It’s not that they are unfriendly.

But they are 100% there to represent the company’s interest and not yours. If there is any way, to… turn a situation into something where the company gets more money out of it and you get less, it’s their job to make that happen.

In theory they should have employee retention in mind. In practice, nobody does their HR that way anymore.

All my interactions with HR have been “professional polite” and appropriately friendly. There is no reason to be unnecessarily mean, they are also just doing their job.

Some kind of general fitness testing?

You know, involving heart, lung capacity, performance?

All the ones where the idea was to “just start something, grow grow grow, then figure out monetization later” is wild to me.

E.g. reddit. It worked. CEO is rich, site is still online. Somehow they got investors probably, presumably.

I get not having profit. I get not having income, if it’s in some prototype phase. But having no plan or idea whatsoever for how to monetize and still getting VC? Wild.

I had a phase as a teen when I was constantly swearing. My parents told me that, it can’t be that bad and it’s really annoying.

And it’s mostly an impulse reaction and we’re kind of above that.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t express pain or anger. You’re just not insulting people’s ears if you scream “Aaaaah” when you bang your toe against a table leg or something. And your environment really doesn’t deserve it. Most people are somewhat compassionate and you’re just swearing while they try to help… that’s not a pleasant environment for them to be in. It makes it harder to help you.

No to both questions. I just made a change and that was it. And it has never stopped me from expressing anything.

If anything, it lends more weight to the regular words.

A _______ criminal? Or a criminal?

You can still put the same emotion into the words, they’re just not swear words. :)

Having an easy on the eyes markdown that is also easy to parse would be cool.

But YAML does these things:

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

which are not excusable, for any reason.

I’m not sure now that I think about it, but I find this more explicit and somehow more free than json. Which can’t be true, since you can just

{"anything you want":{...}}

But still, this:

<my_custom_tag>
<this> 
<that>
<roflmao>
...

is all valid.

You can more closely approximate the logical structure of whatever you’re doing without leaving the internal logic of the… syntax?

<car>
<tyre> air, <valve>closed</valve>  </tyre>
<tyre> air, <valve>closed</valve>  </tyre>
<tyre>      <valve>open</valve>  </tyre>
<tyre> air, <valve>closed</valve>  </tyre>
</car>

Maybe I just like the idea of a closing tag being very specific about what it is that is being closed (?). I guess I’m really not sure, but it does feel nicer to my brain to have starting and closing tags and distinguishing between what is structure, what is data, what is inside where.

My peeve with json is that… it doesn’t properly distinguish between strings that happen to be a number and “numbers” resulting in:

myinput = {"1":"Hello",1:"Hello"}
tempjson = json.dumps(myinput)
output = json.loads(tempjson)
print(output)
>>>{'1': 'Hello'}

in python.

I actually don’t like the attributes in xml, I think it would be better if it was mandatory that they were also just more tagged elements inside the others, and that the “validity” of a piece of xml being a certain object would depend entirely on parsing correctly or not.

I particularly hate the idea of attributes in svg, and even more particularly the way they defined paths.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Tutorial/Paths#curve_commands

It works, but I consider that truly ugly. And also I don’t understand because it would have been trivial to do something like this:

<path><element>data</element><element>data</element></path>

YAML

To each their own indeed.

;)

It is very cool, specifically as a human readable mark down / data format.

The fact that you can make anything a tag and it’s going to be valid and you can nest stuff, is amazing.

But with a niche use case.

Clearly the tags waste space if you’re actually saving them all the time.

Good format to compress though…

No.

https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/programs/applications#requirements

Take a look.

Though, if you have not heard of the program before, you’re probably not involved with a project that qualifies.

Glockness Monster *teleports behind you*

“nothing personal, kid”

It is broken in the sense that it’s absolutely insane that they can take 30% and nobody can build a competing product that only takes 20%.

It is not broken in the sense that they keep doing what they are doing and developers and customers consistently choose their offer.

It’s not a monopoly because they exploit their position.

It’s a monopoly because nobody else is trying hard enough.

“The computer” decides when to install updates and which ones to install.

No.

You know how boxers don’t beat up their trainers?

This is like that.

The boyfriend interpreted as a bonding moment.

The father meant his placing the gun as a threat and got “called” on his bluff and gets angry.

The meritocratic, capitalist way, would be to to put a property tax on it and to increase that tax, until

• rents increase so much that people can’t afford to live in cities anymore
• cities lose essential employees
• society shuts down
• THEN property loses value
• then it can be bought cheaply again
• and also rented for a low price, because the tax on the low value property is also low

Let’s go people!

When you lament the loss of ready and experienced volunteers, what we lack are people who’ve learned at the side of truly talented people

What I’m actually lamenting isn’t the lack of experienced volunteers.

I’m lamenting the fact that the groups in need lack the awareness that nobody is teaching the stuff they need and that they should do it themselves.

E.g. https://kernelnewbies.org/ I wasn’t kidding when I mentioned them. Their idea of “outreach” is to open the door and wait for people to fall in. They have no teaching material, they have no recommendations. I’m recognizing that there is something happening that is in my interest and I personally would put in the time to learn whatever is necessary to get to the level that is required to seriously touch that code. I just literally don’t know where to start and have no point to connect. There is a https://kernelnewbies.org/KernelMentors mentors program. Not only is their only point of contact a mailing list, if you follow the link, you will find that the mailing list doesn’t actually exist.

Yeah, except I’m on your side, and that kind of protest is obviously not getting it done.

Because it’s what has been tried for decades and the problem is still there.

We have figured out how to run everything, absolutely everything, in the 1950s.

The original computer “AI” craze was started by “cybernetic systems” and for good reason. You probably only know of the bastardizations of “cyber-” that don’t have anything in common with the original concept.

The original concept goes like this:

1. set a goal
2. perform an action
3. measure how much impact that had, did it get you closer to your goal or not?
4. If you are at your goal, you’re done,
5. otherwise adjust your actions, got to 2. (This is “feedback” and the reason that word is now so common. People at the time knew)

The faster you go through the loop, the faster you will figure out what works.

You can measure anything you want, as vague is you want. Happiness, money, productivity. It’s the way democracy is designed to work, in which case the feedback is vague and the cycle time is measured in years. It runs your thermostats, in your home, big national power grid power plants. It’s how autopilots autopilot.

The idea that “nobody could have predicted…” or “nobody responsible” is a myth. We have the science. We know how it works.

Every failure we still experience is a failure we allow to happen. Because of profit, politics, or whatever.

Didn’t catch something “going on for years”, maybe someone should check more often. “Crazy single individual causing a tragedy”? No, that’s a person at risk, probably with social or mental problems you didn’t take care of before, didn’t flag, and didn’t stop in time.

“Nobody wants to work on our open source project” Really, how is your onboarding? Do people take a look at the docs/culture and run away screaming? Yeah?

I’m not applying but I have a comment / suggestion:

A pattern I’m seeing here, in activism and open source is that you basically want the full package right now. While I understand that that is what you need, people like that don’t grow on trees.

It would be good if there was a “trainee” position for people to gain the kind of experience you are asking for. And guidance, by you to make sure they learn the right lessons. Possibly including a private-ish best practices handbook or whatever. I know that that means additional work in the short term.

Thanks for reading, all the best wishes!

(Compare to linux’ kernel team asking for kernel devs and the policy of “pick any topic you’d like to work on”. Do I expect a fully course on everything, bringing me from “high school knowledge” to “kernel dev professional”? No, of course not. But a few book recommendations would be great. In that case. Not sure if you can learn moderation from a book.)

I helped design large-ish electrical grids. 30-100k cables

Without the actual calculation bits, unfortunately.

Not very interesting. Bad software. Management didn’t really care about the problem. I was there so the problem was “managed” from their point of view.