Month: 3 Tammuz 5783 (June 2023)

rescue 5 rich guys: around the clock media coverage and no expense is too much, because life is utmost concern
rescue countless poor people: rot in jail for 20y you terrorist!!1!
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/node/71822

—@zeh

@elight

Coding for a living fundamentally means writing code whose purpose is determined by someone else, in ways determined by someone else, on someone else’s schedule. You’re renting out your body to a stranger who has structural incentives to mistreat it & no structural incentives to make genuine value.

Generally speaking, you’re writing code intended to be used by domain experts in a domain you have limited knowledge of, and you will never meet the users and find out if the code you wrote made their lives easier — but typically the answer is no, because users & customers are disjoint sets with different motivations. Basically, if you’re writing a tool for some field X, you’re implementing a marketing guy’s idea of what a different marketing guy at a firm that does X will want to buy, and the people who actually know how X is done have no power or voice. So you may well work on an extremely profitable but totally useless project.

If you’re very lucky, you’ll be surrounded by sensible people. But inevitably, you will be asked to do something that shouldn’t be done, and your choices are to either do it or find another job that may very well be worse. Most software engineers are employed exclusively to implement code that should not ever be written, in ways that are transparently perverse, to perform tasks that should never be performed in industries that should be abolished.

In this sense, we’re like workers in other industries.

We’re privileged because of the unjustified mystique (produced largely by unnecessarily poor tooling) surrounding programming: non-technical managers acknowledge that we know something they don’t, to a greater degree than other comparable domains, and so it’s possible for at least senior devs to manipulate the planned project away from really obviously bad ideas. But there are pretty strict limits to that. We’re trapped the same way as all other workers.

—@enkiv2

So, he essentially hired someone to be his mom to fight his “bullies”.

Twitter CEO starts fighting Musk’s battles, paying Musk’s overdue bills https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/twitter-ceo-starts-fighting-musks-battles-paying-musks-overdue-bills/

#Twitter #CEO #MuskyMusk #TechNews

—@majorlinux

is someone has news from @rarst ? ping @mbootsman
#WordPress

—@sebastienserre

if, as the saying goes, “writing is easy, you just sit down at a typewriter and bleed”, then programming is easy too, you just sit down in front of a text editor and get a concussion

—@glyph

If vaccines really did contain computer chips someone would have ported Doom to them by now and posted to Hacker News about it.

—@pwaring

Based on the analysis in this blog post, #visionOS relies on semantic HTML rather than author-defined CSS hover styles in order to render things properly. All of a sudden, things that those of us #accessibility people have been saying about properly using the semantic web becomes important.

🤷🏾 I guess.

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/thoughts-on-safari-spatial-computing/
#WWDC23 #a11y

—@ppatel

This is your regularly scheduled reminder that ‘cis’ literally means ‘on this side’. It’s a term with Latin origins that has been used in scientific language for 135 years, and it’s not a ‘slur’.

The opposite of ‘cis’ is ‘trans’, which means ‘across’, and ‘transgender’ is just one of its many uses. You have probably eaten trans fats, for example, or perhaps you have been on a ‘transatlantic’ flight.

Ain’t science and language grand?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cis

—@sindarina

When you learn about engineering failures in school you quickly understand that it’s not that people were unintelligent, it’s because they were careless. And good engineering practice builds layers to make sure that carelessness doesn’t propagate.

The rigor of engineering is not the technical complexity of the problem space, it’s everything else around it.

In other words, literally everything the silicon valley grindset devalues.

—@emilygorcenski

The worst thing that ever happened in software engineering was when Kirk asked Scotty how long something would take and Scotty said thirty minutes and Kirk said you’ve got five and Scotty got it done in five and impressionable children watched this and grew up to become managers.

—@isaacfreeman