namingthingsiseasy

@namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple told to pay back €13bn in tax by EU⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Great to see, but are there punitive damages too, or even charges for interest? Because if not, then they’ll just keep trying to pull stunts like this off again and again.

  (My guess is that there isn’t because it involes a deal with Ireland, but I would love to be proven wrong.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple told to pay back €13bn in tax by EU⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The biggest theft in history, even.

  Why is nobody talking about this?? Oh yeah, because it’s okay when our planetary overlords do it. Let’s imprison some more homeless people for stealing bread instead!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That looks like a really nice policy. But my question then becomes, what happens if the company sells out someday? What if they get bought out by a larger company, or a private equity firm? Did they take funding, and if so, how much leverage do the funders have to influence them to make money and cut out programs like this?

  It’s great to see companies trying to break that trend and I highly commend them for it! But we have already seen this pattern a million times before and it always ends due to something similar to this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Climate scientists flee Twitter as hostility surges⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And this is why I’m perfectly happy with Lemmy being the size that it is. There certainly are trade-offs - I wish niche communities were bigger - but is it worth bringing in all the other crap that comes in, like all the shit you see on Twitter? No, in my opinion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How is it that you’re so well-versed in all of Stallman’s negative quotes (from over a decade ago), yet conveniently omitted the fact that he later retracted those statements?

  On September 16, 2019, Stallman announced his resignation from both MIT and FSF, “due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations”.[124] In a post on his website, Stallman asserted that his posts to the email lists were not to defend Epstein, stating "Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve called him a ‘serial rapist’, and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him—and other inaccurate claims—and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said.

  The FSF board on April 12 made a statement re-affirming its decision to bring back Richard Stallman.[133] Following this, Stallman issued a statement explaining his poor social skills and apologizing.[134]

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Justice Department considering push for historic break up of Google after landmark antitrust ruling: report⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.

  Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don’t rely on tracking information.

  And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That’s what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That’s much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.

  And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.

  Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it’s right or wrong, it’s done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does everyone hate Google now? | Google's story over the last two decades has been a tale as old as time: enshittification for growth⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t doubt you at all - I’ve seen quite a few stories of Google exhibiting retribution against employees attempting to unionize.

  The point I was trying to make (admittedly quite badly) is that Google employees should have unionized a long time ago, when they had the upper hand. At this point, it’s a much steeper uphill climb. But it is still a very worthy fight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does everyone hate Google now? | Google's story over the last two decades has been a tale as old as time: enshittification for growth⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You could also blame the idiots who had a chance to unionize but never did.

  If you go back 5-10 years, everyone would say, “why do we need to unionize? Working in IT is great, we don’t need to unionize!” And now see where we are today to realize how stupid of a mindset that was. I guess they don’t buy insurance for the same reason.

  I thought you had to be smart to work at Google, but seeing people take dumb positions like that made me realize that while they might have been brilliant engineers, they were definitely not very smart people.

  (I’m not holding Google blameless here by the way - fuck them hard! But Google employees had the chance and wasted it, and this is what they left behind.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now Thanks to AI Deal⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The “just add reddit” or “just add site:reddit.com” has been trash for a while

  Has that ever been true? I always assumed it was some sort of shadow marketing campaign to get people to look at reddit more. Pretending that one website is the only reliable source of answers on the internet is incredibly audacious, it always seemed very farfetched to suggest that

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Privacy-Preserving" Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Can I interest you in links?

  Or how about lynx?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EU finds Microsoft violated antirust laws by bundling Teams⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I doubt that you’re interested in arguing in good faith, but if by some miracle you do care about having an informed opinion before opening your mouth, how would you respond to things like this?

  This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round because of it and had to drastically downsize the company, causing even more churn (about 80% net churn in 2 years). This move by the EU is good, but too little too late - 99% of the companies that were hurt by this have already shut down, and the ones still running will take years to recover…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple’s App Store breaches EU’s Digital Markets Act⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The intent is to allow companies time to implement the change. But if you’ll pardon my cynicism, in practice, what ends up happening is companies just use it as a tactic to delay the implementation and continue recording the revenue.

  At the very least they should forfeit the revenue that they earn during the period for this. I’m not sure exactly how the fines work and whether they take this into account, but I doubt Apple is seriously going to use the 12-month period to actually come clean and change their ways. I think they’ll just use it as more time to come up with some new bullshit form of non-compliance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple’s App Store breaches EU’s Digital Markets Act⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Excellent news:

  At the heart of Monday’s findings are three elements of Apple’s practices, including fees charged to app developers for every purchase made within seven days of linking out to the commercial app.

  source

  This is, in my opinion, the most egregious non-compliant practice from Apple. They have no reason whatsoever to entitle themselves to purchases made outside their repository just because the software runs on their hardware. It’s also the most asinine set of rules that they established to pretend that they were complying with the DMA.

  It’s a bit disappointing that it will take so long before the fines can be enforced, but I really hope that they get the maximum penalty over this because it’s really the most shockingly brazen breach of the DMA’s terms. In fact, I hope that they get imposed the maximum penalty multiple times - the same article I linked mentions that there are two other DMA investigations being launched into Apple, though I don’t know what grounds those other investigations are looking into.

  And I really hope Apple gets the message loud and clear: they’re gonna start making less money. And this is a good thing. They don’t deserve it, and they were never entitled to it in the first place. This is what happens when you invent new revenue streams that are criminally worthless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, fair points. We should distinguish good and bad managers here before we get too specific. The bad managers will do whatever they’re told to do by upper management. Upper management just says “cut down to this number” and they do it because they only care about their own incentives and don’t care about the consequences. The good managers will probably realize the downsides of these decisions and will try their best to blunt the impact of these decisions. But in the end, they still have to report to higher levels of management, so there’s little that they can ultimately do. So they’re probably going to end up doing the same thing anyway.

  This is why management is such a hard position, especially in the lower levels. You’re basically at the end of the chain and usually have little power to get what you want. At the same time, you still have to make lots of different groups happy - upper management, your workers and whoever you’re delivering your product for. All the things that you listed are things that I’m sure they would like to have, but probably end up having to get sacrificed anyway. If there’s only one group of people that you’re going to please, chances are that it’s going to be the people you report to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nothing matters more than the quarterly earnings report. If that’s what it takes, so be it!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Everyone in this thread is saying that this comes as no surprise, and that is certainly true. But the thing is, a lot of management types do know this already but they simply don’t care for two reasons:

  1. They care more about leverage/control over employees than they do about actual good work being done. You cannot understate at all how important employee control can be for managers and how seriously they’re willing to destroy their own business to keep this kind of power.

  2. RTO is basically a layoff program. As much as I love working remotely, it’s very important to keep in mind that remote workers are the first ones that will get laid off when the business wants to cut back - purely because of how easy it is to do. They can just mandate RTO without actually calling it a layoff and know many workers will outright quit, and the business won’t have to comply with whatever local regulations are in place around layoffs. Still, this shouldn’t sound like comfort for employees that do work in the office - there’s a good chance that once RTO is in place, another round of layoffs will strike when the company doesn’t meet its cut targets. So tl;dr: any time a business announces return to office, it means that there’s a good chance that layoffs will follow too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to opt out of the privacy nightmare that comes with new Hondas⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. It’s really hard to understate how ineffective “voting with your wallet” can be. The fact is simply that nobody honestly cares. Even if you get 100 people to boycott a company, would 100 out of millions of consumers really make a difference? Of course not.

  And of course, you always have cases like this where everybody does it. Same thing goes for TVs - if everyone spies on you, the only real solution is to not have a TV. Yes, I know there are exceptions here and there, but bad practices like these force buyers into making compromises that they shouldn’t have to. Capitalism should be predicated on companies offering the best product to earn their income. It should not be about companies having the least bad product and trying every terrible thing that they can get away with.

  (Of course, we all know that capitalism is a farce.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elder scrolls⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I hated the trend of flat buttons. Then they removed the buttons. Then they basically removed the entire scrollbar altogether.

  At this point, I’d happily go back to the age of flat buttons. That’s how bad things have gotten…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elder scrolls⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s really depressing how often I have to turn off CSS entirely just to view a webpage. I could of course always go into the inspector and turn off the bad CSS, but Gecko-based browsers fortunately have “View -> Page Style -> No Style” which is must easier and faster.

  And seriously, whoever invented the font-weight CSS property can burn in hell. Ditto for whoever decided that we should only be allowed to read light grey text on slightly lighter grey background.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elder scrolls⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In case you weren’t aware, there are extensions that you can use to restore the older (better) UIs. Here are a couple:

  • addons.mozilla.org/…/wikipedia-vector-skin/
  • addons.mozilla.org/en-US/…/classic-wikipedia/

  There are probably some for other browsers as well. I don’t use them though. I instead wrote myself a tampermonkey script to change it:

  if (!window.location.search.contains('useskin')) {
    var new_url = window.location.protocol
        + "//" + window.location.hostname
        + window.location.pathname;
    if (window.location.search == "") {
      new_url = new_url + "?useskin=monobook";
    } else {
      new_url = new_url + window.location.search + "&useskin=monobook";
    }
    new_url = new_url + window.location.hash;
    window.location.replace(new_url);
  }
  

  You can compare the available wikipedia styles on this page to see which one you like best: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin?useskin=mono…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed overall, you will still be competent switching from one language to another, but intricacies and nuance matter a lot here. You may have enough knowledge to solve problems, but will you have enough knowledge to avoid creating new ones too? Like performance issues, or memory leaks, or other unwanted behavior? C++ is a great example here: someone that’s smart but inexperienced might just be dangerous enough to start writing classes with dumb pointers without overriding the copy constructors, and this is just a recipe for disaster.

  I think it would take more than a few months to develop the kinds of experience that you need to be aware of these issues and avoid them. And while C++ is a very easy example to point out here, pretty much all languages have their share of footguns to be aware of, and it just takes time to learn them. A “deep knowledge” of a language is not just about being faster and more productive; it’s also about not creating more issues than the ones your solving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This one might be a bit controversial, but has rung true in my general experience. Probably a lot of exceptions to these rules, but here goes:

  You don’t really know a programming language until you understand a fair amount of the standard library and how packages/modules/dependencies work. Syntax is pretty easy, and any mainstream language will work just fine for solving basic leet-code style problems. But when you really spend a lot of time working with a language, you’re going to spend more time learning about common libraries and how to manage dependencies. If you’re working with a language like C++ or Java, this could also include build systems and how to use them.

  Another precursor to being able to say that you know a language is that you should also be familiar with best practices (ie. how to name modules, how to write documentation, etc.) and common pitfalls (undefined behavior, etc.). This is one of the hardest parts about learning a new language in my opinion, because the language may not necessarily enforce these things, but doing them the wrong way can make your life very difficult.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If only it was like that⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. I’ve never understood the logic of splitting the hours of the day in half. 1800 is so much nicer than 6PM.

  I don’t think that’s purely an American thing though. If I had to guess, I’d say that most of the world uses 12-hour clocks instead of 24-hours. I could be wrong though. Nevertheless, I usually write all times in 24-hour format. But it always sounds awkward trying to use it in speech. I haven’t figured out a good way to do that yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If only it was like that⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I work in an international company too! And yet, this confusion persists :-/

  I also format everything YYYY-MM-DD for my personal use too. When writing prose, usually some other format is just fine, but I really would love if everyone did year-month-day

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If only it was like that⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks, I appreciate it! I also try to use the name of the month instead of the number as frequently as possible. To be honest, it’s not really the order of the fields that matters - format it whichever way makes you happy! Just make sure it’s not ambiguous so other people can tell what you mean. And be aware that not everyone interprets things the same way you do

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If only it was like that⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I work with Americans and this hits home hard. It’s especially infuriating when they format their dates. “I had a meeting with so-and-so on 4/5” and nobody has any fucking clue what they mean.

  The worst part is how hopelessly oblivious they are about it. It’s not even like they don’t care that nobody does things their stupid way - it’s the fact that they’re so insulated that they can’t even fathom that nobody does things the same way they do. It just goes to show how clueless they are about the rest of the world and how little they get out of their neighborhoods.

  It drives me mad. At this point, it’s just offensive how ignorant they can be sometimes. If you have to work with other people, you should at least make an effort to be aware of the fact that others do things a different way and try to avoid situations like this, but they just refuse to do so.

  Apologies… /rant

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This may force Google to address their terrible dispute resolution policies though. If they keep removing software without providing any meaningful dispute resolution, then I would hope that there’s a possibility for alternate repositories to fill that void.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  However bad they may make it, it can’t possibly be worse than it is for non-adblock users.

  But hey, if they want to torpedo their own services, have at it. It’s not like they have a reputation for it or anything…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fusion 360 increasing annual price by $190 USD⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just use the same creative^W standard accounting practices that all other companies use. Take Google for example… we all know that they don’t earn any taxes, because they don’t earn any positive revenue. Right?

  So I’d like to use the same approach. I would not be the one making $1000. That would be my, um, cousin, who just happens to live in Bermuda. HE is the one making all that money, not me! So I don’t have to pay the $680, right?

  (By the way, can I also stop paying taxes and be worth a trillion dollars now? No? Why not?!?!)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Broadcom CEO tells VMWare workers to ‘get butt back to office’ after completing a $69 billion merger of the two companies⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They’ll lose a bunch of good workers, but they bought VMware for the customer base, not the workers.

  Yeah, vmware has a pretty good stranglehold on companies using on-premises hardware.

  My last job was like this. We had basically 2 sysadmins (now 1) that managed hundreds of servers for about 30+ research scientists. There was no way in hell that people were going to adopt kubernetes (nobody in the entire team had any expertise in containerization, let alone k8s), IaaS was too expensive for their meager budgets, and it’s not like anyone is going to switch virtualization vendors.

  So anyway, the writing is clearly on the wall for them. Pretty soon, you can be sure that the prices are going to get cranked waayyyy up. Current vmware customers will likely find themselves in a pretty unfortunate position soon.

  Oh well. But this is what happens when you depend too much on commercial vendors.