Maybe you're right. Physical/behavioral differences were bigger, but fears based on them were simpler. As in your wolf/dog analogy - maybe they weren't developed enough to make a big deal out of it.
(I don't have any big opinions about the effort, I just wanted to hear what was the database chosen that was able to track all different data formats... and it could have been sexier, but yes - Postgres would do.)
Blown away, by both the adaptiveness of the platform and software. It feels like the flexibility that I'd want for all of my prototyping experiments. Signed-up, and patiently cheering from the side-lines.
Maybe the problem is with my sense of humor, but I find that when a comedian starts the sketch with "you're a stupid moron, let me tell you why..." I have trouble following the rest.
Interesting. "I'll talk about a thing I don't like to people I don't like". Doesn't even work on the sarcasm/satire level because there's too much effort put into it. What am I missing?
purely judging from your profile picture it seems that you're about half my age :) and I think it's excellent that you're doing a bunch of things - personal blog, linux, tutorial post... Just remember - most of the guys around here tend to do it for marketing reasons (i.e. we want to find a job and we're advertising our capabilities), and those projects might not be the most interesting things out there.
Bottom line is - just because everybody else is doing it, might be because they have different motives than you, and I hope you'll do/build firstly what's interesting and fun, and secondly what's financially viable.
That is the most shocking part, but it's not the emphasis of the rant - it's the added value that gives the author credibility.
Please note that I'm coming from a 3rd world country, Google probably has my university well below it's radar, and I know people from there hired by Google (in double-digit numbers). So not being on the "A list" is quite normal for a vast majority of the world, yet you can make it happen.
On a personal note - I interviewed and got reject by Google, but I'm a white male so I do think they actually rejected me because of my performance and not because of my other attributes.
She writes "Google treats badly black, queer women", but the story is "Google treated ME badly, and I'm a black queer woman". Also, I'm not comfortable supporting or empathizing with anybody so certain about their "stellar, fantastic, greatest in history" profile.
It would be interesting to hear what were the performance/carrier paths of those 300 people she hired, to understand whether they really just needed a leg-up. That would validate her hunch about untapped potential. On the other hand I'm afraid that it's likely that if they were not promoted it would be again blamed on racism, because if you have that one differentiator, it can be used in any situation.
(Yes, I'm aware that this comment is not going to be palatable to politically correct majority).
If we're discussing the capitalist society, the salary does represent in a very literal form your worth to the company, and by consequence probably your skill level too. I'll admit that it's more complicated than that.
What you should not associate with your salary is your own sense of worth or success, because there you're on mentally unstable grounds.
But in my original response I just gave a random example, and you're right that we should not expand the discussion in that direction.
I agree with all above, and I'll go on a slight tangent.
I dislike the "genius" and "gifted" labels because in the long run they're excuses why you're not one. "It's ok that he got a better salary - he's a genius!". With a "nature" argument, you don't have to think about the "nurture" argument - your actual skill. Then you can give up without being ashamed.
99% of the people you'll actually meet are averages with interests and luck to manifest their skills in the right way. And on the other hand, I've attended local Mensa chapter meetings to see first-hand that "geniuses" can in 99% of cases be just ordinary people with some special interests on which they may or may not capitalize.
So - always value contextual knowledge, skill and effort, and encourage yourself and other people to develop. Because otherwise you just like to play the lottery and complain how the numbers are too random to your liking.
I have to ask - what's the revenue model? I didn't see a payed account option (which is nice), but I do wonder how you're going to sustain this without deciding after 5 years that maybe selling a carefully selected subset of information would not be privacy invasive (just projecting my worst fears here)?
[Off-topic] I see the other post on Scott's blog "My summer 2020 road trip along the Italian Riviera", and I have to give impressions.
It's not the first time I hear the story along the tune of "we went on vacation, and it was so strange, everything was deserted, people were masked". There's a reason for that - it's called a pandemic, it's taking lives in the thousands per day. Yet, people still can't seem to rationalize that we shouldn't do unnecessary trips, even if we really, really need a vacation right now (and probably everybody does).
The author said they chose Italy because they were "only country that seemed to have a handle on infections". Again - that's because Italy was the hardest hit country at the start of the European side of the pandemic. It's like saying "Wuhan seems to know how to deal with the issue".
Usually, I go for the ad-hominem attack "people are too uneducated, they don't understand..." when I see this kind of behavior. But this year - I see it over and over again in highly (formally) educated (PhD-level) people, who keep track with things, are aware - and yet, can't help themselves. Scott certainly doesn't seem like a uninformed person, nor is he blind to the situation. That's the kind of contradictory examples that whisper "this isn't going to be OK, we're always going to have easy short-sighted goals that will justify the risk and make us go downhill".
I do see that Scott is the original poster, and would like to hear the rationalization beyond "we really needed a vacation".
> Let's not imply that all decisions are malicous and all lawyers are evil.
I'm really not. But I can imagine that if you're a professional versed in blindly protecting IP - this is what you would do. The decision to do it in that specific way (suing infringement left and right) needs to come from the top and typically is not a decision that a lawyer would make alone. So, 3 scenarios:
1) this is an unsupervised default action of a lawyer that's just applying the law without guidance from management, because that's what they expect that they should be doing.
2) management approves of this and they're short-sighted thinking that the logo IP is more important than the community
3) management decided that they'll make a business move that requires stronger branding and purposefully want to kill the community to monopolize the support.
In case 1 and 2, we can hope that this will be corrected. I really don't like case 3, but again - I was never a very good business-person.
EDIT: Wow, so it was No.2. Glad to see the feedback loop working. But as pointed out by others on this thread - it's not that RPi should not protect themselves and their trademark - it's that they can do it in a better way than sending take-down orders.