testudovictoria

The problem with some of (all of?) these is that it's becoming increasingly moot to bother posting. I posted back in the early days of social media to share with my friends. In response, my friends and acquaintances kept me up to date with their lives. Now the apps only bother to show me friend/following posts if they deem it matches my interests.

I understand that this sort of algorithmic feed likely matches the metrics to keep people scrolling. This would also track with every app moving away from "friend" verbiage to something like followers, subscribers, or members. Users are encouraged to post _to_ their audience rather than sharing _with_ their friends.

In addition, it feels like the past 5 years have brought on more marketing spam. I've been slowly reappearing onto marketing lists that I either never signed up for or unsubscribed from. They're coming from legitimate companies that I've done business with.

The people that's a problem for don't understand this fact. Of the ones that do, there's upper management and/or shareholder pressure for profits now. It's a can that infinitely gets kicked down the road until they reach a dead end.

I think a lot of people are missing that eBay bought TCG Player back in 2022. This would fold the TCG Player brand into GameStop. Many (most?) local game stores list their inventory on TCG Player. In addition to the physical stores themselves, GameStop would have their hand in nearly every digital trading card transaction. GameStop would own the TGC Player warehouses and inventory.

As you should be. I look forward to more of this nonsense.

You also have to be "all in", so to speak, in order to participate. I can window or minimize a screen on a PC. I can pause a game on a console. I'm immediately aware of my surroundings in both cases. With a VR headset, I have to physically remove the headset before I see where I am within physical space.

It feels so silly expressing this, but the act of putting on a headset that completely engulfs my vision with screens, even if my space is already clear with a boundary, feels like a much bigger commitment than opening Steam. It doesn't matter if I'm standing for room scale or if I'm already seated with the headset next to me. Both cases feel like extra effort for a lesser experience.

> What I'm suggesting is a low risk way to see if an engineer has an aptitude for aligning the roadmap with what the users want. If they aren't great at it, they can go back to engineering. We also know for sure that they are technically competent since they are currently working as an engineer, no risk there.

It doesn't have to be the most socially competent engineer to gather feedback. Having the engineering team sit with the target users gives so much insight into how the product is being used.

I once worked on an administrative tool at a financial institution. There were lots of pain points, as it started as a dev tool that turned into a monstrosity for the support staff. We asked to have a meeting with some reps who were literally 2 floors below us. Having the reps talk as they worked with the tool in real time over 1 hour was worth more than a year's worth of feedback that trickled in. It's one thing to solicit feedback. It's another to see how idiosyncrasies shape how products get used.

Insurance. One of the core pillars of insurance tech is the CSV format. You'll never escape it.

I once got dinged for not reporting. I saw an email that was clearly an internal security campaign. I deleted it. I received an email a day or two later stating that I failed to take action on a phishing attempt. Damned if you do; damned if you don't.

I don't live in the city. Aside from not being able to walk to school, mine would have to wake up roughly 45 minutes earlier (60 minutes if we want to be safe) to catch the bus. We are about 8 minutes from the school via car. Between the lack of housing density and ugly school zoning, taking the bus cuts significantly into their sleep.

Interesting way to put it, but I'm still not sure that quite applies. The game is a multiplayer game intended to be played with other people. Commercial endeavors change with movie viewing. It's implied that single entity can own a single copy while charging admission to profit from their single copy of the movie. Meanwhile, movie companies (mostly) don't care if I play _The Lord of the Rings_ in a private setting to a small audience of known people.

I would argue that the competitive nature of tournaments implies that the entrants all have a copy of the game along with hardware to run the game (emulation withstanding). The only thing is streaming the event. Even then, what would be the difference between streaming a tournament and streaming myself or a small group of friends playing? It doesn't seem like that would infringe upon the core purpose of the game.

There are fair-use protections, but it costs money to defend. Part of why so many Smash tournaments folded in 2022 was because of Nintendo telling people they weren't allowed to host tourneys using their IP. Granted I'm not a lawyer, but people gathering to play a multiplayer game and then streaming the matches doesn't inherently constitute any infringement on Nintendo's rights or ability to make money. Many TOs (tournament organizers) left the scene or stopped featuring Smash as a title over the C&D notice. No one wanted to take on Nintendo in court.

Kind of. Some TOs are calling Nintendo's bluff. Nintendo released a set of guidelines[0] on what kinds of tournaments can be hosted. However, Collision 2024 just happened with attendees and a prize pool surpassing the guidelines.

[0]: https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...

Is it really outrageous to ask for some of the crumbling infrastructure around us to be updated or better maintained? Granted the OP comment said _first_ when it's not really an either/or situation. It's not like we need billions in R&D to apply what's been solved in dozens of other metros across the world.

Same with me. By blame, I really meant responsibility.

We missed a pretty big deadline not too long ago. In the retro, I accepted a lion's share of the responsibility. I'm a senior dev rather than a team lead, but I had my head down during a lot of the technical discussions and PRs rather than diving deep with the juniors and mid-levels. I apologized for it.

I have made myself more available since then. PRs have been under more scrutiny from everyone, and I feel like the constructive feedback and requests for comments have been flowing more openly.

I truly wish that teams used retrospectives in this manner instead of the shallow conversations that are often devoid of blame. Not that every sprint needs to have a deep, impactful retro, but it's nice to talk about shortcomings, be able to accept blame, and move forward with actionable items. Everyone comes out ahead.

The creator posted this elsewhere in the comments:

> it seemed like it was mostly intro stuff, or straight to DBA level

This would have been perfect for someone like me a few years ago. I went into my first job knowing how to make simple queries and simple joins. I changed jobs into a legacy system where there was an overwhelming amount of data sharded across few databases and several hundred schemas.

I didn't need to learn how to do simple joins or basic keywords like union and intersect that every tutorial talked about. I also didn't need a bunch of DBA knowledge like distribution strategies, replication, and HA techniques. I needed to learn how to leverage what was in the database to pull the exact data I needed more efficiently than what I was doing - windows, cursors, and good subqueries. I was the type of person being addressed.

My guess is that the older folks who have the experience to speak deeply about these topics aren't interested in maintaining a blog. One of my most interesting college professors worked on chess engines professionally. He has a small online presence, but his commentary is usually in response to pointed questions or wild claims about chess engines.

The guy has stories upon stories about both hardware and software design and their impact on performance at both high and low level. All of his tangents in class were downright fascinating.

I went from a company that used Google Hangouts, which is like using pen and paper relatively speaking, to trying to use Slack. Slack wasn't official, but it was an allowed form of communication. People who didn't have the vested interested just couldn't figure it out. So while I preferred Slack, having to hold everyone's hands through basic functionality was awful.

Now I'm at a place that uses Teams. I don't think Teams is perfect, but I feel like Teams gets extra hate just because it's Teams. The best feature in my opinion is the group thread feature. Having people able to start a threaded conversation by default gives a lot of granular control over what notifications I receive by default.

Part of the problem with this is the horrible business practices and policies in place. In a way, it is urgent that you get back to your health insurance rep or your car insurance rep or whatever private business that's selling you a government mandated service. That phone rep knows that you only have 15 more days to finish your insurance claim, or you've gone past the deadline. Then when you call back, the rep can't do anything. Terrible business policy doesn't allow them to. Something like this happened to me.

I had an issue once with a claim. It was an ongoing ordeal with lots of small meetings and documentation. It was eventually denied. However, I had a rebuttal window. Unfortunately for me, it came during a stressful period of work. I made the initial call to my rep. No call back. I was buried under work, and the 5 day rebuttal window (how absurdly short) blew by without me realizing it. Turns out the rep was on vacation, and after my case was closed, there was no reason for them to return my call.

These issues are never a matter of urgency that should be dealt with in that instance. However, don't let your window of opportunity close due to an adversarial business policy.

Focus on the bottleneck. There is a finite amount of time. Increase it to allow more participants.

There's also putting restrictions on the input. Have a maximum song length.

Otherwise, require additional constraints before queueing like making it computationally expensive or having a priority system based on criteria. Charge a cover (with increasing costs) or have a membership club that gives more/better access.

They're not mutually exclusive. I would like a more progressive tax system, better healthcare for everyone, better rights for workers, and better systemic treatment of minorities and non-binary people.

I have plenty of time in both Halo Infinite and Splitgate. Even if you take away the portals, Splitgate doesn't play like Halo Infinite at all. They look and sound similar, but they play and feel very different.

I can see why you'd say that. It's not charitable thinking. I'm thinking it's part of a standard inclement weather plan. Everyone works as usual. If there's a tornado watch, employees don't come in to keep them from being caught in a tornado. Hold employees in approved safety area under a tornado warning (e.g. reinforced building, not open warehouse), because sending them home is a clear danger.

> The company who ordered people back to the floor when a hurricane was coming causing their death when the building partially collapsed

Question about this specifically. Was it ever revealed if that order was to get people indoors to a reinforced building that happened to collapse? I remember SMS screenshots of a delivery driver who was killed, and to have sent him on the road would have been a death sentence.

Good mentors nudge and maybe push; they never shove.

The best mentor I ever had helped me orient myself when I had no idea what I wanted to do. My answers were always, "I'm not sure. As long as I'm actively developing, I'll likely be fine." This wasn't quite true. Working on feature sets that didn't make sense with the code's architecture only to be thrown out 3 months later was rough.

She was the one that encouraged me to work on skills during work hours. No employer is going to miss 1/40 hours when it's used for professional development that directly benefits them. She encouraged me to stick with learning new things when I was ready to phone it in. AWS certs aren't hard to pass, but I probably wouldn't have taken the test without her push. I would have never dipped my toe into management. I found that management wasn't for me, but it was a better experience than resting on my laurels for a year.

A good mentor is like a good friend checking in on you from time to time, but the relationship is professional. Everything pertains to your professional goals (or in support of) from a place of wanting the mentee to succeed.

Web desktops usually aren't meant to be a true replacement of an actual OS. They tend to be long-tailed exercises that marry web development and desktop development.

Along with what the sibling said, I'm not interested in tricks and puzzles, but I am interested in how people take in and handle new information. I'm not going to pretend like my job is bleeding edge or remotely novel tech. I do CRUD with SQL.

It's impossible for anyone to be an expert in every application that my team handles. The key for us is that we try to keep our applications relatively simple with how data moves from point to point. Orienting yourself with new environments and applications significantly increases productivity here. It's always good to have people who can recognize and apply logic to patterns, but knowing how to ask questions is important. It isn't about the "gotchas". It's about what happens after the person is stuck. We try to make sure our applicants can make some assumption or ask clarifying questions about ambiguous portions.

> Google Search has gone so far downhill. I'm not sure what they're optimising for. Long-term irrelevance, it seems.

I assume they're optimizing for the most common denominator: standard, non-power users. Early search didn't return great results for human-like questions such as What are the wavelengths of the colors on the visible spectrum? The result might be within the first two pages, but that query had too many irrelevant search terms. A better query would have been wavelengths color visible spectrum. That query only has the necessary key terms. Sometimes queries required the user to know search operators (e.g. exact match, date range, synonyms) just to get relevant results.

The average person probably didn't know that early searches gave better results when constructed in the second way. Google changed search to adapt to how normal people search. Now the human-like query will return good results. Combine that with locales, search history, and personal interests, even the most basic user can get worthwhile results from asking Google question. The cost is that power users who understand operators and the power of key terms get less relevant results but likely still correct.

The archived page is pulled from http://www.skirsch.com/humor/techarg.htm. There's some merit to some of these, but it's not a serious list.

> I don’t see anything about anyone paying the content creators.

The knowledge contributed to Wikimedia is understood to be public knowledge. Any contributions are considered voluntary and available to the general public. This includes profit driven corporations who want to create a service wrapper around Wikimedia content or serve the content in a different presentation (licenses withstanding).

> ...not to try to provide a free service for a profit driven corporation.

I personally feel like this is a fair step. Since contributions are made for public consumption, it makes sense that for-profit corporations whose products depend on Wikimedia APIs would pay for access to those APIs. They're not paying for the data; that's free to the public. They're paying ensure their presentation has a guaranteed level of availability and support[0]. The end result is the same: knowledge contributors aren't paid for additions or edits. The context behind the payments are different.

[0]: https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/