rrwo

This aged well.

I disagree. Using AJAX to hit internal APIs to load or update content improves performance of the site, and can make it easier to maintain.

> Some how firing/laying-off has been trivialised.

Hardly. Even in developed western countries, being laid off can hurt families and communities.

When there are a lot of tech companies and the industry is doing well economically, and you can easily relocate or work remotely, then it's less of a worry. You can find another job with less difficulty.

But if you work in another sector like manufacturing, it can be devastating. Especially when a significant portion of the community work in that company or industry. There are large swaths of the US and UK where industrial jobs have disappeared and once prosperous areas have become impoverished in the past 40-50 years.

> We have normalised firing of people.

That's what happens in societies when the majority of people work for a corporation. The corporations are motivated by profit and will lay off hundreds or thousands of people or abandon a community if it saves money.

> I don't know about the "developed" countries where people have social security....

Many of these "developed" countries have embraced the austerity gospel. There isn't much of a safety net as the was or could be.

I don't know about the "developed" countries where people have social security,

So where are these things going to be?

As public video phone booths? People will come up with some "interesting" uses for them.

Offices won't need them. People will use video and webcams on their desktop or in a conference room.

At homes people will use their laptops or tablets or phones. Who wants a dedicated video room?

It is recommended, not mandatory. You are a single person company.

Do you think every family run corner shop or plumber or painter in the EU has hired a DPO? No.

I should be able to ask on a forum about configuring an application that dates back to the 1990s without having to declare that I have to maintain a legacy server for work, and that throwing it away and replacing it is not an option.

There is no fundamental flaw in using very old software that still works.

You don't need to hire a separate person as DOO. It's recommended but not mandatory.

No, that's not true at all.

I've started to wean myself off of `fgrep`, but only because I am using `zgrep -F` as I'm often searching through logs, which may or may not be gzipped.

But this is a stupid change.

Part venting, but I really would like to know about decent forums.

> Between the increasing cost of high-speed internet and the proliferation of streaming subscriptions — Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Apple TV Plus, the Criterion Channel, YouTube, Shudder, Paramount Plus, Peacock, etc. — costs haven’t really gone down all that much. People wind up paying a little less, maybe, but at the cost of having radically fewer choices. What’s interesting about this is how little most folks really seem to mind the trade-off.

What the author misses is that people are so saturated with content that they don't need to subscribe to everything.

I don't have the time to watch everything that I am interested in on just Netflix. What is the point of subscribing to another service, that I won't have time to watch?

It wouldn't matter if they all merged into one giant streaming platform. I don't have the time to watch everything.

> Isn't finding and pointing out a fundamental flaw in how you want to accomplish X the opposite of pedantic?

The problem is when people treat questions as having fundamental flaws when they don't.

We often have to maintain legacy systems running on ancient servers, or with code that doesn't quite fit with a perfect theoretical framework of system design.

I could ignore the bad comments if someone actually answered the question.

But questions like "What are the most restrictive permissions I can put on /var/lib/foobar without breaking foobar" are not actually answered by saying "Don't use foobar. bobaz is better".

And questions like "I am using foobar v10, and I am wondering if there are performance issues with the bleep function, or problems upgrading to v11 or later" shouldn't be answered with "The bleep function violates the sacred separation between model-view-controller. Do not use it."

None of these are answer the questions in any way.

It's not a matter of "different people have different discussion styles". It's as if they see the mention of certain keywords and want to post a dogmatic criticism.

Nematodes manipulated evolution to produce organisms that would send them to other solar systems.

> A job board which truly understands software developers

Great... but what is it about the site that it "truly understands software developers"?

Sorry, accidentally submitted before fixing typo. I've edited the post to be longer.

If true2, does this violate the Logan Act?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act

I've never had typos take hours to fix.

But then again the text editor I use has syntax and bracket highlighting.

I've seen a lot of companies have a jobs section on their websites that talk about what great places they are to work, and the kinds of skills they are looking for along with an email address for people submit resumes.

But I myself wouldn't submit anything to a company this way unless someone at the company suggested it.

And I suspect that people who send their resumes this way are either junior developers looking for job, or developers who are desperate for a new job. So I'm not sure how many diamonds you might get.

You collected books on the programming language or system APIs, or a textbook on algorithms, and sometimes saved magazines, plus a bit of experimentation.

Fidonet and Usenet were good places to ask.

Looking at the source code of open source projects, especially when some piece of the code was doing something that you wanted to figure out.

Three years seems to be the standard amount of time that Google supports their phones. (A bit of web searching suggests Google may support newer phones for five years.)

I used to have a Nexus 5 phone, and when Google stopped sending updates, I rooted it and installed LineageOS on it, which gave it another couple of years life until Lineage stopped supporting the device.

I'll add that the "older" versions of some utilities in a distribution's package managers often have patches with security fixes from newer versions.

The distribution's package manager will identify when there's a newer version, especially with critical security fixes, so I don't have to regularly do manual checks to see if something should be upgraded.

Newest isn't always better, and I'm usually happy to be conservative about common system utilities like tar and gzip.

> Second, once we have done compiling a few times, compiling a program from its latest sources can be easier than figuring out how to install an often older version with our distribution’s package manager.

This is nonsense.

> format the document source for legible reading. Yes, it's the input to the typesetter, and yes, the output of the typesetter needs to be legible. But it's worth making the input easy to read, too.

How is that difficult? Most text editors support word wrapping and syntax highlighting.

> avoid rebuilding your rendered document too often. It's slow, it takes you out of the activity of writing, and it throws up lots of opportunities to get distracted by some rendering nit that you didn't realise would happen.

I wrote a 300+ page PhD thesis with a lot of mathematical proofs, 12+ years ago on a computer that was a few years old. It wasn't that slow.

But then again, the whole point of using something like LaTeX is that you can focus on the text and not how it looks when writing it.

> If you use syntax highlighting in your editor, take a long, hard look at what it's drawing attention to. It's not your text, that's for sure. Is it worth having it on? Consider turning it off. Or (yak shaving beware!) tweak it to de-emphasise things, instead of emphasising them.

Again, I never found this to be a problem, even with documents that were full of mathematical expressions.

The point is that reviews complaining of "no smell" are correlated with an increase in covid.

You need logs of some form to know what users did, or tried to do.

I'm not talking about 3rd party analytics.

> Alternatively, you can just not track the behaviour of every person who lands on your website.

Tracking behaviour is useful to ensure the site is working, that people are able to use the site and make purchases, or even to know what parts of the site people are using. There is nothing wrong with that, so long as the logs are not shared and not kept for longer than necessary.

Tracking people's use of the site to build a profile of them and share with third parties, without consent, is where the privacy problem comes from.

There is a misunderstanding about GDPR and cookie consent that many people have.

Using cookies to track state on a website, that is only used for that website, is fine. You don't need to ask for consent. That is how a site tracks things like whether you are logged in.

I worked in a office in late 1990s/early 2000s when it transitioned from Novell NetWare on DOS and Windows 3 to Windows 95 and 98 on the internet.

People using the internet on their work machines added so many problems:

- People spending a lot of time on shopping or porn. (This was before Facebook, and I don't think MySpace was around or popular yet.)

- People downloading and installing software they shouldn't. Which ranged from pirated software to adware to malware, or even something benign that conflicted with the tools they needed for their job. (This was mostly fixed when we migrated people to Windows 2000.)

- Viruses.

- People set up file sharing nodes for music and porn.

All of these problems came about once we added access to the internet.

Admittedly, it should have been rolled out differently, perhaps using something like Windows NT with firewalled networks.

But giving people access to the internet just allowed a lot of people who were naive to shoot themselves in the foot and waste a lot of resources fixing their computers.

I've seen computers improve lives

At a former place of work the secretaries became experts at using Excel and even Access or Crystal Reports. I remember one had a beefy SQL book on her desk to make queries directly from the company's Oracle databases.

Eventually they got newer titles of "executive assistant" with better pay.

The IT department I worked at also lobbied for a policy, so that when computers were upgraded that they should get the newest and more powerful ones, since they were doing the bulk of computing.