nathanlied

I presume from showing something they've worked hard to discover and research. Even if their work may be used maliciously, it's better to be out in the open so that our communications systems can be made more robust, than to leave it in the dark to be exploited at a later date for nefarious and/or strategic reasons.

For an example, see the bricking of Viasat's satellite internet terminals in and around Ukraine at the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as part of the greater Russo-Ukrainian war[1]. If someone had discovered that vulnerability before, and been "happy" to present it, perhaps it could have been avoided.

This kind of security research into structures and services that millions of people rely on every day is of utmost importance to keep our society safe from malicious actors.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-us-spy-agency...

I do find the Boomer hate to be absolutely incoherent, but not new. Ultimately, the biggest factor is your economic class. If you're a boomer, but you're poor, you will live just as poorly as someone who's a poor Gen Z. If you're black and poor, you have far more in common on a day-to-day basis with a white poor person than with a black millionaire/billionaire.

IP issues aside, the only negative to the game itself is that, since it will likely have an online component that Rockstar is presumably intending to make a very solid profit on, source code availability means it's easier to find vulnerabilities, exploits, mod opportunities, and ways to circumvent their monetisation.

Short answer? Source available = no security by obscurity.

This is my opinion, through and through. Regardless of your views on regulating companies (breaking up cloudflare because it's too important vs not doing that), I believe we can mostly agree that companies should not be making moral decisions on what content we should access.

Moral decisions are a two-edged sword: we may all agree kiwifarms is bad and should be blocked because we agree trans people have a right to live without harassment; and if Cloudflare agrees with us, they'll block kiwifarms and we'll rejoice. But what if Cloudflare had a different value set from ours? What if they decided to block all pro-abortion-rights websites? They would, after all, be within their right.

It's my opinion that governments should ultimately be the deciders of what goes. Kiwifarms is allegedly committing several crimes. What should be investigated is: why did law enforcement not get involved sooner? After all, Cloudflare can be ordered to stop serving a person or legal entity by a court of law. So why hasn't that happened?

If we take them at their word, it's ideological. They seem to be somewhat libertarian and believe they shouldn't interfere except for the most serious cases. If I recall, they've even stated that the 8chan/Daily Stormer decisions might not have been made today.

For me it has helped to write it as "golang"; usually Google seems to understand what I want and show me relevant results.

They could; and Google could then close down their offices in Spain and save that money. Maybe it'd be worth it, maybe it wouldn't; I don't know Google's financials to make the decision.

I'll agree with you here; I've got plenty of anecdata of the "younger" people choosing synchronous methods (calls, meetings, one-on-ones, etc.) vs "older" people (perhaps with families or other time-taking things) prefer asynchronicity.

I don't think it's necessarily an age thing, more of a work methodology thing. Same as how some people cannot work remotely at all and will be miserable and unproductive doing so, where others thrive on remote and can't see themselves at the office. We should control for all of that in companies, and try to match people of the same persuasion. It may lead to far less attrition.

That's because it is a double standard. However, people in low labour cost countries have usually preferred to get something rather than nothing, and they held virtually no power. People in low labour cost countries would need to collectively unionise/strike/fight for their rights, in countries that don't always have the best human rights laws, much less political will to defend their citizens. And if they win? Well, they might get those big companies to leave, because some other country makes it cheaper, or if they have to pay the same as back home, why not move the business back home?

People who are capable of working remotely from low CoL areas/countries are, in contrast, more empowered. Generally better educated, often English-speaking, sometimes fairly well-connected. And it's just as easy to work for <CoL-Adjusting company #1> as it is to work for <CoL-uncaring company #1>.

We're seeing a lot of people who thoroughly enjoyed full-remote work during COVID make it a dealbreaker to work remotely now. Those people often don't even consider on-site positions. This whole CoL-adjusted thing will depend on whether a good % of those people will consider CoL-adjustments a dealbreaker or not. I suspect some might, but not enough that it'll change the balance sheet, and so we'll see larger companies who can "afford" the bureaucracy of CoL-adjustment do it, whereas other companies will use CoL-neutrality as (one of the) carrots to attract talent from CoL-adjusters.

Why couldn't HR see this as just a data-point? Put things this way, if the "junior opinionated guy" is full of it, this kind of feedback won't emerge again, and you can discount it.

Or maybe you've got some other data-points indicating this guy is an issue? Say, his projects are consistently late, or there's issues developing new features, or his teams have a higher attrition rate, or, or, or.

This is why it's my opinion that these things should be as secret as possible so people can feel comfortable voicing their real opinions knowing it won't blow back on them, and the company can get real feedback that might prevent thornier issues from becoming terminal.

I've been finding it very easy to empathise with Russians in this. After what we've seen happening in so-called "enlightened" Western democracies, with all our press freedoms, and yet we still have homeopathy advocates, far-right (and left!) conspiracies, and all kinds of gnashing of teeth over "fake news".

How can I not look at Russian society, with a far more controlled environment, and think "how can Russians not know about it? How are they so easily deceived?", well, how are -we-, in the West, so easily deceived? It cuts both ways - but at least Russians have more of an excuse.

I am hoping you and your people find kindness wherever you decide to flee to. It is already difficult enough to uproot yourself (and your family), with an uncertain future, leaving friends and memories of better days behind. We need to advocate for Ukrainian refugees - those who are fleeing Putin's war of aggression - but we cannot forget that, while Ukrainians are the worse off in this conflict, many Russians will also be victims. Many Russians will not be able to return home. And many Russians may see friends and family prosecuted for opposing Putin's war.

Will have to third this. I have friends and acquaintances I talk to regularly from all walks of life - from construction workers to tradesmen/mechanics, all the way to bankers and the like.

Out of all of them, I have the "best" job in terms of what's expected of me on a day-in-day-out basis. The biggest problem I feel us tech-workers have is that we compare our "bad" with their "good".

On a good day, a construction worker may get there, do their work for the amount of hours stipulated, and leave the work at work. That's our perspective. What we do not often see is the time they spend worrying about the weather conditions (if you're painting outside, can't do it in the rain), or whether this or that material will be on time/to spec, or that you sprained something yesterday and you really need to haul heavy stuff around today, and it cannot be delayed because people are relying on it being done, and this might mean your injury will worsen and you might not be able to work for a while.

We can get bad days. And our bad days can get pretty shitty. I won't begrudge anyone who'd love to leave the tech sector; I've often thought about it myself. But from hearing my friends in other professions talk about their bad days? Mine don't occur so often, and when they do, are often not as bad.

It's very difficult to deny our privilege when we talk to someone who works all day in the searing heat, and our day consisted of turning on our laptop at 11, running some Terraform scripts, making it to our favourite restaurant for sushi, enjoying an extended lunch while monitoring some deployments on our work tablet, and having a meeting while walking on a nearby park to negotiate internal deadlines. I've often been embarrassed to describe my day to some of my friends.

As someone adjacently interested in the field: care to elaborate on what systems you do like? It's always interesting to get new perspectives.

It doesn't (strictly) need to have centralized search; you can passively collect info from the DHT swarm and build up an index over time of torrents people are sharing.

It's not as convenient as something like napster or the like, but we've also got this draft <http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0051.html> to make it a bit better.

Can confirm your experience. Although in my circles credit cards are more common due to kickbacks - big discounts at places you'd normally go to anyway, or straight up financial incentives. Everyone prefers debit however, and credit cards are definitely not the norm.

When "slavery" is mentioned in this context (wrt. black/white), it's reasonable to assume the person means it predates the Atlantic slave trade, which was not the only form of slavery, but it was the largest (and most visible) form of slavery involving predominantly white people owning predominantly brown people.

I make no claim over the validity of "white going first" predating the Atlantic slave trade, however. I simply don't know.

I don't want to sound accusatory with this at all, so I apologize in advance if that's what it sounds like. I'm merely speaking from experience.

"Remote work lifestyle" is what you make of it. During lockdown, many of us were forced into -a- lifestyle. People adapted how they could to the new circumstances, some developed healthy habits, others less so. Now circumstances changed again, but it does not constitute a break, like lockdown did. Point being, you need to look at what you're allowed to do (and okay with doing!) in the current context, and incorporate that in your life.

If you work with other people, there will likely be others that enjoy physically socializing. Try pushing for a slack/discord/whatever platform you use channel for people to schedule out-of-work meetings. Sell it (if you have to) as teambuilding. This kind of thing has existed in many workplaces I've had knowledge of with (and even without!) remote workers.

As an example, a friend's team had a couple of people who lived alone in town craving social contact; so they started scheduling Friday night dinners/late night talks at each of their houses in turn. The other members of the team have patios, so they can just sit outside, drink some beers, and do the socializing there. Sometimes they go out to restaurants, other times they order in some pizza. It works, and it created a much more positive team environment between everyone.

Now, that might not necessarily be you - and it may actually be that you're one of those people that fully remote work doesn't work for - in which case not a ton can be done, and I'm sure there will be workplaces that will accommodate you. I'd even daresay those will be the majority. But you can give it a try, if you see any benefits at all from remote work.

I know of some HSBC teams who have gone full remote. It was meant to be experimental, but management has been really satisfied with the metrics so it's a permanent thing. Some banks are embracing it, even if not fully.

Ends up being a cat-and-mouse game, but the power dynamics are even more unbalanced towards the red team: not only do they have control of the hardware, they also control your executable.

It's also why "anti-cheat drivers" have never gone away, they allow a greater level of control over what's done to your protected processes.

I'm not sure I am okay with that - there's only so much I'm willing to put up with to play some game - but I do understand why developers/producers would want such draconian solutions. In some game genres, cheating is rampant.

I think you'll find a lot of this type of thing in threads like these - the better range of experiences go from "okay" to "pretty nice", but the bad can get very horrible, very fast, and people tend to remember the bad more. Especially if you have to seemingly fight against everyone on a daily basis just to do the basics of your job.

Yeah. I worked infra at a few EU Universities, and while firing someone in that environment is pretty difficult, you still get the "old boys club" that will absolutely not let you do anything.

The problem was never users/faculty. It was other people doing IT there for longer who would not accept anything they were unfamiliar with, and treated "their" hardware as if it was their own children. It led to a sort of balkanization of infrastructure that was extremely difficult to break, and you often had to spend way more of the budget to come up with convoluted solutions so you didn't touch their ancient setups rather than just making the whole thing homogenous and centrally managed.

As a result, depending on what you were working on, you could have to deal with wildly different AWS/Azure/GCP platforms, or on-prem hardware that could range from independent(!) OpenStack installs to ancient Debian machines that might not even be supported anymore. Sometimes people negotiate licensing completely separately, where you could have unused licenses available but it's not communicated so it's bought again by someone else. Some places even had random servers running inside people's offices connected via Wi-Fi.

There's a reason I got out of that line of work. I'm frankly surprised universities aren't a larger target.

Agreed; but this isn't just a Google problem. Seems to me like a lot of SF (and SF-inspired) "big tech" wants to be known for their "wokeness"[1], which leads to hires like Timnit and other "politically-outspoken" people, which in turn leads to situations like this, James Damore, and other individuals/situations that amount to workplace political activism.

I am wholly uncomfortable with any discussion of politics in a workplace environment like a mailing list. I am more than fine with employees choosing to associate politically outside the workplace and workplace spaces, no matter how radical I find their views. This is in itself political - it supports the status quo - but anything else is inviting dissent and combativeness, and situations like these will keep happening.

That said, I've not seen the email outlining her conditions "or else", but I feel I'd have very much taken the same stance as you, given the surrounding coverage of what was in that email. Ultimatums to your employer don't often go well. And perhaps this is a good thing for her, because she may leave for a place that better suits her.

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[1] my derisive use of this term does not stem from actual efforts at inclusiveness, those are good, but from surface-level attempts at it that end up feeling performative, at best.

This is exactly what these workers are doing. They're unhappy with their contracts, so they're trying to negotiate better terms.

Normally, you negotiate your contract because your company wants you, and finding someone else that would agree to the contract is a non-trivial amount of effort, so they'll hear you out. In these people's cases, all they'd hear is "lol, no" if they tried to negotiate individually, because they'd have virtually no power. As a result they're trying to find leverage in numbers: We want the freedom to negotiate all our contracts to our advantage, otherwise we're striking.

Allow me to put things differently: There is no law that says that Amazon must accept whatever terms are put forth by these unions. Amazon can, if they wish, outright refuse their terms and tell them that the contract is as-is and will not be altered.

While I'm not saying this is your case, I am puzzled at people who argue against unions with your last line, because it really does cut both ways. "If you are unhappy with a contract, don't sign it". Well, a union is a form of negotiating said contract, and to the companies being proposed those terms: "If you are unhappy with the terms, don't sign it". Makes sense, right?

Have direct knowledge or worked with many critical systems in a few different areas (cannot get more specific for several legal reasons). Can confirm. I'm given to understand that legacy systems (think 30ish years ago) were much better engineered, but there's not enough Proper Engineers(tm)(r) to design (and build) all the critical systems that are necessary.

The biggest issues are that an engineer with the knowhow is expensive, a team of them is prohibitively expensive, a lot of companies outsource this work to different countries and make them sign onerous and dubiously-enforceable contracts, pay little, demand too much, and have incredibly unrealistic deadlines for the type of work that needs to happen.

You know how it is, if it never fails, you're throwing money out. That's the mentality of a lot of management types I've dealt with.

Yeah, if you pay attention to the world (and I'm not implying grandparent does not - please don't draw that conclusion), you will see a lot of "symptoms" before 2016 happened.

I believe the person grandparent is referring to's rise to power was one more symptom in what's been happening, and not a cause in any way. Of course, these things tend to enter a sort of feedback loop. If you'll allow me a parallel with the rise of antisemitism in Europe in the early half of the last century: It was not Nazism that emboldened and bolstered antisemitic feelings across Europe. Nazism was a symptom of the established and pretty mainstream antisemitic current in western society at the time. Even the US was not immune to hating on the Jew.

This rise in far-right political strength is most likely associated with a backlash against the (mostly? totally?) left-wing push for inclusivity and rapid social progressivism. In a way, among those that wouldn't identify themselves as far-right but do manifest ideals associated with the far-right of today, I can identify a certain undercurrent of "we're going too far, we're making too many changes, we need to slow down". Of course, things like "cancel culture", Spotify's staff wanting complete creative control over a 'controversial' podcast, etc., as well as the social bubbles we isolate ourselves in on our chosen social media platforms do not help at all with empathy or viewing others' viewpoints, which greatly exacerbates the issue.

Yeah, pretty much. I don't think they're trying to do the embrace-extend-extinguish thing here at all, at least not in a "willful" way.

Devs I know of that use macOS do it for the "Linux without the jank" aspect - essentially as an "it just works" quasi-Linux distro. If Windows could provide the same experience, or at least a very similar one, I do believe a good number of devs 'raised' on Windows would stay. In my lifetime, I've seen more people convert from Windows->macOS due to wanting to do dev work in a "Linux-like" environment than anything else. It makes sense for MS to want to mitigate that bleed-off.

Indeed. I don't see why people are mischaracterising this ban; it isn't banning software, it's an extension of the concept of a 'commercial embargo' - except now it applies to a company instead of a country.

I know how superficially contradictory this may seem, but I disagree at an emotional level, however, I rationally see where you're coming from, and perhaps even agree to an extent.

For me, the 'process' of creation of a game, or piece of art, is interesting in and of itself. Whether a song was created for profit only, or inspired by the loss of someone close, is interesting on its own but it does not enrich the work, if that makes sense. The work in itself produces feelings, and those feelings would be there regardless of origin. In fact, I've found myself deeply moved by music, ascribing to it meaning and intent, that turns out is completely different from that intended by the author. That is what I mean when I say I emotionally disagree with you. If a work of art can produce feelings in us that the author never felt nor intended, can we say that the author matters in any special way? After all, we're post-Death of the Author.

However, for the rational part of me, the source matters. If for no other reason than philosophically: Why does art inspire feelings in us, even those unintended by the artist? Is it empathy? Even if misguided? If so, we could say art is devalued by a non-feeling creator: after all, what's there to empathise with? Or is it the recognition of something within ourselves? A (guided) self-introspection, if you will? Then the source doesn't inherently devalue the product; unless you're somehow opposed to introspecting based on the output of a machine.

I feel as if some of us have been so worried about sentient/super-intelligent AI outperforming us creatively, we haven't worried enough about what it would mean if non-sentient/'intelligent' AI outperformed us at our own creative process. Or even reached parity - that on its own would be monumental.

You don't even need them to be big, even a low budget car's infotainment touchscreen is enough. Mine has adaptive brightness, so it means that at night in a dark road it'll be at lowest brightness, with black/gray, which makes it even less visible. It's still enough to screw with my night-vision when compared to old cars I had without interior lighting save for some very dim reds on important buttons.

I'm a native-level (European) Portuguese speaker, and although I can get through the beginning, it is with some effort.

I'd describe the style as being akin to stream of consciousness, but with a somewhat jumbled sentence structure on top. Of course, I use the term 'jumbled', but I'm sure it's intentional, and it does have a striking effect because of that.