-surveilled workers.

Having grown up with a world map over my bed, I'd say the overall benefit from seeing all those political borders was generally low. I stared at Antarctica a lot and was able to name most African countries; without further context however their names remained rather abstract.

More interesting concepts would be to emphasize population density, or other meaningful cultural and economic measurables that, short of a "brain reboot", would increase understanding of the world.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/3d-mapping-the-worlds-large...

It must be a different eponymous law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

Points for keeping one day meeting-free and batching meetings together. Deep work is the only useful kind of work, so getting one day of that is something! I'd be radical and suggest another of those deep work days to double productivity, but refering to your last point, organizational changes initiated by the team members are rare.

Generally, good changes would require scrum masters and tech leads to work harder, to really get to the bottom of a wide range of issues outside of superficial meetings, to actually understand how developers, testers and devops struggle, and to solve those problems. But it's easier to put the burden of articulating problems through public speaking on generally introvert developers who then risk incriminating themselves in the process.

> 2) In the beginning of the stand-up, I make space for some minutes of casual chatting and joking around.

In a work environment it is extremely hard for people to truly enjoy jokes and chats when everyone, including soft leadership, is present. People are very much concerned with their standing within the organization and if they are good enough to remain, or advance. If that is not an issue, frustrations with many work-related disappointments and sometimes colleagues are main concerns for software people. It would take a truly remarkable individual to lead such a casual time of cracking jokes in everyone's second language in multicultural teams over video call, when their livelihood or sanity is on the line, rather than it being a stressful performative act for half the team.

I tried to be a little concise. These days we mostly wonder which Amazon review is fake, and which product might be counterfeit. In the earlier days of the internet niche forums surprised with exciting and on-point information and initiative. Back to your charging cord example, a store could innovate and stand out by offering reliable off-brand alternatives for things like charging cords. Such innovation is less likely when a monopolist is holding on to most of the market share.

Back to my main point: The basic logistics of distributing products around the world should be equally good or better in a world without monopolists - theoretically, monopolies extract a surplus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#/media/File:Monopoly-...), intuitively it's obvious ("why try when you don't have to").

Market forces on a commodified, non-monopolized playing field should come up with all that innovation and bring us that charging cord faster and cheaper, and/or through a wider variety of curated market places and organic charging cord communities.

The internet was supposed to clear out all the middlemen. The websites consumers and factories use should be completely commodified and under strong competition, and with lots of innovation, like in the early days.

Very disappointing.

That makes it even harder to call out bad science. You hate how your colleague cut corners but do you want to testify against them in court in your free time and have them sent to jail?

I'd go the opposite way and give job security to anyone who is doing solid science to remove some of the weird incentives. There is upside to be amazing and win prizes or get better positions, but there is also space for people to "just" reproduce, or generally do important but non-glamorous stuff.

"Conflict of interest"?

Understandable, but still weird: Is it our job to enforce work quality and productivity from our colleagues? Has "The Man" made us turn on each other?

I found that managers (representing the business) are not primarily focussed on eliminating underperformers; instead they are trying to have work done within the constraints they have - recruiting and retaining competent employees being a major constraint in today's workplace. It is management itself that wants you to work around and cover for weaker colleagues. Your boss is likely operating on a macro level, trying to defend the entire team through the ups and down of corporate restructurings.

I have realized that it was my own ego acting up, wanting to be seen as 'better', and complaining about 'unfair' work distribution. The honourable path is to try and enable the weaker team members, there are always tickets they can handle right? If you carry a heavier load, make sure it is reflected in your salary accordingly.

Berlin isn't "north-German" culturally, it is a very distinct cultural sphere and probably good for making some friends.

Note that behind the aparent coldness of Germans lies a promise of eternal, deep friendship once you break through :-)

I started playing tennis again, building on some basics I learned as a kid. Joined a local club, and was dumbfounded why no one was playing on beautiful weekend summer days. The sport has declined a little but still, where is eveyone?

Turns out all the action is at the organized league play with teams of 6, playing at home or travelling to nearby clubs. Through age groups and play modus anyone who can nominally complete a match skill-and fitness wise can join and contribute both to team success and social life surrounding the play. Through the shared activity you can connect, and meet for a match before joining people for non-tennis activities, before "making a friend as an adult".

So yes, the social structures are eroding rapidly and this will have major consequences for society, but there are still pockets left that you'll have to go out and find.

> 9. Does your Infrastructure as Code live alongside the service it hosts?

That means minor changes to some test infrastructure have to go through the strict review process, because the gitlab-ci.yaml is in the part of the main code. Last time this happened to me I found it annoying, and I don't think the code quality guardians care about some CI config anyway.

Someone on reddit claimed he was on a US presidential campaign doing exactly that. Respond to posts with pre-made replies, if things got hairy, distract with humor or memes. Interestingly, they were aware when they were dealing with another paid shill from the opposing side.

After all those years on the internet I think I can also feel the impact of systematic forum activity; controversial topics that get swift, well articulated replies with links and upvotes. Another comment, declaring the winner of the debate!

Is it individual experts who weigh in, organically? Groups who are passionate about the topic and organize via Discord? Or professional shitposters and memers? Who can tell. But a few internet-addicted Reddit aficionados could cover a lot of topics in a lot of communities for a small salary and huge impact.

People who are have the skills to investigate home phoning might get a version pushed that doesn't phone home.

/tinfoil

re #4: There are many instances of people sacrificing themselves to save others, Chernobyl workers, figher pilots not ejecting but steering the plane away flightshow visitors etc.

I expect these people to act this way routinely, give hazard pay to their entire profession to compensate for the risk, but likewise consider it my obligation to act likewise when the situation is clear (like in the Trolley Problem).

Looks good (or is it just nostalgia?):

- familiar font on grey background is quite readable

- blue underlined link tell you what to click on

- link turning violet to indicate you've visited it already? Genius!

It would be better to articulate the gist of an on-topic thought in the confines of a HN post, rather than sending people off to go read something. If something in the article is wrong, let's address that exact thing in the comment. If you have understood your own beliefs well and can articulate them, then you can make great impact on a thread that way.

"Just read this link" on a complex and controversial topic may be comparable to "Just read this religious tract".

No doubt Bogost had offers to sell and/or saw avenues to zyngafy it to the max. He deserves a lot of respect for his (as I assume) crictial, scientific, maybe cynic but definitively ethical, human way to approach it. Ramp up the insanity and maybe teach people about the mechanisms of game addictiveness before shutting it all off.

Private tutoring has to be, with a good teacher, orders of magnitude better than anything else. Services that ask you to "request a quote" instead of naming a price are of course not for everybody.

Has anyone had success with finding tutors on platforms like italki.com? I tried for a bit but probably didn't spend enough time to find the right tutor.

Have we discussed the requirements for those fancy "Tier 3" jobs? I suspect it's overall a lot harder than most regular dev jobs.

Many developers are medium sized fish in small ponds, where they can get away with moderate effectiveness, bad programming habits and little study, or, if they are good, they easily stand out and enjoy the honor of getting the harder tickets assigned, yet may not ever be really challenged.

These top paying companies all seem to do quite complicated stuff, serve a lot of users reliably and implement major features quickly. FAANG codebases seem large and involve a lot of (custom) tooling that devs need to grok and processes they need to understand. Just the author's passing advice to study up for those interviews means ... many hours of study in that "100%-concentration-mode" that many people are not willing or able to put in even for 1 hour.

No doubt there are some cosy pockets in FAANG but, ultimately, building AWS or Azure from nothing can simply only be done by a certain type of person who is willing to bring a certain amount of effort. And those people the market rightfully grants the appropriate salaries. Right?

Also if you didn't push the consent button:

https://futurism.com/google-admitted-tracking-location-when-...

Those tools should probably be designed to handle super sensitive data, if they are handling super sensitive data.

And, user behaviour on a website can very well be confidential, for example they could easily track the cognitive decline of users over time as mouse movement gets more erratic and reactions slow down - super sensitive information if you ask me. The reason a person is a customer is because they might buy a thing, not to be analyzed.

Contrary to what the article says, flat hierarchies and self-organization ("agile") have been en vogue for the last 20 years, and no one is saying "let's go back to strict hierarchies!".

This suits organizations, who can save costly management levels and puts a lot of stress on the remaining managers. Those have gained a lot more people with all their needs and wants (and lost secretarial help along the way too). A manager visiting the office in the other town can easily spend a day with pastoral care.

Organizations also appreciate that Business Analysts, Scrum Masters and the like wrestle through the complexity without putting too many tough (technical) decisions on the bosses' desks. Let them figure it out and let's just check the KPIs and budgets.

The new generation coming into the workplace hasn't even experienced that much hierarchy yet. In my youth we still kind of lived as second class citizens under a general adult rule and have known a lot of formal leadership outside of our parents. Is the intern willing to do the kind-of-boring but necessary work along with me, because I carefully suggest it? Often, not really.

So, get ready for less and less hierarchy. Learn to deal with invisible power structures. Hire people who already have the skills and will work self-driven. And consider that the team you're in may not actually share that "common fate".

The video game argument represents some kind of fallacy: A rational actor picks the best form of entertainment which turns out to be video games - how can that be wrong?

However, there are many local minima in entertainment and life and many great things require going through a learning curve and preparation. Even the greatest couch enthusiast can remember, say, a magical moment during a pickup basketball game, and surely those kinds of moments are happening in this city right now...

Most comments are critical about Google's way of doing things, but maybe this is a good moment for an eulogy. Is anyone using Google Talk right now or has good things to say about it? Was it a place where you happened to have meaningful conversation? (Not me, but sometimes I'm nostalgic about internet places that came and went...)

This is an inevitable consequence from the push to make cloud companies responsible for the content they host. Analyzing all of it can only be automated; automation will deliver weird false positives.