jeklj

Prognostication has never been Cringely’s strong suit.

Not only we don’t understand the mechanism causing depression, we don’t really understand (as far as I am aware) why medications work or don’t work. I deal with mild depression sometimes, but this scares me off of considering medication for it. I’ve encountered so many horror stories of withdrawal symptoms... you really need to be at a point of desperation to consider drugs for it, imo.

Meaning what you’ve pointed out is clear; the problem was the statement and not material discrimination. “No blacks allowed”, in America at least, was no idle threat.

> The DO said that no individuals had been discriminated against, and noted that the festival had not in practice enforced the ban on cisgender men

Alrighty then.

> If nobody ever heard anything counter to the group-think, the organization itself would very quickly become stuck by momentum.

Indeed, that's a great reason not to fire people when they're honest. And yet, here we are.

At least in SV tech companies, in my experience, people really get their feelings hurt over small amounts of honesty. More importantly, the conversations you'll have to have afterward and the way people will sit on it for months until it comes up in your review make it just not worth it.

Keep it anodyne, pretty much always. You can tell your spouse what you really think. Or better yet, your dog.

Yeah yeah, but ultimately this all comes down to whether you think government interception of private messages is ultimately better than the messages staying private. People here obviously don't feel the same way you do about that.

Myself, I'm not quite so convinced as you seem to be of the harm of "absolutist" positions. Maybe the truth isn't always somewhere in the middle

Maybe we should consider that goods can still be worthwhile despite their mitigations.

Yes, I love this story too. It really demonstrates so much. And oh, the hackles it raises. :)

Companies like them want employees who think for themselves and work hard to change the world... But only within implicitly-defined areas.

I'll buy that it's the top seller, but are the majority of bottled drinks water? Because when I go to a convenience store there is usually one fridge for bottled water and several for all the other stuff (soda, tea, juice, Gatorade etc).

I don't think all of that really matters anyway, because the point I'm making is: anything that's bad about a plastic bottle filled with water surely must be just as bad for a plastic bottle filled with water and a little bit of sugar and coloring. Nobody has really addressed this, and I just think it's strange.

I'm fine with the idea that we should address this by drinking tap water instead of bottled water. All I'm saying is that surely the same goes for other bottled drinks as well.

I don’t believe your last sentence is correct in the case of brands like Dasani that are just filtered tap water. And for drinks other than water the bottles still have to get made and disposed of. Again, they are all just bottled water with a little bit of extra stuff in them, so whatever impact bottled water has, they all must have as well.

That is silly! I'm just not sure the solution is to switch to Powerade.

Sure. And that’s as true for juice, tea, and soda as it is for water.

Right but shipping Sprite around is just as wasteful. It’s almost all water.

Are you sure about that?

I don’t understand the focus specifically on water bottles when this comes up, seems like any drink bottle would be just as problematic. I understand we don’t all have pipes that bring Coca-Cola to our homes, but when you’re out and need something to drink that ship has sailed.

I don’t want to fight battles, at all. At least not in my working life but really not anywhere else either.

I’ve seen a lot and done a lot in my career, and I don’t feel I have anything to prove to anyone anymore. On the other hand I do find it enjoyable to discuss ideas in a collegial environment where people really are trying to figure out what’s best.

If we can agree on ideas as equals and proceed then great. If not, I’ll live. If someone gets mad because I had an idea to improve something I’m not going to get too twisted up about it. Life is too short for all this stuff, and it isn’t important in the scheme of things.

I did something similar once but failed to glean such a valuable lesson from the experience. My takeaway was, those people are touchy so leave their shit alone. Not because it’s right but because I’m just trying to get through my day, and i don’t need more politics in my working life. People can be assholes, it’s just how it is sometimes so let them be.

Among my own team, if I raise points or ideas that get disregarded in this manner (as opposed to more thoughtful demurrals), I let it go and don’t push the issue. I’ll speak up if I think I have something worth considering, but I’m not going to beat you over the head to see things my way.

Still, the takeaway regarding being on the other side of that table is really important. Once you start feeling that indignant reaction or “yeah right newbie”, listen harder.

To be a bit glib, unit tests don’t catch security vulnerabilities. Maybe I’d agree this can happen to any project, but my example might be something more like OpenBSD

Nothing bad ever comes to companies as a consequence of these leaks, so what is their incentive to stop them? It happens so often that it goes down the memory hole after maybe a week or two, so even that isn't much of an incentive. We shouldn't be surprised about this.

Yes, that single ad.

Sure. Give “Children of Men” another watch, and strap in.

Come on

It’s nice that you can store photos and it’s nice that you can maybe actually finally get support from them, but I don’t understand why those two things are bundled together. Their product offerings are typically sort of baffling

I am not sure it is possible any longer for JS to avoid getting larded up with a bunch of features from other languages, due to the popularity it has achieved. But one of the things I used to like about it was its relatively constrained feature set. (I would almost say simplicity, but some of the wackier aspects of the language prevent me from going that far.) Now we have things I’m not sure anyone even uses like Symbols.

(Please don’t tell me I can just constrain the code I write to the subset of features I care about. We all read more code than we write.)

Yuck.

Until there is some reliable way of comparing the complexity of two things, when people say something is “complex” what they usually mean is that they don’t like it or it’s unfamiliar.

Or better yet, your complexity is incidental, mine is essential. I was forced to make it complex, you did it because you’re not trying hard enough!

As Rich Hickey’s dictionary reminds us, to complect is to entwine together things better left separate. If you aren’t using the word in this sense, if you aren’t identifying the specific concepts which are complected but should be separated, you’re using fancy words to say you don’t like something. I’ve noticed we tend to do that, a lot.

I’m very wary of doing this in my own thinking, personally. It’s okay to just not like something, and it’s more honest just to say so than to use objective-sounding words in an attempt make it about something other than one’s own taste.