The only reason I haven't fully swithed to Linux at this point (because I'm very comfortable in it) is that my work pretty much requires it. Having the enterprise world in a strong hold to the point where important industry tools simply have zero/very weak Linux support feels like half the reason the fabled "Year of Linux Desktop" hasn't come to fruition. Many engineers and artists literally cannot afford to switch. Many other industries have too much data in servers or spreadsheets to efficiently move over.
It's all relative. The general idea of this is that a software engineer spent years studying such concepts and then years more working in legacy code.
so it's second nature to do the mechanical operation of "extend a new class from Widget and add a function that returns the number of pencils pushed", and then somewhat easy after a few years to "pipe the pencil pushing function into the website frontend to display". Even if just describing this to a non SWE would have their eyes glaze over, and a junior SWE would struggle getting things integrated.
The painter metaphor works well here:
>Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”
>“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.
>“No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”
(Disclaimer: I do not think Picasso literally said this, but it's a very common tale)
I imagine the hard part isn't the literal building of the stuff. It's the months or years of politics, beauracracy, and bids needed to get to a point where you can build it.
That's not to discount the intensity of the labor. Just that the labor is rarely the bottleneck in building stuff.
>Some times the programming part really is very hard even when it’s easy to know what needs to be built
Sometimes. Most programming jobs out there just need a button on a website or a 2 line fix for some off-by-1 error, though. Those who are working on novel, cutting edge problems are relatively rare.
As you said, most software enginering is connecting existing frameworks together and being in meetings on how/when best to do it. Not necessarily a bad thing at all, but that's why the metaphor of the mechanic or doctor works out here, where the labor to know where and how to fix something is worth much more than the actual part (or medicine's) cost.
A corporation having to ability to bribe people who need money to pay their rent and healthcare in order to save their own image is indeed "too much power".
> We are literally discussing that this act could easily be stopped by legislation. Doesn’t that imply they have less power than the electorate?
Not when they have full time people dedicated to lobbying the legislation. That's the issue on why things move so slow or halt when it comes to really voting on such policy.
"we" is a strong word here. More like some people 50-80 years ago decided to at worst rule against the worker's best interest, and at best chose to ignore it and pretend things would work out with a "gentlemans' agreement".
But it was a severance agreement. She accepted a sum of money for agreeing to not disparage. You don't see anything wrong with someone knowingly accepting these funds, and then turning around and immediately violating the agreement by writing a book (making even more money in the process)?
If it's about whistleblowing and doing the right thing, why not just refuse the money?
There should be a statute of limitations on this stuff. Otherwise we’ll see things like chemical plant employees who signed such an agreement keeping stories of dumping to their deathbeds.
In a better world, disparagement would not legally refer to the dissemination of factual accounts.
In such a world it would only add to penalties for proven libel.
It’s a pretty simple concept: if the truth hurts, you’ve got no one but yourself to blame.
NDAs theoretically should never be able to paper over illegal actions. In a similar vein, non disparagement clauses should not be able to paper over the publication of legitimate insider experience of terrible — even if legal — behavior.
Not without impacting other political aspects. Remember we only lowered the voting age to 18 some 50 years ago to justify the ability to send more kids to a war we started. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
It still strikes me that some places consider someone fully able to freely consent to enrol in the army, to the risk of getting permanently maimed or mentally scarred, and consider them fit to make life or death split-second decisions for both themselves and everyone around them under terror In highly stressful situations.
But can’t be allowed to have a beer or a whisky, and isn’t able to freely consent to sleep with someone five or ten years older.
I wonder what the official legal justification for this dichotomy is, if there is any.
Edit: after looking it up, there doesn’t seem to be one.
The base tech of a "friend discovery network" isn't "hard" in the grand scheme of things. But getting those who don't put much thought into their tech to care enough to move out takes a gargantuan effort. Musk had to go full nazi to start seeing the bluesky adoption, and it still isn't the level of catastropic effect you'd think would happen if you heard about this 20 years prior.
I haven't logged onto Facebook in some 6 years now, so I can't really do much more to boycott them.
That's the big issue of the post truth era. I imagine the number of people "using these platforms despite what we know" is minuscule. Most will never hear of this, and many who do know have probably left long before this for the other dozens of crimes against humanity Meta's performed.
Of the rest of this list. Youtube Premium is the only thing I'm still subscribed too. I actively unsubbed from Prime and am setting up to unsub from Google One.
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