cblum

I just came here to comment on that :)

The linked article.

Exactly. I found it very dishonest that the author is trying to imply that what happened to Tay was due to developers being biased.

> Microsoft released a chatbot named Tay, designed to learn from Twitter users. Within 24 hours, Tay claimed the Holocaust never happened, professed hatred for women and suggested that black people should be hanged.

> “Garbage in, garbage out,” software engineers say. Likewise, racism in, racism out. Biased developers produce biased code.

The author either made zero effort to understand how things work, or willingly chose to pass judgment on developers to drive his political point.

"Biased developers produce biased code" - absolute nonsense.

Why would you not count those?

> Mozilla is funded entirely by Google.

Do you have a source for that?

I spent many hours of my childhood in that help system :)

Same. I just wrote in another comment in this thread that I hate spending hours at Home Depot searching for tools and parts. I find the whole world of home repairs hard to navigate. I watch a video on YouTube on how to repair X, and they talk as if things are standardized, but then I try it at my place and everything looks completely different and I don’t even know what those things are called.

Yeah, we’re at opposite ends of the spectrum here :)

I hate all that stuff. I hate spending hours at Home Depot trying to find the right parts and tools to do things.

I just hate dealing with hardware in general.

True, but from my perspective moving is a small, point in time hassle that you go through every couple years as a renter, as opposed to a lifelong stream of issues that you have to deal with as a homeowner.

>housing security

There is no such thing unless your home is paid off.

If you have a mortgage and are hit by a catastrophic life event that leaves you without a job and depleted of your emergency fund, your home is gone.

Did you enjoy making repairs though? In my experience that’s what makes people either love or hate owning their place.

Personally I loathe doing any kind of maintenance work. I hate dealing with drywall, paint, wiring, pipes, and whatever else you have to deal with when maintaining a home.

Glad to see this near the top and glad to know I’m not the only one who thinks like this.

Like you, I only own a place as a compromise with my wife. And like you, I hate everything that comes with homeownership. People don’t realize there are a lot of hidden costs in owning a home.

When you rent, if you secure a 12 month lease, you know exactly how much you’re spending in housing over the next year.

When you own, all bets are off. This year for example we’ve already spent a couple thousand dollars on appliances that broke. There are things around the place we know are gonna need repairs soon and those are gonna cost us a few hundred more.

Our situation is compounded by being under an HOA, so special assessments are always a possibility.

I know two people who sold their homes and went back to renting specifically because they couldn’t put up with maintaining a home anymore.

I saw renting as paying for a service. I know I wasn’t building equity, but I saw it as paying for not having to worry about all the crap I have to worry about now. Any issue was a phone call and $0 away from getting resolved and the maintenance folks were always awesome at the place where we lived.

You moved within the EU. That’s far easier than it is for a non-EU citizen (which I assume is OP’s case).

Of course you're being downvoted. But I'm totally with you on this one.

As someone currently responsible for migrating services to gRPC at my company, I always say that the main reason people are switching is "because Google."

While there are merits to gRPC and protobuf, I don't think there are enough advantages to throw away REST and JSON and all the tooling around it. The moment you start switching, you start feeling the pain.

"Because Google" is also the main reason everyone wants to run their crap on Kubernetes. It's pure hype.

Always makes me think of "You Are Not Google": https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not-google-84912cf44afb

That’s like 99% of software these days. So frustrating.

Ibuprofen, yes. Aspirin, no.

Aspirin is a blood thinner.

I thought it went too crazy on the tech. The ring habitat was fine but the spinning things that catapult them into space seemed a bit too far fetched.

Such an amazing book. The first half at least.

> I have problems at paying attention in meetings. I struggled through the whole university too. I understood and learned almost everything at home for 5 years. Sometimes I even got asleep during important classes. I'm not talking about 1.5 hour long scrum groomings or reviews, sometimes I can't even pay attention during a 15 minute long standup in the morning. At my lost job they found it as a serious problem. Where to start?

IMO that is only a problem if you can’t pay attention in meetings where the points being discussed are very relevant to what you’re expected to contribute.

Most meetings are a total waste of time. The more people in them, the more meaningless they are. It’s natural not to stay engaged. If you think other people are, a lot of people are really good at giving that impression. This usually manifests in the form of completely irrelevant but tangentially related questions being asked.

If it’s any consolation, I think I’m a good (or at least decent) developer given my career progression, rewards, etc. so far, and I space out in 99% of the meetings I attend and that’s rarely an issue (and when it is, it’s a matter of someone telling me one little thing I missed in 1h of blabbering). I’m very open about my opinion on meetings and it’s never been a problem either.

> now the place is filling up with walking calculators - brilliant at arithmetic but no lateral thinking.

That was exactly the impression my interviewers left on me when I interviewed there a couple years ago.

Yes.

Yeah, the rhotic thing is the first thing that goes when I get tired. I fall back to rolling my r's though, instead of making them soft like in British English.

> There's a reason I left Brazil, and it mostly has to do with wanting to live in a better culture.

Same. Plus the insane violence.

I’m Brazilian but I’ve had people think I’m American since I’ve lost most of my accent. It’s funny though that when I’m tired my accent shows up.

I do the immersion thing without even calling it so. My view is that if I’m living in another country, I should integrate and learn the culture. I stopped associating with Brazilians who were only interested in staying within a Brazilian bubble doing Brazilian things. Might as well just go back to Brazil if that’s what you want to do.

That makes sense. I remember being frustrated though because Gimp was usually the only imaging app that came installed in a desktop Linux system. And I never found a good Paint-like app that wasn’t super buggy.

> A sane, default, "draw box on image" app is a good thing.

Speaking of that, is that still insanely hard to accomplish in Gimp? I haven’t used it in years but I remember being extremely frustrated with it.

Same thing in South America.

Edit: I find it insane that most people in the US don’t see the advantages of renting. When you rent here, your housing cost is fixed for at least a year. Anything breaks, you call the landlord or leasing office and it gets fixed at zero cost to you.

I really miss renting. Now that I own a condo, I keep having to deal with unexpected expenses - fridge breaks, something comes off the drywall, microwave breaks, plumbing issues, etc. Plus, I don’t have the option anymore of moving closer to my kid’s school when she transitions to middle and high school (and those are quite far compared to her elementary school). I mean, I do, but selling a place and buying a new one is a monumental hassle compared to switching apartment leases.

I would go back to renting if I could.

I think they meant that as a joke :)

Theirs is a system that “funnels” people without giving them much choice. I can see the issue in that.

But how about this: an objective test that anyone can take however many times they want, as long as they have a high school diploma.

That’s essentially the Brazilian system. There are arguments to be made about well off kids still getting an advantage because their parents can afford prep schools, but the government counters (at least partially) that by introducing quotas for certain disadvantaged groups.

I have many misgivings about many things in Brazil, but I do think the university admissions process down there is the fairest I’ve seen in my life.