obviouslynotme

The default Google experience is top notch. When it works, it works fantastically. But when you fall off that golden path for any reason, you have some of the worst experiences imaginable. I have moved everything I can off of Google except for my company's email service, and that is coming soon. You cannot trust them to provide even the smallest customer service for people who are paying hundreds of dollars per month or more. You are more likely to get better customer service from cable companies, an industry with customer service so universally reviled that South Park has an episode on it.

While you aren't technically wrong, those opinions are nowhere near the mainstream. The Internet puts a magnifying glass to the most provoking people in the world and makes them seem common.

I have seen this before. Middle management graded teams on story points per sprint. Of course the shittiest team took that to the extreme. They had 15X the story points of everyone else. The problem is that every file edit was a story point. Every bug fixed was a story point. They shipped ridiculously buggy code constantly that cost us tons of money through lost customers. Fortunately each team owned separate service, so they had to handle the continuous calls for their crap. And yet, every time, management would scold them lightly and praise them for their hard work. The one time we had a bug that made it to production, management jumped on us. Thankfully, I left that company after a short time.

I now ask exactly how management attributes time for bug fixes. If they aren't allocated to the person, team, and story point for the original feature, then I explain to them my story and why I won't work for them.

The amount of people excitedly telling me their 8 person startup is using microservices really upsets me. I try to tell them what a mistake it is, but they never listen. They don't know what problems microservices solve or bring. They just know "microservices = good." It gets really frustrating sometimes.

You aren't wrong that it is a bit of work. It's just less work than learning the actual software itself by a lot. Learning .NET's flavor of the year framework stack is not that bad since there is lots of good documentation, classes, books, and blogs. Your software, at best, has documentation that is as good as .NET's. This is highly unlikely though. Learning the product's layout and quirks dwarfs learning the latest incarnation of .NET.

You are absolutely correct. It bothers me to this day that "I want my weed" is a bigger reason for stepping back on the War on Drugs than "I am tired of police murdering people in no-knock warrants for entire streets with zero repercussions." I don't understand it, and it makes me sad sometimes just thinking about it.

I remember when my buddy was trying to get me to use the JS framework of the day. I was just floored with how much JS was required for very simple things. I couldn't help but think to myself, "This whole thing could be a couple dozen lines in a JS file."

I am sure that some people really need these massive frameworks with build chains and universal rendering. I am just not one of them. I use JS for small logic here and there, mostly form validation and a bit of dynamic content. Most web software I know fits this description. I don't know why, but web developers are obsessed with making their jobs seem more complex than it really is. It's like everyone is scared that if someone realizes they just used HTML, JS, CSS, and a small set of scripts that people would find out they weren't real programmers.

You aren't wrong. Go comes with some boilerplate, but it's not as much as people imagine. My main point was that you can compile, execute, and view your changes almost as quickly as an interpreted language. Anyone who has worked with long compile times from C++, Java, or Rust knows how nice and incredibly powerful this is.

It would be difficult to form. Not every customer is even close to equal. The customers who buy the most from Google already have massive leverage. If anything, participating in a union would dilute their demands amongst the mob. The union has no forces keeping it together.

Go's Windows and GUI support is questionable at best. If anything, Go is a Ruby, Python, and server-side C++ killer. Go gives you the development iteration speed of an interpreted language with performance approaching C. Go is a reasonable compromise in the backend arena.

If you think that real research isn't dependent on funding, then I really don't know what to tell you.

Scientists are the new priest class. They deliver edicts and answer the public's questions about the universe. The problem is that the answer to 99% of the public's questions is "I don't know" or "It's very complicated." We don't like that. We want the right answer, right now, delivered in one simple sentence. We find the one goober who hasn't walked inside of a lab in decades who wants to feel important to give us what we want.

Worse is that people envision scientists as unbiased saints. That's just not real. Real science is about one thing and one thing only. Money, aka grants. Grants get you labs and underlings which bring more money and maybe someday tenure. And once you have tenure, you can finally publish what you really think about what interests you instead of chasing funding fads. Except that part never happens.

That means you study the subjects that give funding. You give papers that increase the chance of more funding for more papers. Your accuracy? Doesn't matter. Funding matters. No one is going to check your work anyhow beyond simple peer review. Someone tries to recreate your work or recalculate your numbers? Tell them you lost the data. It's a bit embarrassing but no one is going to call you on this stuff anyhow.

There is only one solution to the replication crisis. Funded third-party replication for all experiments. Money is the root of this problem. It has to be the solution. How many scientists are going to publish "mistakes" if they know that four different teams at four other universities are going to automatically attempt replication?

I might believe you if this were the first time I have seen something like this happen. After all, it was such an enormous, public incident. But it is not the first time and it will not be the last time either.

The problem with your example is I don't turn off the bomb maker's electricity. I call the police. They take violent threats seriously. If you think someone is making a violent threat, that is what you do. They want to shut down non-violent speech. The police won't deal with that.

As for the collusion, I might believe you if this were the first time. After all, it was such an enormous, public incident. But it is not the first time and it will not be the last time either.

If just Apple suspended them for a clearly identified infringement of codified policy and then gave them steps to correct it, I wouldn't care nearly as much as multiple sectors of industry banning one company within hours of each other. It's the coordination that is terrifying. When a group of powerful people says, "You have to let me do crazy thing, or the boogieman wins," you must forgive me for having doubts. I have heard that too many times to count.

They host content that YouTube will not. That seems to be enough. Peertube is federated, and I haven't seen them attack a federated service, yet.

If AWS is dropping you, then Facebook, Twitter, and Google probably already have. Stripe, Cloudflare, and Paypal are probably doing the same. If you try to continue, Visa, MasterCard, and your ISP will shut you down next. This is the world we live in now. You can be removed from commerce by a unanimous decision that you will be told never happened. I am just glad I can shut people down hard now when they say, "If you don't like X, then build your own X." I have now watched two Twitter clones and one Patreon clone be shutdown by magical sudden decisions made in lockstep. My guess is that BitChute is next.

The problem is that the industry has been sold a lie that a magical team of 10X Rockstar 1337 developers can make designing and maintaining large and complex systems easier. Of course, US companies would never purposefully reject qualified candidates in an effort to get more H1B visas either.

I'm old enough to remember Win32 programming in C/C++ because it was the only thing that worked. There was a problem though. Memory management, shitty standard library, and a non-existent packaging system. Java came around and gave you something that worked. Memory management? The runtime does it. Want to do X? Here is a library for X. These combined with academia moving over to Java killed new C++ development hard. It seemed good at the time. Java sucked but Widgets and MFC sucked harder. Qt wasn't that popular yet.

There was only one problem with Java. Even on new machines, you would get noticeable random pauses doing simple things. This never happened in C++ apps even with full MFC bloat. The GC just wasn't that good yet. Programmers would also include FAR more code and libraries because it sped development up. Even today, C++ applications only include libraries if they absolutely have to because of how painful it is.

All of C++'s disadvantages become advantages when you look at them from the lens of performance. Manual memory management means that even if you are slow, you are consistently slow. You don't get the peaks and valleys that really irritate humans who are incredibly sensitive to rhythm. Memory leaks are honestly not even a problem unless you have long running servers. Even then, you could honestly just restart. The near-complete lack of standard libraries and complete lack of a package system highly reduced the amount of fluff you had. If you wanted it in your software, you had to do it yourself. This led to very simple, non-pretty, static interface that just tried to look like Word without the Toolbar of Death. The best optimization has always been to Do Less Stuff.

It's only going to get worse too. The same companies who think C++ is too complex for their programmers are going to laugh at Rust. People in Java or .NET shops aren't going to move over. "Native" is increasingly becoming a JavaScript space which has all the terrible performance of JavaScript usually combined with the slowness of internet connections. For good and ill, package management is now standard.

Microsoft Office used to run fast on a 486 with megabytes of ram. Think about that. Are you a more complex or intensive program than Word? I bet that ePCR has far higher specs. The program running on it isn't inherently more complex. It's literally a form filler, but it isn't used because of how ridiculously bloated even the most basic software has become. In the 90's, you could have made that machine by installing Windows on a machine and programming a VB program in a few weeks that hooked up to a printer. It would have been more responsive than a state-of-the-art ePCR that sits unused today.

I played more bowling on the Wii with friends than I have almost any other game. It's fun, fast, and enjoyable for a large demographic. Hell, I know people who bought the Wii just to play the starter disk. I think there is a huge market for small games that are easy to learn and fun to play in a living room or in a small discord lobby.

That is because he is a real person using his real name. He might have believed in this nonsense and is only now seeing CoCs for what they really are. He might not be comfortable publicly rebelling against the new orthodoxy. These tribunals are no joke.

Most things that ought to occur do not.

>diversity of opinions

It takes a level of maturity that most people never reach to handle real diversity of opinions. This is why universities used to be small places with only highly interested intellectuals trained to handle that diversity. And even they weren't great at it. Modern universities are a joke, and they are better than most organizations.

Or anyone really. After 2016, I stopped watching and reading the current news completely. Everyone is lying to you now. I just wait 6 months before having an opinion on anything. That gives more than enough time for most of the rumors and mistakes to iron themselves out. As an unexpected side effect, I am happier than I have ever been. The world isn't going to end and I need to stop worrying that it will.

I remember the first time I walked into the "residence" for a major contractor's H1B visas. They were packing a dozen people in a 3 bedroom apartment in a bad area of town. You then see how they are treated by their companies at work, and it disgusts me.

This is why you can't have second-class citizens like this. They are terrified to go for help if they even know how. It's even worse for undocumented workers. At least they can quit though. H1B workers are tied to their sponsors, which has to stop.

I am not intimately familiar with Linus beyond his product Linux and his famous rants, so I can only grant you his aspy-ness.

I think Linus's handling of the Linux kernel is an excellent example of stellar technical leadership in a parallel track. It is what technical companies should look like. Engineers do their thing without worrying about administrative tasks like HR bullshit, salary negotiations, hiring, firing, and fights over who makes the coffee.

Let's be real here for a moment. Software engineering, in general, is the most thing-oriented profession available. It attracts people who are incredibly thing-oriented. Most lack the want or ability to manage other people. This double track is specifically to give prestige to people who are amazing engineer but also can't look strangers in the eye.

This is the current #1 reason I refuse to work for any SV companies. Before, it was their shiny veneer of fanciness that barely covers the shitty working conditions. I see nothing but continuous witch hunts targeting people who didn't toe even the most ridiculous lines quickly enough. I can't imagine the anxiety of walking on eggshells 24/7 only to wake up one morning crucified online for an opinion that was mainstream less than a decade ago.

What scares me is how ingrained in every SV company this is now. Nearly every company monopolizing some corner of my Internet life continuously spouts this rhetoric in terror. It makes me wonder what they are afraid of.

"If you don't like X, then start your own." I watched Hatreon get shut down by Visa and probably every other processor. Is their name stupid? Yes, but that's not the point. I would bet you dollars to donuts they worked ten times harder than Patreon to comply with US laws and regulations. They knew they were going to be under a microscope. It didn't matter one bit.

Everyday, the Internet and the companies who sit on it are becoming more central to our lives. We are already close to an informal Social Credit System in the US. How long will it be until watching the wrong politician's speech on YouTube means you can't get a mortgage? Can't get a middle class job? Is that where we want to be? It's not where I want to be. It's not where the vast majority wants to be, and it's scaring us.