throwaway936482 (u/throwaway936482)

throwaway936482 commented on How Microsoft crushed Slack theverge.com/22150313/how... · Posted by u/atarian

Lutger · 5 years ago

That's part of it. There are lots of workers who do care about their tools though.

There is just one little problem. They are often not the people who get to decide on where the company spends its money.

We are a Microsoft shop by and large. A lot of workers used slack, but management decided it had no compelling features compared to teams. We already got the licenses for teams, so slack was just costing us. So slack got ditched and now we all use teams.

Except we don't, not really. Not like we used slack. Somehow, teams feels like work and slack feels like community. A lot of people use teams chat like they do email: not for fun but to get things done. A lot of people used slack like how they would chat in person.

It's different, teams killed most of the joy of connecting with each other at the workplace through chat. Not for all I think, but in general I feel we lost a certain sense of community that slack brought to our company.

throwaway936482 · 5 years ago

Yep, and from a bean counter but also "someone who likes to do work while at work" Point of view having a chat tool that feels like work at work rather than a typical social media time sink is a GOOD THING. Slack has been an absolute productivity killer everywhere I've used it because it contains all the usual Skinner box tricks to keep users engaged with it rather than doing actual work. Workplaces shouldn't be about "the joy if connecting with each other". shudder

throwaway936482 commented on Why do I care the open web is dying? insightbrowser.com/blog/o... · Posted by u/archajain

throwawaygimp · 5 years ago

So decades of cooperation created the most incredible thing humans have created, then a bunch of kids come along and say 'Thanks! Fuck you. I'm just going to crap all over your efforts, profit from it, and there is nothing you can do about it'.

Thanks Zuck. I'd love to see you sit down with some people I know who have spent their entire lives contributing to RFCs and actually building the open internet for everyone. These people aren't rich. They worked hard all their lives and lived with good values. It wasn't all wasted but you've massively devalued their work. I'd love to see you defend yourself to them, one on one. No PR people. Just techie on techie.

throwaway936482 · 5 years ago

Frankly if you want the kids to stop profiting from all your efforts without paying back, stop giving away your labour to open source projects that have none discrimination and free redistribution clauses that allow companies like Facebook et. al. to make massive profits from building Skinner boxes and generally increasing the grand sum of human misery. A lot of the "good people" have helped create this situation by pushing an ideology that says devs should give away their labour to increase consumer freedom without acknowledging that the people who benefit most are Zuckerberg, pg and the other hyper capitalists.

throwaway936482 commented on CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017) shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/11/... · Posted by u/notRobot

artichokes · 5 years ago

Those aren't anything like the sort of questions involved in IQ tests. IQ tests rarely involve words at all, usually a series of geometric shapes where you're supposed to pick the next one.

throwaway936482 · 5 years ago

Depends on the test. There's been a move away from tests that require cultural or language specific knowledge and which instead rely on "which shape in the sequence comes next" type questions but they have their own set of problems in that they don't capture linguistic ability which is a part of intelligence, and are also useless for blind people. Earlier IQ tests required a lot of culturally specific knowledge, and were often quite up front about it because they considered the possession of such knowledge to be a marker of intelligence. Generally that viewpoint is out of fashion now so test makers try to come up with tests that measure "pure" Intelligence, whatever that means.

throwaway936482 commented on A Worsening Culture War taibbi.substack.com/p/for... · Posted by u/admiralspoo

ck425 · 5 years ago

One thing I've noticed is the whole sale importation of the BLM movement to the UK. I'm not overly aware of the issue facing ethnic minorities in the UK (I live in Scotland where it's almost entirely white with some small asian communities, which isn't to say there isn't racism just few people to discuss it with personally) but from reading around racism in the UK is very different to the US. Despite this we've adopted BLM views wholesale, including call to defund the police.

I fully support discussing racism in the UK and what we can do to counter it but I don't get why we're discussing it as if it's the exact same situation over here with the same solutions. This might to a symptom of London centric-ness where there is far more ethnic diversity and therefore racism.

throwaway936482 · 5 years ago

Unfortunately the BLM rhetoric I the UK is largely pushed by a bunch of (usually white) middle class students with a hard on for Kimberlie Crenshaw and an utter ignorance of the work done over the last seventy years by black and ethnic minority British anti racists to tackle the racism in British society that arises from our history as a colonising nation. Ironically by privileging black American narratives over those of BAME Britons BLM campaigners in the UK engage in a form of cultural colonialism that silences the voices of the very people they claim "matter." Arseholes.

throwaway936482 commented on The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders wired.com/story/open-sour... · Posted by u/BerislavLopac

throwaway936482 · 5 years ago

I have a very simple rule when it comes to doing work, be it on open source software or otherwise. If you want me to do something for you, (and you are not a close friend or relative) you will pay me appropriately for it. Want me to fix a bug for you? Pay me. Want me to merge your drive by pull request? Pay me. Want "to arrange a zoom call between me and your team to discuss how we can better use your project to add value to our business". Pay me. This idea that we should all be giving away our labour in the name of the great God's FLOSS and freedom is bollocks and one of the great con jobs of late stage capitalism.

throwaway936482 commented on Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/eddieoz

kevincox · 5 years ago

I agree. I see false advertising as a serious crime.

Obviously we should be utilizing critical thinking ourselves, but I think that we also need the threat of punishment. Because if we have that threat one critical thinker can report the problem and it will be solved for everyone. If there is no punishment then there is no incentive for companies to tell the truth.

throwaway936482 · 5 years ago

Especially if one is ideologically committed to light touch regulation / free market economics. This makes false advertising a particularly serious crime because it introduces a false information asymmetry between the customer and supplier that damages the effective functioning of the market.

throwaway936482 commented on No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This github.com/Marak/faker.js... · Posted by u/ingve

Robin_Message · 5 years ago

No problem per-se, but to give a simple example:

Suppose a developer, let's call him Salvatore, lives in a modest apartment in, say Italy, and would live very comfortably indeed on three hundred thousand euros a year.

And let's say three cloud providers, call them, Jungle, Blue, and Lots, agree to give Salvatore a hundred thousand a year each to keep developing a, I don't know, a high-performance in-memory database. Lucky Salvatore, plenty of money for doing what he loves anyway.

Let's say that this database is quite good, and Jungle, Blue, and Lots each make a cool hundred million a year in pure profit renting out instances that run Salvatore's code.

So, whilst Salvatore has done perhaps better with the cost-plus model than he was before, he is capturing just 0.1% of the economic surplus that is being generated by his code.

And that is the problem in this scenario: if all elements of the value chain are cost-plus except one, that one element captures all of the surplus even though it may not be deserved.

throwaway936482 · 5 years ago

Congratulations! You have just described capitalism! Have a lolly pop.

throwaway936482 commented on Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces djrobstep.com/posts/progr... · Posted by u/vortex_ape

swiley · 5 years ago

The answer is to push the "application vendors" back into the browser. None of them are really writing anything that needs to be running natively, it's almost all just a front end to some service on the internet.

Real computer applications are almost universally developed by researchers and the open source community and look exactly like this. No "application" just tools you install into your system that are watched by the community for breakage/malware or worst case offered as a git repo/tar for free.

throwaway936482 · 5 years ago

I see comments like this occasionally and I ask myself, what do people who make them actually do? Genuinely? My three main hats are developer, accountant and 3d designer and while most of my accounting work these days is done via web based services none of my dev work or 3d design work. Sure I consume a lot of stuff on the internet but the vast majority of actual creation is done via native software. Some of it is open source especially dev tools, but the most content creation tools are closed source and with the exception of Blender there are no or at least very few open source content creation tools that are widely used professionally in any field that I'm aware of. (Before the OSS fanatics start what abouting about gimp, Krita, openscad etc. please note the caveats of professional and widely used)

throwaway936482 commented on A Better Mousetrap – Converting WebPages to Web APIs turnerj.com/blog/a-better... · Posted by u/shanselman

throwaway936482 · 5 years ago

A suggestion - Stop burying the lede. Neither this post not the front page of your brand vantage website say what your service actually does, or what problem it solves. Instead it piles jargon on top of jargon and seems obsessed with talking about brands, despite the product you are offering not having anything to do with brands or branding. On mobile at least all that is above the fold on Brandvantage is a meaningless statement: "Data driven brands stand out" That seems to have no connection to the service you are actually offering - a way of extracting structured data from websites. It wasn't until I got to your use case page on brand vantage via the bottom footer that I managed to work out what your product does, which actually looks cool! You might have started by trying to build a "digital brand expert" Whatever that is, but that isn't what you've ended up with so I'd suggest to stop viewing and promoting it via this lens.