generalk

  > The traditional start menu / taskbar is genuinely nicer 
  > than what Gnome attempts to force on me. OS X is also 
  > genuinely nicer than what Gnome attempts to force on me.

This is definitely subjective, and if Windows jives for you that's cool. To provide a counterpoint: Gnome for me is worlds better than Windows and slightly better than OS X. It definitely takes a little getting used to if, like me, you literally grew up with Windows, but I vastly prefer Gnome nowadays. Not to mention, you have choices besides Gnome -- although if you dig Windows mostly they'll just be either wildly different than what you want, or a clear imitation.

Truthfully, if you need HDR or specific AMD/nVidia features, you're right you're probably gonna have a rough time. (Bluetooth has worked just fine for me, though.)

It's definitely not all roses over in Desktop Linux land. I miss having real third-party app support -- sometimes you just need After Effects or actual Word/Excel -- and MacOS' consistency in keystrokes (Cmd+, as the "preferences" hotkey in every app is just so good) but for 90% of what I do it fits me really well.

I gotta put a big, giant X next to "Readable."

I have HN at 170% zoom right now. I keep most of my font sizes around 14pt minimum. I have one useless eye and another that isn't so great even corrected with contact lenses.

Give me more web design trends that emphasize fonts at a readable size AND color contrast with the background color. Dark gray Calibri Thin on a light gray background might impress some design nerds but I'll take large, margined, justified text well set from its background any day of the week.

The way I've always heard this is:

If it's important, it needs to have a URL.

Your issue tracker works, assuming you're not constantly changing your tracker. SharePoint may work but is super clunky for this purpose. Confluence or Notion or something work just fine.

Email doesn't work by itself. With some mailing-list interface on top it may, but that seems like you're stretching a bit. IM/IRC/Slack/whatever chat also don't work for this purpose.

I always think: if I want to put a link to this project's design docs, maybe some meeting notes, so new hires can come up to speed on what we're trying to do, I want it to be a URL that makes some kind of human sense, and I want the format to be conducive to communicating the right details.

  > Open protocols, or non profit open source projects will 
  > never compete with true entrepreneurship and hardcore 
  > entrepreneurs creating products.

Nginx and Apache httpd are, in that order, the most used web servers. Both are FOSS, and both serve HTTP, an open protocol. There were definitely attempts to build proprietary protocols, none of which were successful, and in the long run the proprietary web servers ended up second place to the open source projects.

Here in the US, I get reminders via SMS from my bank or my doctor telling me that payments went through or that I have an upcoming appointment. More thorough messages are sent via Email. Every form I've filled out since the turn of the millennium asks for my email address, none of them have asked for my MySpace, Twitter, or Facebook handles.

I edit my code in either Emacs, Vim, or Visual Studio Code -- one of those is an open-source product by a very much for-profit company, the other two have survived decades as powerful editors/IDEs.

If I had to make a prediction, I'd say that over time open protocols will end up winning -- not because of some kind of ideological purity, but because they permit people to build platforms that interoperate with one another. The Fediverse is young yet, and Twitter/Instagram/FB are making adversarial interoperability hard, but the entire history of the Internet and the World Wide Web is one where open has won over the long haul.

The video you posted from June 2020 does not seem to contradict WaPo's August 2020 article that says there's no definitive link between this murder and the BLM protests. A comparison: armed vigilantes overran the capitol and bludgeoned a police officer to death as part of their riot. These two events do not appear similar in that way.

You say you're concerned about the violence on both sides and there being a double standard which you find distasteful, and yet all of your posts are attempting to paint the BLM protests with the same violent core as the folks who overran the capitol, which given any kind of context or detail isn't true at all.

To my original point: the context around these events make it clear that they are different and should be judged differently -- context which you've continually ignored to push this narrative.

If there exists a double standard, it isn't that "violence on the left" is suppressed, it's that if the capitol were stormed by BLM protestors who've finally had enough of police violence and systematic racism, they wouldn't have gotten into the building, and they for damn sure wouldn't have walked out under their own power.

  > He was murdered by armed "anti-fascist" protestors.

It appears that that link has not been confirmed, as of an August 2020 WaPo article[0], which points out that many of the deaths at the protests can not be conclusively linked to the demonstrators.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/26/almost-no...

I'd challenge the assertion you're making here -- again, it is reductive to reduce the entirety of the nationwide protests against police murders to a handful of cherry-picked instances of violence. You're doing that and then dismissing the entire issue because of it, which is intellectually dishonest, which you already know.

You aren't giving the same treatment to the the other side here -- you're not saying "if keeping people safe means the police should be allowed to murder folks / bludgeoning a police officer to death when storming the capitol" so I find it difficult to believe you're merely concerned about the use of violence.

You did, several comments up, state "the assault on the capitol was an unprecedented attack on democracy," which it was, but that's after posting multiple links where you're posting links and evidence trying to discredit the nationwide BLM protests by painting them as violent, so again, your bias is evident.

  > I suggest we all stop comparing these things.

Agreed, they are comparable only in superficial ways which remove context vital to the understanding of both events.

One group of people were protesting/rioting because police continue to suffer little consequence for murdering Black folks, despite years of effort at reform.

The other group protested/rioted by breaking into the Capitol and threatening to murder politicians because the current POTUS has claimed, repeatedly and without any evidence, that the election he recently lost was somehow rigged against him. Again, for context, this has come from the side of American politics that has for the past four years claimed that "elections have consequences."

To compare these two events on a "look who did more violence" level is reductive at best and at worst a bad faith argument in support of the folks who stormed the capitol.

I grew up in suburbs, I went to school in suburbs. I met my wife in the suburbs, I had my first kiss in the suburbs. I definitely had some formative events that occurred on the mid-90s Internet, and would not be the person I am today without it.

But I for damn sure also wouldn't be the person I am today if I hadn't rode my bike to my friends' houses to trade floppy disks or watch Schwarzenegger films, or sneaked out to the mall to meet folks, or hung out at the neighborhood strip-mall comic shop and picked up various CCGs and RPGs.

  > You'd be surprised how many great FOSS (free & open source 
  > software) are out there that you can deploy on your own VM 
  > and have unlimited number of team members and OWN YOUR OWN 
  > DATA!!!

I'd love to run some open-source stuff for analytics or error tracking or application monitoring. And we have, in the past. And they work pretty well. When they work.

If the VM disk starts filling up because log rotation wasn't set up right, or the ElasticSearch instance we only run for this service starts flapping, now I've gotta pay one of my devs to work on that instead of work on our product. And in your example, where I've only got three folks, that interruption could be ruinous.

$200/mo ($2,400/yr) is nothing compared to the financial and opportunity costs here.

  > Tasks and issue management, wiki, kanban board, 
  > discussions ci/actions to trigger other stuff [...], 
  > storage of docs, revision control, tagging and 
  > organization, notebooks (with code too!), static hosting,  
  > support tickets

All of these features either work only for devs, or are extremely bare-bones.

Would I love it if my entire company could live in Github? Sure! But fully half the company is composed of folks who will never, ever log in to GitHub.

And don't get me started on issues. For personal stuff I'm GH all the way, but for planning a year's worth of development? It just doesn't fly. I'm looking at Linear now because I dislike JIRA's UX, and GitHub/GitLab both are too lightweight for my needs.

As someone who is beginning to live in financial spreadsheets, I'm damn well happy to pay for SaaS that totals less than a FTE dev and also allows my entire company to move faster as a result. Like, not even a question.

  > I continue to be disappointed with Apple's desktop 
  > experience. 

Agree! I switched to MacOS during Tiger, and the experience has gotten steadily worse since then, double if you're not into the iOS-ification of their desktop OS. I know iOS is driving their +1T market cap, but come on.

So I pick up a beefy Windows machine for gaming and video editing. And Windows is just awful. They're trying, but it's still an inconsistent mess, UX all over the place depending on what first-party program you're in. I get some folks like it, but it isn't for me.

But I've also got various Linux distros running, and Gnome is actually really usable. And honestly I don't have a lot of bugs or missing functionality -- new Lenovo laptop, Arch or Ubuntu, everything just works out of the box, including external displays that don't even require an adapter because I have HDMI out! But there are definitely bugs and issues, and there's no software support. I'm lucky I get MS Teams so I can work with my coworkers, but I don't get virtual backgrounds. I'd kill for some first-class support from vendors, but I know why it doesn't happen.

Moral of this story: apparently, as we approach the year of the Common Era Two Thousand Twenty One, desktop computing is still a mess.

Oh definitely, but for me I was never gonna be able to learn Ruby in a vacuum. If I had needed a general-purpose scripting language in 2007 I'd have reached for PHP or Perl, both of which I knew from web dev.

But with Rails I had a reason to pick up Ruby in the first place. So I didn't know a damn thing about metaprogramming or duck-typing going in, but I knew Rails was lightning and I wanted to capture it.

For most of the professional work I've done, I'm doing a CRUD web app. So if Rails or Phoenix lets me get to market faster with a tested solution, I'm sold. I've even got a talk I used to give about getting Rails to work with a legacy database, which has gotten much easier from the early days.

Now that I'm hiring devs, I do not want to pay them to build a CRUD framework from scratch, I'd rather have them building business logic we can't get off the shelf for free.

But whatever ends up working for you is cool!

AFAIK Phoenix doesn't tie in with npm packages whatsoever.

You have an `assets/` dir that contains your javascript stuff, and out of the box Webpack is set up there, but besides that it's all your choice, with the exception of the pre-shipped stuff for Channels and LiveView.

JAMstack is...not my jam.

I'm a big fan of rendering majority on a server and then shipping it, especially with Phoenix's LiveView which allows you to write reactive UI without writing Javascript.

But I said it in another comment: shipping value beats everything. If you can ship quickly and effectively in JAMstack to lambda, don't let anyone tell you that's wrong.

I've used Django, and while there's a base similarity the philosophical differences between it and Rails are definitely there.

Not gonna take a side on the Rails vs Django deal though. Like you said, if a team can effectively ship software with it that's the only measure that counts.

The initial application that powered CoverMyMeds was PHP, as it grew out of the consultancy I mentioned in my original post and we were a PHP shop then. AFAIK it still exists and is actively maintained.

Most other apps and services at CMM were written in Rails after we showed that we could ship better software faster with it, and it now accounts for the vast majority of code there.

Oh definitely. I picked up Rails without doing a single line of Ruby beforehand, and I think that's true for many of the Rails devs I know. Knowing Python is a plus, much of the language is gonna make basic sense.

For me, the big hurdles early were Blocks, which seem strange at first but make sense, and some of the metaprogramming stuff which you can definitely ignore to start and be just fine.

I'm gonna go back a short bit and say, for me? Ruby on Rails.

In 2007 I was plugging away at PHP with whatever frameworks were around at the time -- the vast majority of web dev that I saw then was pure procedural scripting down the page, maybe some `include` statements to pull in database functions. Especially in PHP, which encouraged mixing logic and HTML. The consultancy I was with had built custom stuff on top of Zend framework, and it helped a lot.

But around summer of 2007 is when I started hearing folks crow about Ruby on Rails, this hot new web framework written by a Dane in a Japanese programming language. It had been out for a few years and it was the hot topic in web dev circles, and so I decided to see what the fuss was about one weekend.

Instantly stuff I'd always had to do by hand was done for me. A decent data access layer with a few lines of code per db table, that automatically handled preparing and executing statements, and could handle keeping the database up to date with migrations. A REPL where I could load up the code I'd written for the app and use it for one-off debugging or maintenance tasks. A thriving plugin scene where many of the things I'd bashed together over the years were available, for free, just by cloning a repo.

That weekend I reimplemented the core functionality of one of the apps we'd been working on for a client. We'd taken about 10 weeks to get this thing into rough shape and I had its equivalent in two not-very-busy days. Authentication, authorization, CRUD, and fancy database queries I'd all had to hand-roll before just fell out of Rails.

I'm not overselling it when I say that for me, Rails was an absolute game-changer, and I myself and many folks I know owe their careers to the Ruby community and its (not always perfect) attitudes about software development. MINASWAN.

(I'm still active in Rails and the local Ruby community [Columbus Ruby Brigade!] but I'm running an Elixir/Phoenix shop now, which feels to me like the next step on the path Rails forged us.)

I don't have a horse in the Flash race -- it had a ton of issues but also enabled many content creators to deliver over the web in a way straight HTML/JS was incapable of -- and yes, Flash had its time and that time is now over, but yeah. Agree. Disturbing.

Flash games and animations were a treat of the early/mid-2000s web, and many folks got their start as creators there. Adobe hasn't just stopped distributing a player/plugin for Flash content, they're blocking the existing players from playing existing content. Even if you were an archivist there's nothing to do.

So yeah, this is disturbing. I can go to my city's library and browse microfiche if I want. I can install a Gopher or a Usenet client and connect to those widely-unused protocols that still serve content. But Adobe's reaching back and making all Flash content completely unplayable, even with players that should support it.

Wow.

  > My point is that deprecation is by its very nature going 
  > to hurt something that isn’t prepared for its demise.

TFA describes techniques for deprecating code paths that do their best to notify and prepare the folks working with that code.

You're describing the end of Life of Adobe Flash that hits at the end of 2020.

Deprecation is different from EOL (Flash has been deprecated for some time now), and deprecating/EOLing a creation tool/product line has little similarity with tooling to deprecate internal APIs gracefully.

Although I do think that you and TFA agree on how difficult it is to deprecate functionality that folks rely on, it seems like you're talking about two wildly different facets of that statement.

Getting a job or building a career in software development isn't about the languages you know. Your list is pretty broad and COBOL probably won't help.

It's what value you can provide with those that counts.

One of my earlier companies started with a policy against hiring folks who just knew PHP, even though that was our main language. We wanted folks who knew SQL, some JS, maybe some C or something to prove they were well-rounded and could think about tech as a whole.

We dropped that policy when folks started coming in with _just_ Ruby on Rails under their belt. They were destroying our project-based interview and blasting out projects in weeks that typically took us months. And we found that we could easily teach them the SQL they needed when they needed it.

I'm not saying it's _just that easy_ but if a dev hits my interview process and shows they can understand my customer's needs and build out a solution to those needs quickly, I _very much_ want to give them a job.

I've begun doing recruitment in a professional capacity recently, after having been the type of dev that dismissed this kind of social media, LinkedIn hashtag feed nonsense for the same reasons you do.

And I still don't love it, but I have to admit it's got a place in the strategy. Posting a job req with some focused hashtags seems to help get more responses. Posting a few industry-appropriate articles does seem to help keep our company in folks' minds.

In an ideal world every company I work for will be so amazing and so well known that I don't have to sell it to folks because the right folks are coming straight to us. Or that all of my friends and all of their friends will magically be capable of switching jobs to come build a new team with me whenever I need to grow.

But reality doesn't work like that, and so things like LinkedIn end up being table stakes. It isn't the whole of my recruitment strategy, but certainly it's a functional part.

That's one of the two links I posted, which I think Stallman did not link in the faith you give him (nor do I think was written in that same faith), but that's subjective.

The other is where he's doubting that pedophilia is harmful to children. So yeah, that's pretty well "in support of pedophilia." That one isn't subjective, it's the words he typed, and try as I might I can't find an interpretation where he's not saying pedophilia is fine.

But that's just it!

You're willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because you're a fan of his work and his ideologies in other spaces. Which makes sense, I dig it.

For myself, I'd rather not expend the mental gymnastics. If RMS had ever wanted to set the record straight, he could have. If he isn't willing to clarify, personally I'm uninterested in attempting to do it for him, and inclined to assume this (like his other writing) is direct and unambiguous.

(Edit, to add:) And to reinforce my previous point: sometimes the damage one's words do can't easily be undone, and treating everything like it's a philosophical debate and not someone telling us who they are may reinforce that harm.

I mean, his own website?

https://stallman.org/archives/2006-mar-jun.html#05%20June%20...

  > I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia 
  > harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem 
  > to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are 
  > then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea 
  > that their little baby is maturing. 

Please note that for the purposes of determining statutory rape, a person under the age of consent is not mature enough to give consent, so there cannot be "voluntary pedophilia."

https://stallman.org/archives/2012-jul-oct.html#15_September...

  >  Rick Falkvinge joins me in demanding an end to the censorship of "child pornography"

This second seems to touch lightly on specific cases where the definition of "child pornography" should perhaps be in question -- but given RMS' stance from the former quote, it's not clear that this is the entirety of his viewpoint.

  > Well, when RMS wants to say things implying that maybe 
  > pedophilia isn't always bad and perhaps it gets a bad 
  > rap because some parents aren't OK with their kids 
  > growing up, he needs to be exceedingly careful how he 
  > phrases every word of it because he's commenting on an 
  > extremely charged subject.

I hear your initial thought here, that talking about sensitive topics requires a sensitive hand, and RMS may lack one. And that's a valid point.

For some topics.

RMS has a history of defending or being actively supportive of pedophilia.

This isn't just a matter of RMS being incapable of speaking about a sensitive topic with grace. If I start raising questions about how smart non-white folks really are and supposing that perhaps only white folks can be in leadership positions, multiple times in multiple venues -- well, folks are going to think I'm a white supremacist. And the harm I'll have done to the non-white folks in my community will have already been done.

And no amount of (pp.) "carefully phrasing every word because it's an extremely charged subject" is going to change that.

For a long time I wanted to give Google more money! I tried multiple times to get together a Google Music Family Plan, because I'd bought music and uploaded music and the radio feature was so good.

They refused to allow me to pay them more, and refused to allow me to transfer my purchases to another account I verifiably own so I could then pay them more.

I know legacy GAFYD accounts don't matter to Google, and I don't expect them to, but it'd be nice to be able to transfer my stuff out. I know we like to point out who Google's real customers are, but after a decade-and-a-half I've actually paid them real money for things, and shockingly would like to continue doing so.

I've been having issues for a while.

Couldn't sign up for Youtube TV with my main account. I could sign up for Google Play Music (formerly Google Music, now RIP) but I couldn't sign up for a family account.

Stuff like that. It gets frustrating after a while.