I don't disagree with some of the points are making here, but the main point of my own comment is your last sentence from above was mean-spirited and unnecessary.
You want to have a conversation about quality and ethics in computing and how this post can be pushing a narrative that is not in line with your views on this, I think that is worthwhile to have. But personal denigration of someone else isn't necessary in doing that.
> The folks that taught the author should hang their head in shame that their student is producing such rubbish.
This is unnecessary and rude, you should hang your head in shame for that. I wish some people in this community weren't so reactionary and would engage with empathy instead of trying to personally roast people as soon as they don't agree with something.
Someone can tell a story on the internet, it doesn't have to be some rigorous experiment or proof.
> The end of the document warns, “[It] is impossible to guarantee that no future change will break any program.” Then it lays out a number of reasons why programs might still break.
> For example, it makes sense that if your program depends on a buggy behavior and we fix the bug, your program will break. But we try very hard to break as little as possible and keep Go boring.
Nice visual tool but wildly optimistic. Walk times to and from stations and during transfers can eat up huge amounts of time in a commute, and that assumes trains are running well. Discounting walking to station times which clearly can't be taken into account in this tool, the transfer times between trains are also not taken into account. Transferring over from any train that is taking you up the west side to one that takes you up the east side (or vice versa) of Manhattan takes up a lot of extra time but the maps treats them as if it doesn't matter what side of the island your original train will take you.
Transfers take a very relevant amount of time, even during rush hour when the trains are running frequently. Aside from waiting on the train, which does not keep a strict schedule and can get delayed for many reasons there is the walking time to the other train, which can be a decent amount even in locations where you don't have to exit the subway to transfer. Factoring a minimum 5-10 minutes extra time per transfer is a safe bet.
What does the reason the police are doing it for matter? Isn't either action an egregious violation of privacy? Sometimes society has allowed these things for emergency reasons, but stop and frisk was a program that was instituted for many many years. I can't understand how you can view the forced cell phone search as a clear violation of rights but defend stop and frisk, other than one is happening in evil Russia and the other happened in the US.
People talk about stop and frisk in such an abstract sense, because it happened in poor minority neighborhoods, so most people talking about didn't have to go through. Imagine strangers being able to legally frisk your whole body for no apparent reason. It is such a huge violation of personal space and privacy and it's so demeaning, especially when you know it's being specifically targeted at your community.
> You cannot compare these two levels of violence.
The comparison is between two things, the police forcing you to give them access your phone for no explicit reason, or the police forcing you to allow them to physically and invasively search your whole body for no explicit reason. You are conflating that comparison with a bunch of other things happening external to the specific actions the police are allowed to do.
The reasons why both are happening doesn't mean you can't objectively compare whether what the police are doing is acceptable outside of the larger situation that is causing them to do it. The question is if one seems unacceptable, shouldn't the other be too? If you want to talk about levels of violence between these two, stop and frisk certainly seems to be something closer to approaching physical violence, or at least the greater potential for it, then searching your phone.
> Yet somehow this is fairly obscure knowledge unless you're into serious game programming or a similar field.
Because the impact in optimizing hardware like that can be not so important in many applications. Getting the absolute most out of your hardware is very clearly important in game programming, but web apps where scale being served is not huge (vast majority)? Not so much. And in this context developer time is more valuable when you can throw hardware at the problem for less.
Traditional game programming you had to run on the hardware people used to play, you are constrained by the client's abilities. Cloud gaming might(?) be changing some of that, but GPUs are super expensive too compared to the rest of the computing hardware. Even in that case the amounts of data you are pushing you need to be efficient within the context of the GPU, my feeling is it's not easily horizontally scaled.
You loose one usb-c port to get all the others. I've never needed 4 usb-c ports at a time, but definitely have needed all the others. And one usb-c port is replaced by power, which many times I have had to use one for anyway. So whether you bought into full usb-c future or not I don't see the extra ports hurting you. Maybe a 'whatever', but don't see it as a reason to dislike it.
Because your risk becomes everyones risk. The vaccine is becoming less and less effective against variants and people talk as if dying or hospitalizations is the only bad outcome. Long term health problems from even 'mild' COVID infections is a thing and the efficacy of vaccines at preventing that is not clear.
So getting a vaccine does not make the vaccinated isolated from the risks the unvaccinated choose. Your choices affect what I can do and the risks to my health.
> On the contrary, as far as I can tell (i.e., based on information released by founders and employees), they didn't object at all to being called out on it.
> What they did object to was the discussion being escalated to genocide and that there appear to have been employees who refused to climb down from that.
The topic brought up was the Pyramid of Hate, and I'm going to presume linking the list of names to one of the base levels of bias. DHH is the one who escalates that point to say, well this must be a fireable offense since it is on this pyramid with genocide on the top, which is really completely ignoring the point of the pyramid and not at all what employees probably said. An employee actually tries to explain this, that "dehumanizing behavior begins with very small actions". DHH ignores the point and completely unprofessionally and unethically (imagine the CEO of your company doing this) publicly shares some old chat log of the employee participating in making fun of the names, as if this employee wouldn't be aware of that and probably regretful of it.
So yes, an employee tried to explain what might be wrong with DHH's thinking and yes he did not like it at all and responded inappropriately and he was the one who wanted to "escalate to the most extreme position imaginable."
Here is the full-text from the article that described what happened:
"But Hansson went further, taking exception to the use of the pyramid of hate in a workplace discussion. He told me today that attempting to link the list of customer names to potential genocide represented a case of “catastrophizing” — one that made it impossible for any good-faith discussions to follow. Presumably, any employees who are found contributing to genocidal attitudes should be fired on the spot — and yet nobody involved seemed to think that contributing to or viewing the list was a fireable offense. If that’s the case, Hansson said, then the pyramid of hate had no place in the discussion. To him, it escalated employees’ emotions past the point of being productive.
Hansson wanted to acknowledge the situation as a failure and move on. But when employees who had been involved in the list wanted to continue talking about it, he grew exasperated. “You are the person you are complaining about,” he thought.
Employees took a different view. In a response to Hansson’s post, one employee noted that the way we treat names — especially foreign names — is deeply connected to social and racial hierarchies. Just a few weeks earlier, eight people had been killed in a shooting spree in Atlanta. Six of the victims were women of Asian descent, and their names had sometimes been mangled in press reports. (The Asian American Journalists Association responded by issuing a pronunciation guide.) The point was that dehumanizing behavior begins with very small actions, and it did not seem like too much to ask Basecamp’s founders to acknowledge that.
Hansson’s response to this employee took aback many of the workers I spoke with. He dug through old chat logs to find a time when the employee in question participated in a discussion about a customer with a funny-sounding name. Hansson posted the message — visible to the entire company — and dismissed the substance of the employee’s complaint."
Honestly I don't understand @cciresi's position. As far as a I know anti-boycott regulations have primarily (only?) been used to prevent US companies from not doing business with Isreal. China & Russia are geopolitical rivals to the US and I don't see any sort of risk of anti-boycott regulations being applied in restricting business with residents of those countries. I guess you could say there is a risk that could change, but that seems hypothetical to the extreme and realistically irrelevant to worry about from a risk perspective.
And this isn't discriminating on nationality or national origin, it is on the nation you currently live in. Employers decide not to hire employees living in other countries all the time, it's the most prevalent choice (i.e. US companies only hiring employees living in the US). I don't see why doing this because a customer you've considered critical has asked for it is any more legally risky that having done it for other reasons, assuming we discount the anti-boycott argument.
This is all with the huge caveat of I'm not a lawyer, just giving my perspective based on how I've seen these laws/regulations applied in the past.
I get you wrote something to a limited audience and didn't expect it to be shared beyond. But you really should consider any communication with a 'a few authors' as something that could possibly be shared with the whole world, even if you had said it was confidential, which wasn't even the case.
If you want this to blow over the best thing to do here is not say anything. The fact you are trying to 'silence' something that is clearly beyond the point of silencing looks bad in multiple ways (a bit naive, trying to control speech).
> More pressingly, when it comes to plant life RIGHT NOW, we're still dangerously close to CO₂ starvation levels.
This is the most provocative claim you make and coincidentally the one you don't back up with any evidence. The one article you post from phys.org (1) does not use the colorful and misleading language of CO2 'starvation' and (2) actually concludes the opposite of the less dramatic point (plants will be better off with more CO2):
> But, as we know, C3 plants waste a lot more resources at higher temperatures, so any increase in photosynthesis from rising CO₂ levels seems likely to be at least cancelled out by the effects of the global warming it will cause. And that's without factoring in changes to rainfall patterns such as more frequent droughts. Solutions that seem to be too good to be true generally are – and, for the moment, that still seems to be the case for the idea that CO₂ enhanced crop yields will feed the world.
However the idea of being in a CO2 'famine' was recently brought up by the head of the Presidential Committee on Climate Security, William Harper, and also does not seem to be backed by any evidence or the scientific community:
> "It's a silly argument," added Britton Stephens, a senior scientist in the Earth Observing Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in an interview.
> Both independent academic institutions and government agencies around disparate parts of the globe have concluded more carbon dioxide will "bring many negative impacts" to plant environments, Stephens emphasized. "If someone is going to claim it's good, it's incumbent upon them to show evidence." [0]
I mean just using common sense plants can and clearly have thrived with lower levels of CO2, before the far bigger threat of human deforestation decimated forests and plant life. The issue isn't whether plant life will be slightly better off with more CO2 or not, but what negative effects changing climate will have on crops, which could be catastrophic and is the point the phys.org concludes with.
This seems like just another flavor of a very similar climate change denialist argument that there was higher CO2 levels during previous glacial periods, also debunked [1].
~200k in a small southern city if you adjust for cost of living is about equivalent to $500k at a FAANG in SF/NYC. When you know people who brag about how cheap their $2000 a month tiny studio in an old poorly maintained building in midtown Manhattan you'd understand you have it pretty good making a salary like that in a place you actually have the freedom to move around without running into someone and easily afford a really nice house & property.
> I think a lot of people use colourful language as emphasis.
You do not need to curse in a professional environment, full stop.
Letting a word fly out by mistake is one thing, it can happen to anyone. But overwhelming your emails, messages, and speech with curse words when it's completely and utterly unnecessary and can make people uncomfortable is unacceptable. We're all adults here, you need to be able to control your language and not make excuses for it.
In terms of lack of representation I don't see how they are not mixed up. When you're already the outsider/minority things like this just serve to further reinforce that feeling of not belonging. It is just another source of friction that reinforces the cycle of under-representation and if your goal is to break that cycle then making the environment as inclusive as possible is certainly something you need to deal with.