forgottenpass

>One day they're going to do an IE6, and shift their focus away from the project, and the whole web will suffer.

This would still be preferable to if they became the only browser and all web developers were subject to breakneck paced new features and discontinued compatibility as Google makes their characteristic impulsive lurches with zero long term vision.

Yeah, but the white apple is a very sterile presentation, and that might work if the company it represents wasn't so sterile too.

CNC is a way to control a tool, and the tools that can be controlled are so wide ranging that it's weird to talk about the efficacy of CNC, rather than the capabilities of the tool you're controlling.

>No, I think changing license terms to "won't be used by a company which separates families

So, Child Protective Services shouldn't be allowed to license GitHub either?

Edit: I know this isn't what you meant. But such obvious clarity issues are a sign that there are many more subtle issues that limit articulation of your position and prevent engaging in a productive conversation over the internet.

>Why is the title targeted at all US Government developers?

As dumb as you might think people in government are, they're not so dumb as to believe a decision could be made in a way that only applies to ICE.

They can see the abstract case at hand is a disagreement with federal policy. ICE was created by the federal government and tasked with (among other things) carrying out a controversial policy.

Even if GitHub didn't vocalize it explicitly -- or went further and stated that the decision applied only to ICE -- every federal agency is still listening to see if their business relationship with github will be shaped by public opinion towards the job the legislature tells them to do.

>We need more people like Trey Parker and Matt Stone who aren't afraid of starting some controversy to get a conversation started.

The part of Parker and Stone worth duplicating is that they they somehow have political opinions orders of magnitude better informed than whatever keeps celebrities and tv/movie writers so goddamn dumb.

Yeah, it would be crazy to call minecraft white supremacist. Not at all like OK-signs and frog memes. I knew something was fishy about those things from day one.

That wikipedia page is unintentionally hilarious

>This theory remains very controversial, as it brings into question the theory underlying cognitive behavioral therapy, which posits that the depressed individual is negatively biased in their perceptions

CBT is simply a way of coaching the depressed into normative thoughts. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that. But CBT fancies the whole thing up with a thin veneer of science-sounding words as a confidence trick. The theory is a tool for congestive dissonance where you don't have to face the fact mental disorders are defined by severe inabilities to function within contemporary norms.

Aren't people who watch the Daily Show under the false impression that the setups for punchlines are real news? Why would anyone knowingly watch them butcher the news just to make the punchlines work?

Watching the Daily Show when you follow the news is like watching an observational stand-up focus on weird contradictions in everyday life when you already know the un-intuitive aspects of the matter that cause the discrepancy they're riffing on. Except a bit more depressing, because it means either their writers are bad news consumers, or are just changing shit to be more convenient to their joke structure.

This is what happens when you sell out to advertising. A carefully managed image becomes a key asset.

The software development world is going through the growing pains of our largest and most influential organizations making that deal with the devil.

>If the topic is complex like something about the separation of powers, we do a little intro to that, then the news. I'm not sure it would be popular, but at the same time, i'm not convinced it wouldn't be considering the competition.

I have a similar wish, where political news is mostly just civics class.

I tapped out on political news and conversations because it's become sports for people who don't like sports. Well, it's actually worse than that. At least people obsessed with sports know the ins and outs of the rules and can rattle off statistics. I was having an discussion with a couple news junkies that knew all the talking points and fashionable positions of their preferred team. Somehow it came up in conversation that nether of them knew the three branches of US government. WTF am I even doing with my time?

I think these "lower the ceiling rather than raise the floor" rationales are cop-outs.

Yes, I get it, this reasoning does technically provide a justification for the design decisions made that will shut some people up. But that doesn't make the product or design decisions anything to be proud of.

And, to take it a step further, I don't think UX is putting in honest effort to improve things for unskilled users. All the low barrier to entry stuff is superficially pleasant, but the number of common UI paradigms end users have to learn how to intuit their way around has exploded, while affordances and discoverability have plummeted. People who've spent their dayjobs in front of computers for years - if not decades - are assumed to categorically have bad, less-than-worthless, ideas about what might make interacting with those devices easier. All because "shut up, nerds. Nobody would ever like the things you like" was easier than listening and figuring out the how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Calling the Socratic method a bad faith argument, is itself a bad faith argument.

It's obviously an attempt to get you to clarify your position by showing if/how you differentiate a case that fits within your previously-stated criteria but we assume is actually excluded from your judgement.

>They were reporting on the established (at the time) medical opinion.

To what end though? I'm not conspiratorially asking "what was their real angle?", but the much more simple "why did they think it was newsworthy for a non-doctor audience?"

I've seen the NYT run articles on a regulated industry I happen to work in. I'm no doctor, but I can see parallels because everything is slow moving and presumably based on expert opinion. Coverage of subtle points is surrounded by laughably bad analysis that drops a line of facts that lead the reader into conclusions they don't include in the print. Because if they printed it, the counterargument would be swift and damning. But without them explicitly saying it I'm "conspiratorial" if I say they're implying it. They then go on to make a wide-ranging hamfisted policy prescription that don't make sense for the subtle issue we started with and I'm 110% on board for fixing, but do make sense if you believe the unstated intermediary conclusion.

If prohibition had Apple's marketing behind it, a huge number of people would suddenly get onboard.

Paternalism from software companies is popular these days.

I suspect the reason digital stores don't want to allow a secondary market is because market forces would actually cause prices to drop. I'd sell 75% of my Steam library for whatever the current bid price is right this moment. Even if I just get 20 cents total, that's 20 more cents of value than I'll ever get from those games again.

The last thing I need is another godforsaken preferences center inside a product I was forced to become a "user" of just because some asshole bought my email address.

Open secret: "culture fit" sounds more serious, that doesn't mean the evaluation criteria used always is.

>5. Torrents are more convenient.

I miss watching videos outside the service-branded players. I get that the floor is lower, but the ceiling is at the floor. None of them are special beyond making the DRM work, their UIs are at best rebranding of the good ideas they steal from the youtube player.

Sometimes I just want the flexibility to watch their video with a feature I know a different player has. Or without uninterrupted access to high-throughput internet connectivity. Like, in the car, the wilderness, or anywhere that the home network is administrated by a normie.

I've heard that discoverability on usenet is a problem. Is it similar to private trackers and just harder to find an easy "in", or do people actually pay for access to those index sites?

>you can’t really say Bitcoin is bad and shouldn’t be allowed to exist for that reason without also agreeing that other stupid things we do with computers should suffer the same fate

That point is debatable because Bitcoin and snapchat are different in kind. For bitcoin to function, it must be deliberately very computationally expensive. Generally speaking other software limits deliberately costly operations to certain functions (e.g. password hashing) and inefficiencies caused by of developers disinterested in performance can be reworked. Even the resource draw of a high end gaming for a few (or many) hours a week and a 24/7 miner are distinguishable in both raw and cost/benifit ways.

I tried to write that post about contemporary standards with wide enough room to avoid singling out one archetype and proceeding to disparage them by contemporary standards.

But you found it; as it turns out everyone on the spectrum from "unconventional appearance all the way to downright unpleasant to work with" is a cartoon-cutout "lone wolf". Ya got me.

Here's a probably-apocryphal story about San Francisco. The cultural tolerance and open-mindedness the city was know for happened because at some point in history the need for dockworkers was way, way stronger than any superficial differences that employers might otherwise discriminate over if the labor pool was larger. At a time when discrimination was the open and explicit norm, that lack of exclusion grew out into the societal attitudes across the city.

Tech was once a place where we lived with weirdos ranging from unconventional appearance all the way to downright unpleasant to work with. There was a lot of work to get done, and goddamn we were going to figure out how to get it done with the people we had.

Fast forward to the 2010's. We hire for conformity across the board, some places even acknowledge the strictness of that part of their selection criteria and call it "culture fit." It's a very dictionary-definition-but-not-political-alignment conservative time. The outliers have all gotta go.

Here's an example of why I still can't take writing about Agile seriously. I'm not saying there aren't a lot of process improvements under the banner of Agile (and plenty more that Agile is retroactively claiming credit for), but writing like this turns me off:

>Henrich still had a process where success was measured by reports, not outcomes. It was the same reporting process used to measure projects that used linear, step-by-step Waterfall.

What are reports, if not documentation of outcomes? What are outcomes without evidence that those outcomes happened?

I can see what he's saying, but the more accurate description of the problem "the reports included unnecessary and distracting information." But that doesn't make as good of a blog post as casting it as "paperwork vs understanding outcomes."

The whole thing feels like it needs to invent a "paperwork = evil" boogieman just to allow a process change that throws away useless paperwork and allow a team to focus on the paperwork that you just don't call paperwork anymore.

Email is paperwork. Version control is paperwork. Change management is paperwork. It doesn't matter if it's software updating a database instead of a secretary updating 3-ring binders. Most of development is paperwork. In fact, online databases mean we do way more paperwork. If we were bottlenecked by that sea of file cabinets in the basement containing all our the legacy projects, we would have way less paperwork just out of necessity.

Standups are paperwork that just happen to not use paper.

>don’t you think you would perceive this as a rather hostile environment?

No, I'd see it as pathetic and desperate. Which is exactly how I felt about the men and women that worked for the university I attended and were known to date students or had hit on me.

Now if we wanted to talk "hostile environment" the uncomfortable situation my gay highschool principal put me in always drops jaws when I tell the story, but I just think it's funny. I shrugged it off in about 30 seconds and doesn't even rate on the list of things I didn't like about highschool.

5°? That's basically hoodie weather.

>should be targeted instead of other companies that are more conservatively aligned.

They shouldn't be targeted to the exclusion of others based on political alignment, but neither should the not-googles be targeted to the exclusion of google based on google's politics.

> Would I be a bad person for saying I'm sad about this because I want to work at Google and I don't like seeing their future threatened?

You're not a bad person for rooting for a company or wanting to work there. I'd just say you're incredibly naive for having a such an attachment to brand. And you're setting yourself to have some of your most productive years chewed up by a company (not even necessarily google) that can take advantage of your dedication with no additional compensation beyond trowing some creature comforts at you.

Google wasn't _chosen_, they said that they would be better and then promptly gave up as soon as they had gained a bunch of good will and it wasn't convenient for them anymore.

And I still fail to understand how Google surveilling and exfiltrating is somehow better than anyone else doing it.

That kind of perspective happens unfortunately often, where someone can't fathom a group and has no idea how to relate. They invent pretentious gibberish to hold onto the idea they know what the hell they're talking about.

Unfortunately, when you (as the reader) don't have any better connection to the subject mater, you might not notice how hamfisted, reductive and often denigrating their attempts at explanation are. Then those become the memes with which society treats that group. This happens all the time.

> Can we talk about the NYT's fairly open anti-tech bias at this point

Sure. We work in tech, and see that the web has hurt the newspaper business model. Therefore, we protect our ego in the face of any criticism from the traditional press towards tech by rationalizing it away as vindictive rather than ask ourselves if the criticisms are valid and would also be written by a healthier press. And by casting it as a bias, we can avoid contemplating if more tech-savvy reporters would have noticed how morally bankrupt "tech" is sooner and/or provide sharper and more knowledgeable criticism that doesn't rely on poor approximations of goings-on in a domain inscrutable to laypersons.

These are some of the largest companies in the world, make decisions that effect the lives of billions but act like their shit doesn't stink and don't want people looking to closely at the societal ramifications of their business model.

If anything, I'd say the press is too kind and deferential to the half-truths their PR departments pump out.