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marta_morena_23

-5 karma · joined March 20, 2020

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marta_morena_23··on “I, along with almost all of Disney Imagineering, am furloughed without pay”
Wow, that's some testament to employee morale. The company you work for effectively fires you because things don't go so rosy for a month and all you want is to go back lol. The company can really be lucky to have you and I guess you can be lucky to have such a great work that you actually want to go back after they pull off a stunt like this (which is essentially a punch in the face).

Unfortunately for many people, because things like this just show companies that they can (even) treat high-tech employees like disposable items and get away with it. The right reaction would be to make sure that no one in your division EVER goes back to this company and prevents everyone in their close circle to start working there, unless they pay some really nice and big severance package.

I wonder if this is more related to "game development". This isn't game development but it is kinda related. Perhaps people just think differently there and the normal employer - employee separation of concerns just goes out of the window. An employer collects HUGE profits from your work in the IT sector, no matter your level. You, as an employee, sacrifice these profits for convenience, essentially. Now they take your convenience away and you still want to work there. It's kinda baffling to me. And the game industry always spat on engineers, probably because too many people "want" to do it.

marta_morena_23··on I can't keep up with idiomatic Rust
So what? Did you ever look at a production codebase? You will be hard pressed to find an idiomatic codebase and nobody in the world is going to update anything to be "idiomatic" every 6 weeks. I mean maybe your manager doesn't fire you right away if you try, but you better be doing this in your spare time lol.

For academic and self-learning use? Sure go ahead, but then please don't complain that you can't keep up with it. Nobody should be using a feature for the sake of using a feature. If you don't need it, don't use it. If its old and not "idiomatic" there is literally ZERO reason to change it unless you ain't got anything better to do.

Get your priorities straight.

marta_morena_23··on Tesla offers ventilators free of cost to hospitals
Right, so you would rather die than risk germ infection?
marta_morena_23··on The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline
"We hear your concerns and frustrations. And we missed an opportunity to give you notice prior to the Wiki page coming down, and for that we apologize.

So why can’t we put a read-only archive online currently? The Wiki, even in it’s read-only state, was presenting security risks, and it was deemed necessary to take it offline.

We still have the data, and as mentioned above, we will work to migrate the top content into various official resources. In the meantime, we’re investigating how we can make this content available, even in a rudimentary way.

Some individuals from the community have already reached out to explore a community-hosted Wiki. We are following up with these folks and are evaluating next steps to see what may be possible here as well. "

Well you always learn new ways to express incompetence. They do know that you can render wikis into static HTML pages?

marta_morena_23··on Bokehlicious Selfies
Wow this looks ugly :D. But still nice work. It's just that the girl is totally over-processed and the "bokeh", well I hate to break it to you, but this isn't bokeh, its called "blur".

This is bokeh: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/JgrDuxQPCAvgd5VzqiKN5a-650...

And bokeh is 3 dimensional and surrounds the focus area, increasing with distance: https://www.flickr.com/photos/scottcartwrightphotography/145...

I suggest to brush up a bit on photo skills, although I agree that the instragram and iPhone culture can shift your perception of "bokehlicious" quite a bit.

I don't want to make you feel bad, so I also tell you that Apple's "bokeh" in portrait mode looks disgusting, doesn't make any sense and breaks the image in a lot of trivial cases... and they spent a lot more money & effort on it than you :).

marta_morena_23··on Zoom’s Use of Facebook’s SDK in iOS Client
Baffling how this can be the top post...

"Who audits that?" We just did. And if there was a law against that, Zoom would just have been exposed for breaking it. Any sane company will try their best to adhere to laws. Some big players like Google can afford to mess around pay a few billions in fines, but those are the exceptions, not the rule. Eventually, even they can't afford to pay the fines in the long run (Even Google bowed to GDPR or at least its getting bashed with steeper fines until they wake up).

"How do you determine what's legal and what's not?" You pass a law, read the law? This is a self-contradiction. Laws are open for interpretation but the interpretation is quite clear after a supreme court case (for the better or worse).

"We should be pushing for a platform that makes it obvious what the software you're running is up to". Oh the web of trust? Did you ever install Snitch or some other firewall on your system? Its utterly hopeless even if you are knowledgeable. There is simply not way to audit that. Who audits that? Here you CAN ask this question.

I can't for the life of me understand how you can believe that it is better for everyone, including parents and grandparents to audit their phone, instead of having researchers audit phones and report companies who break the law. This is non-nonsensical. You must either be some expert without a connection to the real world, or some elitist who thinks everyone is like him.

marta_morena_23··on Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible
Whoever uses local storage as persistent storage doesn't understand what local storage is. 7 days is enough. Local storage is supposed to allow your app to temporarily navigate around connection issues, to not require "always on". You can never rely on this storage to be permanent, there are just too many ways to accidentally wipe it all and for the user there is no easy way to back it up.

Your offline app should ALWAYS sync to the server whenever possible. The only bad thing I can see here is that if you can't upload the data in time and the user then doesn't use your app for 7 days, he will lose what he last worked on, but such is life and why you should rather use real apps. Offline apps needs to work differently, they need to get permanent storage just for that app but only if the user explicitly choses to install it like that. Not every random page should get permanent storage on your device. This is the right move, Apple might just lack an alternative for apps you actually chose to "install permanently" ;).

marta_morena_23··on How I became a better programmer (2017)
"Don't spend much time on making your code look nice"...

Well, thanks a lot. You just made your code much harder to read, improve, change and check for correctness. This is actually a self-contradiction. If the code changes often, then its even more important to make it "look nice". This is something that beginner programmers don't get on several levels: Nice code

* can be reviewed more quickly (broadcasting effect)

* can be checked for correctness much more easily

* is pleasant to work with

* can be changed more easily

* can often even compiled into more efficient machine code

The reason why beginners (and this is not about time invested! Many programmers still are beginners after 30 years in the field) think code doesn't need to look nice is mostly because

1. They don't consider that most of the cost of code comes from maintenance. Writing it is really A FRACTION of the time people will spend with your code over time.

2. They don't consider that creating bugs is one of the most expensive parts of software development.

3. They don't consider that code is read far more often than it is being written.

4. They are simply not ABLE to produce good code and doing so would take them a lot of time.

Now giving the advice to not focus on good/nice code is a recipe for staying a beginner for the rest of your life and making every project your work on a nightmare for everyone else involved.

marta_morena_23··on Effect of economic crisis on America’s small businesses [slides]
" then it’s likely that your business was running on a knifes edge and /any/ shock would have killed it."

Welcome to... life? This is how America or even the world works. Most people live on knife's edge. One missed paycheck? Homelessness just got its greasy hands on you. Two missed paychecks? Go pack what you have left... Most business are not any different, especially those run by regular people.

In my family we have a quite successful business in the sense that the person running it, has quite a fancy lifestyle and can afford it. But you have to realize that most business have terrible margins. Our family business has maybe a margin of 10%. That means, for every 10.000$ you take home before taxes every month, your business has running expenses of about 100.000$ per month. Now restaurants are all closed... Nobody will buy your stuff anymore, but your employess still need to get paid. So now you have those 100.000$ monthly costs and not a single dime coming in... There is no reasonable expectation to save this much buffer.

In short, even business that run extremely well, will die within A MONTH, if all expenses continue and no income is generated. This is why I think what they are doing for this petty virus is quite insane. They are destroying the middle class for some "theoretical" projection that might not even play out the way they think. What is guaranteed though is that businesses will die in troves and the economy and middle class with it.

marta_morena_23··on Stanford CS248: Implement an SVG Rasterizer
GPU aren't based on anything. They are turing complete, you can run Linux on it if you wanted to.

What you are saying is outdated by maybe a couple of decades.