Tootfinder

Steven Levitsky: "Nous assistons actuellement Š l'effondrement de notre démocratie. Sous Donald Trump, les États-Unis glissent vers une forme d'autoritarisme. Cela ne sera sans doute pas irréversible. Mais le fait est lŠ : en ce moment même, les États-Unis cessent d'être une démocratie."
#USA

techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.

Die Einschaltquoten sind relevant für die Folgeverträge. Wir müssen endlich über diese ganzen #Talkshows reden und dass sie extern produziert werden, von profitorientierten Unternehmen. It's the economy, stupid!

Weidel beschert Miosga die höchste Reichweite seit Scholz - DWDL.de
Am Sonntagabend begrüßte Caren Miosga die AfD-Kanzlerkandidatin Alice Weidel in ihrem ARD-Talk. Das Interesse war enorm: Bislang gab es nur zwei Ausgaben mit höherer Reichweite, zuletzt jene mit Olaf Scholz.

#harvard Very nice comments at the #nytimes who mend wrath with high literacy:
"Trump and the ignorant like him have always wanted (...) As they rest in the shallow, dirty bathwater of their reactionary, time-worn bigotries, misconceptions, and lies they tell to explain their bitterness a…

Why Harvard Decided to Fight Trump
The Trump administration will freeze over $2 billion in federal funds because Harvard refused to comply with a list of demands. Harvard leaders believed saying no was worth the risk.

"Of course, not everything made with Python was successful. Suffice to mention the GadflyB5 SQL relational database, or Mercurial; excellent tools in their own right, but shadowed by much more popular options. reStructuredText also is generally dismissed, developers usually prefering Markdown or Asciidoc."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-state-of-python-in-2021/

True story time, from about 8 years ago.
After work, I joined few co-workers for happy hour. I had 1 or 2 alcoholic drinks, then cut myself off and drank soda rest of the night, for many reasons including I wanted to be 100% sober to drive home.
One guy was rude, insisted I keep drinking, said I was ruining the fun.
Kids, be your own person. Be stubborn. Don't let someone pressure you into doing something you don't want to do. No means no.
1/x

Years ago, I thought it was rather strange to store and provide an additional copy of a already published article. „Doppelt hält besser“ commented @… back then.
Well, he was right back then. But I still couldn't have imagined how important additional copies would become if data and publishers suddenly disappeared.
One more reason why

Anyone noticed how the characters in the Alien movies (the ones about Rippley) got progressively dumber as new chapters were released?
Don't remember it? Try to watch them in a row, it's astonishing. It's a good "exercise" because them being part of the same series makes it much easier to make comparisons.
I'd say that's what makes a big difference between the first one and the rest, not the plot in itself, but how idiotic are the characters after the first chapter.

“Tenho o privilégio de não saber quase tudo. E isso explica o resto.”
Manoel de Barros ✨

"Quite simply, if you have not read this book yet, read it. If you have a colleague who has yet to read it, get them a copy. If someone asks you what one book to read about software engineering, it is this one. It is not Code Complete, Second Edition, nor is it Clean Code, nor any other book that claims to teach you how to get software right the first time around (you will not)."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/michael-feathers/