I hear you. It’s no good to just cede ownership of a word and allow others to define it however suits them. But… it’s Twitter, getting into a good faith philosophical discussion about the definitions of words ain’t going to happen, so in many cases it’s better to just not bring up the controversial words at all. Guess there’s pros and cons to each.

I agree. That’s why I suggest (or more like implied) that when we know we have different definitions of a word, we avoid using that word. It’s a good thing to at least try if two people really care about understanding.

“Woke” is a problem because people have different definitions, and no matter what Webster or any other authority says the definition is, people will continue to have differing definitions.

How can we reach understanding when we don’t even agree on the definition of words?

This is way to nuanced to deal with on fucking Twitter. If you use the word “woke” on Twitter, expect a lot of misunderstanding, talking past each other, and bad faith arguments to follow.

I did not suggest banning any words.

To understand why I’m opposed to the word “woke”, you must first acknowledge this fact:

Sometimes people have different definitions of the same word.

If you’re willing to accept that, then it logically follows that using a word that people have different definitions of will cause more confusion than understanding. If our goal in speaking is to convey understanding, then that is best accomplished by avoiding words where people have conflicting definitions.

We’ve all learned that there are facts and opinions, but there is a third category: definitions.

If you watch for it, you will see that many disagreements boil down to nothing more than disagreeing about the definition of a single word. If we temporarily avoid using that word, suddenly we find ourselves in agreement, or at least having a better understanding of each other.

Finally a place I can share my cold takes. (I’m not on Twitter, I won’t discuss this on Reddit either.)

1. The community manager had a meltdown and blocking everyone was a power trip and was wrong.

2. Godot’s tweet was wrong, because it used the word “woke” which immediately drives any conversation into the gutter. Doesn’t matter if you’re on the right or left, as soon as you say the word “woke” you have ruined the conversation.

3. It is good that Godot explicitly supports LGBT+ people. They should be welcome. The community CoC should make this explicit, and it does. A tweet to reaffirm this is fine, a cringe joke born from the dredges of Twitter is less fine.

4. Godot’s “revenge forks” are amusing and will not go anywhere. Someone might collect some donations before grifting into the night though.

5. None of this has any effect on Godot’s technical suitability for creating a game.

How would you force someone to take time off?

If I was their boss I would say something like “you’re job is to stay home and do anything besides work for the next week, you will still be paid for this time”. Easy.

As for the on-call stuff. Yes, that’s the point. It should be unsustainable for a company to continually rely on their daytime programmers for frequent on-call alert handling.

If off-hours issues happen often, the company can hire an additional team to handle off-hours issues. If off-hours issues are rare, then you can depend on your daytime programmers to handle the rare off-hours issue, and know that they will be fairly compensated for being woken up in the middle of the night.

I’ve been at too many companies where an off-hours alert wakes up a developer in the middle of the night and the next day the consensus is “that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”. It’s not right for a developer to get woken up in the middle of the night, and then the company puts fixing that on the backburner.

I’ll say it again. It’s about aligning incentives. When things that are painful for the worker are also painful for the company, that is alignment. Unfortunately, most companies have the opposite of alignment, if a developer gets woken in the middle of the night the end result for the company is that they got some additional free labor, that’s pain for the worker, reward for the company; that’s wrong.

When I think of a tech worker union my thoughts first go to standardizing everyone’s pay and limiting what I can earn myself. I’ve probably fallen to anti-union propaganda.

A tech worker union that says nothing about pay could still do so much.

A union could ensure that the company’s incentives are aligned with worker’s incentives around things like on-call.

I’d love a union that forced a company to give all on-call workers compensation. Something like:

1. If you’re woken up in the middle of the night, you automatically get 8 hours comp time (time off), plus 2x the time you spend on-call during off hours.
2. Accrued comp time over 20 hours must be payed at 10x normal pay if the employee leaves the company for any reason. The idea here isn’t for employees to accrue comp time, but to give the company a strong incentive to ensure employees use their comp time.

Basically, if a company is having lots of on-call alerts, or the company is preventing employees from using their comp time, you want this to be directly painful to the company. Incentives should be aligned, what is painful for the worker should be painful for the company.

Or, regarding “unlimited PTO”. I’d love to see a union force companies to:

1. “Unlimited PTO” policies are fine, but they must have a guaranteed minimum amount of PTO specified in writing. So none of this “yeah, we heave ‘unlimited PTO’; oh, we’re really busy this quarter, so can you wait to take PTO until next quarter?”.

Tech workers have it good compared to a lot of workers, but there are still plenty of abuses a union could help with, even if the union never even mentions pay.

What is the game? It’s not being a shill to answer questions.

The reason why is that they need my email address?

Like anything medically related in the US, it’s our time to crack open our wallets and do our patriotic duty of paying half the nation.

Like, if I want to talk to a doctor for 5 minutes, then it’s my time to pay the all the insurance industry workers, and I have to pay my part of those 3 minutes long drug commercials you see on TV every ad break and before every YouTube video, and I have to pay all those people locking down the medical devices so that the users can’t use their own data. This is my time to shine, I got to pay for all this because I talked to the doctor for 5 minutes. Also, hopefully in the end I have a few cents left over to give to the doctor.

Fucking rent seekers…

Look at the entire history.

In 2018 their stock price was about 24, now it’s 2.

I haven’t written any Java since Java 6. This makes me so happy to hear.

What about XML, and XML based configs? Is the Java ecosystem still obsessed with XML?

I remember I was once trying to learn Hibernate. After finding what I thought looked like the best tutorial, I skimmed through it and there was literally no Java code in the tutorial about a Java library! It was all XML! I never could understand it, but this was early in my career, maybe I could handle it now, maybe not.

I don’t know. That’s what I was saying. I can’t possibly imagine what I could say to help someone understand that error message.

😉

If you can’t understand that error message then I don’t know what to tell you.

The rumored 4th and 5th games…

You guys had a house!?!

And I think their board is panicking trying to figure out how they can regain me, specifically, as a customer.

More seriously, I apparently am not the only one who eventually got their fill of Ubisoft games. I think Ubisoft has planted resentment in the minds of all their customers, and as soon as they slipped a little in game quality their customers were more than happy to leave, just for the sake of leaving.

I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.

I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.

What you’re saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: “here’s a frame”, “okay, I watched that frame”, “okay, here’s the next frame”.

With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn’t work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.

Couldn’t we avoid all this by giving players the option to host and moderate their own servers?

Use a more holistic approach. Combine heuristics like the average speed and aim hit percentage with reports from other players.

Review player reports, if a player makes a false allegation in their reports, mark that player as having less reliable reports. If a player reports someone who turns out to be a definite cheater, mark whoever reported the cheater as having more reliable reports. Etc etc.

Like, if the report just says “player was moving fast outside a vehicle”, maybe they were cheating, or maybe they were just goofing off trying to stand on top of vehicles the whole game. If the report says “player was moving fast the whole game, had the highest kill count, and was also reported by 5 other players in the match for cheating”, it’s a little more clear what’s happening.