855 karma · joined July 23, 2012
What I really miss was the period in time where I could work in the office and everyone else was working from home. The quiet of no-one else around, the productiveness of not being at home and the commute for that period of time between work/home where I can have some time just to myself.
In saying that, every time I've tried to "do" Twitter, I just find myself in this space where I feel a mix of sadness, anger, hatred and other negative emotions because 95% of Twitter is either people assuming the worst in everyone, calling other people every horrible name conceivable or just generally being another awful person in a sea of awful people.
The fact that I've never quite "got" Twitter has meant that I feel no attachment to it, and don't care if I remove it from my life, so it's not like I'm losing any sleep over it. But, it also helps immensely that removing Twitter from my life is like cutting off a necrotising limb that you never needed to begin with.
And I'll admit that it may be a case of I'm not understanding the details of what the original article was meaning, but I read it as "support networks" etc.
I don't want to get together with people, regardless of if they are strangers or friends/family and talk about my problems. Realistically what can they do? More often than not in those spaces it is a lot of listening and empathising. If that makes a person feel better, then I'm all for that. But for me, it comes across as performative caring to make others feel good about "helping" and isn't actually addressing what my issues are or why they make me feel a certain way.
I will say, all of the above is based upon my own experiences and how I feel, and isn't intended as a sweeping claim. I want everyone who has mental health issues to have access to the help they need, and if someone needs the kind of help that involves listening and empathising then they should absolutely have access to that. I'm just not sure based upon my own experience (and the experiences of other men), that a lot of men want the same kind of mental health support that is available to women.
I recognise that my thought process that leads me to conclude that probably falls into the category of "toxic masculinity", but my issues are my own, and, regardless of whether or not I am in a "space" that allows for me to share my feelings, I personally feel that offloading your issues onto people who aren't trained professionals is selfish and can be harmful.
From my perspective, what men need is to be able to destigmatize seeking professional help for mental issues.
And, if we're being honest, the reality is that for that chunk that would break, most of them would either not have a developer on hand to fix it, or would be what I call a "Wordpress cowboy" who has a WP site they set up five years ago that they never update, and the sum total of their development experience is installing various WP plugins until the site vaguely does what they want it to do.
It's hard, because on one hand, if we didn't have things like Wordpress, then PHP would be in a position to undertake more breaking changes that would overall give the language and its libraries the much needed quality improvements. On the other hand, without things like Wordpress, it does become somewhat questionable as to whether PHP would have survived the dark days of PHP4 and the early versions of PHP5.
In saying all that, the work that the dev team have done to add great features and solid performance, alongside the community which has done a lot of good things like PSR's and the PHP League libraries to me, is one of the key things that makes PHP still an attractive environment to work in.
I'm not even a Rust person. I've never worked in Rust in my life, so there is no "preference bias" in my comparing the two. I just don't find YAML, or this "improvement" as "human-readable" as people make out to be.
This is not some great injustice or a company acting in any kind of morally questionable way. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that in the grand scheme of things (not just the tech bubble), offering equity to employees is the exception, not the norm.
I in no way feel safe or comfortable contributing to a platform that is that toxic and has a long track record of people trawling through every little thing you have ever said in the hopes of destroying your career and life.
And people who say the solution is to follow specific people or use certain ways of viewing your timeline underline the other problem which is if the platform requires me to make a significant time investment to get a non-toxic, non-awful experience, then I'd rather go without and be blissfully ignorant to anything happening on that platform.
In terms of cryptocurrency, from my perspective the problem for mass adoption comes down to stability of value and oversight. Why would anyone want their paycheque to come to them in crypto when a few tweets by Elon Musk, lord of crypto market manipulation can turn your 2k paycheque into a 1.1k paycheque?
On top of that, for good or for ill the big banks and credit card companies have decades of built up trust in that there is a centralised authority who can ensure that your money is safe. Irregardless of what the reality of crypto and the safety of your money in crypto, the wider public will not trust that their money is safe when there is no one to be held accountable if something happens.
Finally, the fact that crypto has, to the wider public at least, been shown to have significant benefits for criminal activity and speculators actively trying to manipulate the markets has painted the entire crypto space as something that the average person should generally avoid at all costs.
In theory, I liked the original idea of crypto. But the truth is that crypto was good-intentioned idealism corrupted by selfishness and greed.
I'm fully aware that by the rules of the tournament, they are expected to, and I have no real interest in tennis, but from my perspective this feels punitive against an athlete as though the media have this attitude of "how dare she not subject herself to our dissections".
Fully acknowledging that the media are the main source of revenue for these sports and subsequently these athletes, it is still such a strange relationship the athletes and the media have whereby an athlete not only needs to be amongst the best in the world at their chosen sport, but also need to be skilled in PR and be willing to dance to the whims of the media.
I also wonder if sometime in the next 6-12 months we'll hear that Tesla is looking to accept Dogecoin due to it being more environmentally responsible (I don't know if that is actually the case, but who knows what changes will happen in 6-12 months).
From my perspective, we have a number of great developers, its just that most of us (myself included), don't work in places where our tech and work is announced almost like an advertisement. Something that, at least for me, is a weird thing to watch happen so often from US tech companies.
I think a big contributing factor to such a conservative tech industry comes from a general lack of investment in start-up businesses either due to a lack of interest from the government, or from risk-adverse investors who would rather put their money into safe bets like real-estate.
And sure, Rust is great. It's lowered the barrier-of-entry to systems-level programming significantly compared to the alternatives. But, comparing it to Netscape/Firefox, and coming to the conclusion that Rust is Mozilla's greatest contribution is ridiculous.
In a time where Microsoft was much more hostile to the tech industry and open-source in general, the landscape of web-browsers was an absolute mess thanks to Microsofts insistence on developing their own way of doing things contrary to accepted standards.
Without Firefox and the work Mozilla did pushing back against Microsoft, there would be no Chrome. And while this may be a bold claim, there may have never been a NodeJS and the Javascript renaissance that the industry has seen over the last ten or so years.
From my perspective, when Chrome burst onto the scene and gave us Firefox vs Chrome, it did feel a little bit like Microsoft vs Mozilla, except this time the monolithic corporation won, and we're all still sitting here wondering if we are better or worse off for it.
Maybe I'm old or maybe I just don't get it, but this seems like we're rushing to throw away historical contributions because they aren't as cool and popular as the hot new stuff.
This idea that modern front-end has failed is not some absolute statement that means that all that came before was a success. In fact, it's a statement that with all our modern technology and idea's, we're still in a situation where we haven't improved on front-end tooling and development.
Also, just because front-end has exploded and created a huge amount of jobs, doesn't mean we're doing it right or well. There is just as much evidence to suggest that we need so many front-end developers because our current tooling and methods have made front-end development a massive job requiring many people.
I do believe that if you actually understand the situations, there is most definitely no malice or harmful intent in anything he said/did, but I can also see how in the current climate where nuance is irrelevant that things he said and did could be perceived as offensive to people who are hypersensitive to these things.
What concerned me more was that, at least based upon this narrative, the collective failure of The Times to perhaps underline from the outset that the issue was spreading within the newsroom and how serious it was, and that the Times provided next to no support for the situation beyond having legal proofread statements and more or less left Donald to hang in the wind. It really seems to me that the Times more or less gave up on Donald from the outset and let things snowball as an excuse to get rid of him to avoid bad PR.
And the real kicker is that they still left him up to get a pulitzer for his reporting at their publication while throwing him under the bus. Talk about having your cake and eating it too.
To quote WarGames, "the only winning move is not to play."
For the odd occasion when I do log on to Twitter, my rule is simple - if I see a tweet that annoys me or I just don't like, then I block them. I have no wish to spend any time or energy even allowing that stuff around me.
For those who are outside Australia, it bears mentioning that Murdoch-owned media in Australia by far and away dominates the media landscape, and has a blatant bias towards the current sitting government (the conservative liberal party), and the liberals have for decades now returned the favour by consistently legislating in favour of News Corp.
The only way that the government will back down is when they are confronted with a much bigger fish than News Corp, in which case, chances are better than none that the government will go scurrying back into their little holes.
HR is just the department that oversee's the tools and removes/replaces any tools that are not working or are becoming too much of a hassle.
If you doubt that is true, just remember that many companies would willingly have you thrown off the top of the building to your death and replaced within a day were you to even so much as thought about time outside of work if they could do so and get away with it.
That's not to say I am advocating the suppression of speech. All people should be free to speak about corruption and misinformation. But the last twelve months or so have, at least to me, shown that most people would rather burn the public square to the ground than speak of corruption and misinformation. And it does make me wonder what elections would be like in all countries if, at least for the campaign and election period, sites like Twitter were just outright banned.
To me, as a person who doesn't live in America, the US has gone absolutely crazy over this idea that policy doesn't matter so long as a person is on my team. This is an indictment of the media who have failed in their job at keeping the public informed in an unbiased manner, reducing complex macro-economics and geopolitics to catchy headlines and gotcha-questions.
Is my country any better? God no, most of our media is just a budget version of the American model, but it is America who infected the rest of the world with this.
When policy and idea's become the most important part of any election, that's when you can start addressing real social and economic problems like homelessness, LGBT rights, wealth disparity and the loss of jobs to offshoring manufacturing, because you'll have more time to discuss these things like adults now that politicians aren't reducing their job to 140 character hot-takes.
From the outside looking in, American politics has long since ceased being about policy and idea's, it is now a contest of identity where it doesn't matter what someone stands for so long as they are on the team I support.
In this kind of climate, for a business or other entity to involve themselves in politics would be consciously choosing to more or less blacklist themselves from doing business with the other side or run the risk of having their brand tarnished via social media for whatever stance they take.
Finally, a business that takes a political stance does damage not just to themselves but to their employees as in the current political climate, both sides have no problems harassing a person or worse if they are viewed as not "on their team". Once a company takes a political stance, it doesn't matter if what that employee believes or does nor does it matter that said employee might be working for this company because they have a family to feed and don't have the luxury of quitting and looking for a new job, the very fact that they work for said company means that they should be treated as persona-non-grata.
Make it simple, a company can't vote, so a company doesn't have a political affiliation (unless of course, it is some kind of lobbying company etc).
Of course, this is just unfounded speculation on my part, but I feel as though there is some kind of sub-conscious thought, brought about by years of being taught that generally speaking, things that are larger or have fancier packaging are more valuable, and that exchanging money should result in something that you can hold and take stock of.
Software (or really anything in the digital space), while being something that we can cognitively see, is not something we can hold or even try to accurately value using any rough method we usually come up with to do so.
On top of that, digital goods are only ever seen as a finished product, and the average person can't fully comprehend the effort and time that goes into producing that finished product, meaning that effort expectations range from "click a button and it's done", to "I reckon I could make this in a weekend".
Personally, I think this dissonance between better valuing something physical can be seen in peoples willingness to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars for an iPhone, but absolutely refusing to pay 99 cents for an app for the iPhone you just bought.
No, we stand for accomplishing the mission and for creating a great place to work."
My god, you're a business, you're entire existence is predicated on making a profit, don't delude yourself into thinking you're chasing some higher purpose, if that was truly the case then you'd be offering your services at a loss or giving away your product for free.
Last I counted, four of those five are in the same country. The world does not begin and end in America.
Murdoch media owns the vast majority of newspapers across Australia and is also more or less the only cable TV provider in Australia.
A good highlight of the power the Murdoch press has over Australia would be to look at the fact that the vast majority of journalists who work in the Canberra press gallery (parliamentary journalists), work for The Australian or other Murdoch entities, and have such a stranglehold on political journalism that it is a commonly accepted truth in Australian journalism that "if you want to know tomorrows news, read The Australian today."
The real kicker is that the Murdoch presses political biases are not subtle or secret, they are about as overt and blatant as you can possibly get with The Australian frequently running full front-page articles trashing one political party (Labor, the "left" leaning party) and heaping praise on the other (Liberal/National, the "right" leaning party).
With all of that context, the bill suddenly takes on a slightly more sinister tone when you realise that it is more or less designed to benefit one man and his media empire.
And sure, it can sometimes be lonely, but I find that honestly preferable than the alternative.