Nothing wrong with changing the constitution, as long as people do what’s required.

The journalists and the culture at the newspaper wanted to endorse Harris, but the billionaire owner swooped in and overrode all of that. This is obvious.

I realized there’s another layer to how messed up this is though. A newspaper changed it’s journalistic practices to benefit an aerospace company (Blue Origin). Why is a newspaper connected to an aerospace company?

More and more companies are being owned by fewer and fewer people. The American dream is dead, the free market is a myth at this point.

Throttling everyone equally during times of congestion is also fair in its own way. I’d be okay with that.

I like this term, “billionaire media”, because right-wing media likes to use “mainstream media” as a slur to dismiss any other media source that disagrees with them. It’s a term that shuts down thinking and gets people to automatically dismiss any claim from “mainstream media”.

“Billionaire media” doesn’t really work this way, because if Fox News starts criticizing “billionaire media”, eventually some viewers are going to wake up and realize, “wait, isn’t Fox News owned by a billionaire too?”

People, especially Republicans, love to talk about the “mainstream media”. That term needs to die.

There is only “billionaire media” and “independent media”.

You’re billionaire media if your owned or funded by a billionaire; I don’t care if you’re only on YouTube, if you’re getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from sponsors, you’re part of the billionaire media.

If you’re funded by a bunch of small donations or have no funding at all, then you are independent media.

Today my trust for billionaire media sank even lower.

When limiting is required, because many people are using the same network, limiting those who have already used the most seems fair.

Your comment might cause me to do something. You’re responsible. I don’t care what the legal definitions say.

If we don’t care about legal definitions, then how do we know you didn’t cause all this?

Fortran is still a good language for some purposes I think.

And I feel the same way, C++ tries to solve the problem of having too many features by adding more features.

I’d rather believe it’s a bunny than acknowledge snails that large exist.

Epic vs Google turned out a lot different than Epic vs Apple.

Also, Epic vs Google was decided by jury.

I wouldn’t consider Julia statically-typed; am I wrong?

The question mine as well be “what is your favorite compiled language?”. There is a lot of overlap between the possible answers.

I hear you. It’s no good to just cede ownership of a word and allow others to define it however suits them. But… it’s Twitter, getting into a good faith philosophical discussion about the definitions of words ain’t going to happen, so in many cases it’s better to just not bring up the controversial words at all. Guess there’s pros and cons to each.

I agree. That’s why I suggest (or more like implied) that when we know we have different definitions of a word, we avoid using that word. It’s a good thing to at least try if two people really care about understanding.

“Woke” is a problem because people have different definitions, and no matter what Webster or any other authority says the definition is, people will continue to have differing definitions.

How can we reach understanding when we don’t even agree on the definition of words?

This is way to nuanced to deal with on fucking Twitter. If you use the word “woke” on Twitter, expect a lot of misunderstanding, talking past each other, and bad faith arguments to follow.

I did not suggest banning any words.

To understand why I’m opposed to the word “woke”, you must first acknowledge this fact:

Sometimes people have different definitions of the same word.

If you’re willing to accept that, then it logically follows that using a word that people have different definitions of will cause more confusion than understanding. If our goal in speaking is to convey understanding, then that is best accomplished by avoiding words where people have conflicting definitions.

We’ve all learned that there are facts and opinions, but there is a third category: definitions.

If you watch for it, you will see that many disagreements boil down to nothing more than disagreeing about the definition of a single word. If we temporarily avoid using that word, suddenly we find ourselves in agreement, or at least having a better understanding of each other.

Finally a place I can share my cold takes. (I’m not on Twitter, I won’t discuss this on Reddit either.)

1. The community manager had a meltdown and blocking everyone was a power trip and was wrong.

2. Godot’s tweet was wrong, because it used the word “woke” which immediately drives any conversation into the gutter. Doesn’t matter if you’re on the right or left, as soon as you say the word “woke” you have ruined the conversation.

3. It is good that Godot explicitly supports LGBT+ people. They should be welcome. The community CoC should make this explicit, and it does. A tweet to reaffirm this is fine, a cringe joke born from the dredges of Twitter is less fine.

4. Godot’s “revenge forks” are amusing and will not go anywhere. Someone might collect some donations before grifting into the night though.

5. None of this has any effect on Godot’s technical suitability for creating a game.

How would you force someone to take time off?

If I was their boss I would say something like “you’re job is to stay home and do anything besides work for the next week, you will still be paid for this time”. Easy.

As for the on-call stuff. Yes, that’s the point. It should be unsustainable for a company to continually rely on their daytime programmers for frequent on-call alert handling.

If off-hours issues happen often, the company can hire an additional team to handle off-hours issues. If off-hours issues are rare, then you can depend on your daytime programmers to handle the rare off-hours issue, and know that they will be fairly compensated for being woken up in the middle of the night.

I’ve been at too many companies where an off-hours alert wakes up a developer in the middle of the night and the next day the consensus is “that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”. It’s not right for a developer to get woken up in the middle of the night, and then the company puts fixing that on the backburner.

I’ll say it again. It’s about aligning incentives. When things that are painful for the worker are also painful for the company, that is alignment. Unfortunately, most companies have the opposite of alignment, if a developer gets woken in the middle of the night the end result for the company is that they got some additional free labor, that’s pain for the worker, reward for the company; that’s wrong.

When I think of a tech worker union my thoughts first go to standardizing everyone’s pay and limiting what I can earn myself. I’ve probably fallen to anti-union propaganda.

A tech worker union that says nothing about pay could still do so much.

A union could ensure that the company’s incentives are aligned with worker’s incentives around things like on-call.

I’d love a union that forced a company to give all on-call workers compensation. Something like:

1. If you’re woken up in the middle of the night, you automatically get 8 hours comp time (time off), plus 2x the time you spend on-call during off hours.
2. Accrued comp time over 20 hours must be payed at 10x normal pay if the employee leaves the company for any reason. The idea here isn’t for employees to accrue comp time, but to give the company a strong incentive to ensure employees use their comp time.

Basically, if a company is having lots of on-call alerts, or the company is preventing employees from using their comp time, you want this to be directly painful to the company. Incentives should be aligned, what is painful for the worker should be painful for the company.

Or, regarding “unlimited PTO”. I’d love to see a union force companies to:

1. “Unlimited PTO” policies are fine, but they must have a guaranteed minimum amount of PTO specified in writing. So none of this “yeah, we heave ‘unlimited PTO’; oh, we’re really busy this quarter, so can you wait to take PTO until next quarter?”.

Tech workers have it good compared to a lot of workers, but there are still plenty of abuses a union could help with, even if the union never even mentions pay.

What is the game? It’s not being a shill to answer questions.