stevecrox
@stevecrox@kbin.run
- Comment on Star Trek Lower Decks S4? 6 months ago:
How would you buy it in the US? I can see any uk retailers stocking it
- Submitted 6 months ago to startrek@startrek.website | 4 comments
- Comment on It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now 8 months ago:
Uhh how?
The rate of new features/changes is far higher, uptime went through a bumpy transition but is back to normal. From an engineering perspective it supports my point.
Twitters issues are Elon scaring away advertisers/annoying governments/content creators through his hard line on free speech allowing an explosion in hate speech.
- Comment on What's going on with kbin.social? 8 months ago:
MBin is a fork by a group who tried to push into KBin but couldn't. There seems to be at least 4 active committers and stuff gets merged.
You will see a number of the KBin instances moved over https://fedidb.org/software/mbin
- Comment on What's going on with kbin.social? 8 months ago:
The developer behind KBin seems to have issues handing over control/delegating.
If you look at the pull requests, most have been waiting for considerable time and he tends to regularly drop big changes which don't seem to go through the process.
That behaviour drove the MBin fork, where 4-5 people were really keen to contribute but couldn't.
To some extent that would be ok, but KBin.social has gotten to the size where it really should have multiple admins (or a paid full time person).
Compounding all this is the fact the dev has recently gone through a divorce, been forced to get a full time job and has recently had surgery.
Personally I moved to kbin.run which is run by one of the MBin devs
- Comment on It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now 8 months ago:
No it doesn't, it actually makes my point.
My estimate was based was an estimate for how many people you would need for a twitter company.
Twitter had 8000 employees, it will have procedures and approaches assuming all those people exist.
For example
The first step when DevSecOps consulting is to document the processes a team is following. Then you can automate those processes.
Inevitably there will be a step that is very laborious (typically produce a report/metrics). You start asking if it can be adjusted and no one seems to own it.
Eventually you realise the step was for someone who has since left the company or a role that was removed several reorganizations ago.
Firing half your workforce is going to create those sorts of problems everywhere, all at once. The fact everything largely kept working despite that supports my argument.
- Comment on It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now 8 months ago:
Firstly it was just a bit of fun but from memory...
Twitter was listed as having 2 data centers and a couple dozen satellite offices.
I forgot the data center estimate, but most of those satelites were tiny. Google gave me the floor area for a couple and they were for 20-60 people (assuming a desk consumes 6m2 and dividing the office area by that).
Assuming an IT department of 20 for such an office is rediculous but I was trying to overestimate.
- Comment on It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now 8 months ago:
The Silicon Valley companies massively over hired.
Using twitter as an example, they used to publicly disclose every site and their entire tech stack.
I have to write proposals and estimates and when Elon decided to axe half the company of 8000 I was curious..
I assigned the biggest functional team I could (e.g. just create units of 10 and plan for 2 teams to compete on everything). I assumed a full 20 person IT department at every site, etc.. Then I added 20% to my total and then 20% again for management.
I came up with an organisation of ~1200, Twitter was at 8000.
I had excluded content moderators and ad sellers because I had no experience in estimating that but it gives a idea of the problem.
I think the idea was to deny competition people but in reality that kind of staff bloat will hurt the big companies
- Comment on Why do so few Industrial product come with Linux support ? 9 months ago:
It does but for the 90's/00's a computer typically meant Windows.
The ops staff would all be 'Microsoft Certified Engineers', the project managers had heard of Microsoft FuD about open source and every graduate would have been taught programming via Visual Studio.
Then you have regulatory hurdles, for example in 2010 I was working on an 'embedded' platform on a first generation Intel Atom platform. Due to power constraints I suggested we use Linux. It worked brilliantly.
Government regulations required anti virus from an approved list and an OS that had been accredited by a specific body.
The only accredited OS's were Windows and the approved Anti Viruses only supported Windows. Which is how I got to spend 3 months learning how to cut XP embedded down to nothing.
- Comment on What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk? 9 months ago:
The team/organisations knowledge is a huge factor but its easy to fall into a trap where no matter what the problem is the solution is X language.
If I have an organisation that knows C# and we need to build a Web Application. I would suggest we need to learn Node.js and Typescript and not invest in a solution that turns C# into web pages.
- Comment on What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk? 9 months ago:
Technical Leads are not rational beings and lots of software is developed from an emotional stand point.
Engineering is trade offs, every technical decision you make has a pro/con.
What you should do is write out the core requirements/constraints.Then you weigh the choices to select the option that best medts it.
What actually happens is someone really likes X framework, Y programming language or Z methodology and so decides the solution and then looks for reasons to justify it.
Currently the obvious tell is if they pitch Rust.
- Comment on How do you refer to the lgbtq+ "community" least excludingly? 9 months ago:
Personally I would just refer to them as the LGBT community.
Most of the extra letters and terms are highly specific labels or nuances most people would struggle to understand.
For example someone has spent 20 minutes explaining why they are pansexual and not bisexual. I still can't see a difference but if that is the label they want, then they are pansexual.
The key thing to remember is the LGBT community isn't a monolith. The group exists because they are/were being opressed for their sexual identity.
You will also get people who have made the group focus their core identity. They will often be loudest but not always representative of the group.
- Comment on GitHub - Asudox/lemmy-wikibot-rs: A lemmy bot written in Rust to send summaries of wikipedia articles mentioned in user comments 9 months ago:
So I know thats a joke but...
With Java 11's inclusion of 'var' I have successfully copied JavaScript code into Java without needing to change anything.
I judge the direction Java is going in
- Comment on Could you stay in the roundabout indefinitely? 10 months ago:
You could probably stay on the magic roundabout until you ran out of fuel.
Generally if you aren't sure which exit you need its a good idea to go around a few times, plan your exit/lanes and then leave (although you shouldn't enter a roundabout without knowing your exit is clear).
But I doubt you could go all the way around a mini roundabout
- Comment on Screens keep getting faster. Can you even tell? | CES saw the launch of several 360Hz and even 480Hz OLED monitors. Are manufacturers stuck in a questionable spec war, or are we one day going to wo... 10 months ago:
I wish a company would build 4.5"-5.5" and 5.5"-6.5" flagship phones, put as many features that make sense in each.
Then when you release a new flagship the last flagship devices become your 'mid range' and you drop the price accordingly, with your mid range dropping to budget the year after.
When Nokia had 15 different phones out at a time it made sense because they would be wildly different (size, shape, button layout, etc...).
These days everyone wants as large a screen as possible on a device that is comfortable to hold, we really don't need 15 different models with slightly different screen ratios.
- Comment on Google lays off hundreds in Assistant, hardware, engineering teams 10 months ago:
I actually researched my list, most the technologies were used internally for years and either publically released after better public alternatives had been adopted or it seems buzz reached me years after Google's first release.
Between 2012-2015 I used to consult on Apache Ivy projects (ideally moving them to Maven and purging the insanity people had written). I got asked to help solve a lot of Guava/GSon issues, often their would be some annoying bug for the team and a patch release would have the fix but some other library they used pulled it in and even patch releases increases would break the other library. So most of the time you'd find out what they needed guava for and just point to the relevent commons library.
Fun story in 2016-2017 I got called to consult on a lot of Gradle projects to fix the same kind of stupid things people did with Apache Ivy. Ivy knew the Gradle 'feautres' were a massive headache in 2012 and told you not to use Maven for those reasons. Ce La vie.
- Comment on Google lays off hundreds in Assistant, hardware, engineering teams 10 months ago:
The FAANG companies have an internal kind of elitisim that would make staff less effective.
If you look at any Google Java library, GWT, GSon, Guava, Gradle, Protobuf, etc.. there was a commonly used open source library that existed years before that covered 90% of the functionality.
The Google staff didn't think to look outside Google and so wrote something entirely from scratch.
Then normally within 6 months the open source library has added the killer new feature. The Google library only persists because people hold FAANG as great "Its by Google so it must be good!" Yet it normally has serious issues/limitations.
The Google libraries that actually suceeded weren't owned by Google (E.g. Yahoo wrote Hadoop, Kubernetes got spun away from Google control, etc..).
