Buttons
@Buttons@programming.dev
- Comment on "Would U.S. tech workers join a union?" survey average: 67% likely 1 month ago:
How would you force someone to take time off?
If I was their boss I would say something like “you’re job is to stay home and do anything besides work for the next week, you will still be paid for this time”. Easy.
As for the on-call stuff. Yes, that’s the point. It should be unsustainable for a company to continually rely on their daytime programmers for frequent on-call alert handling.
If off-hours issues happen often, the company can hire an additional team to handle off-hours issues. If off-hours issues are rare, then you can depend on your daytime programmers to handle the rare off-hours issue, and know that they will be fairly compensated for being woken up in the middle of the night.
I’ve been at too many companies where an off-hours alert wakes up a developer in the middle of the night and the next day the consensus is “that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”. It’s not right for a developer to get woken up in the middle of the night, and then the company puts fixing that on the backburner.
- Comment on "Would U.S. tech workers join a union?" survey average: 67% likely 1 month ago:
When I think of a tech worker union my thoughts first go to standardizing everyone’s pay a limiting what I can earn myself. I’ve probably fallen to anti-union propaganda.
A tech worker union that says nothing about pay could still do so much.
A union could ensure that the companies incentives are aligned with workers incentives around things like on-call.
I’d love a union that forced a company to give all on-call workers compensation. Something like:
- If you’re woken up in the middle of the night, you automatically get 8 hours comp time (time off), plus 2x the time you spend on-call during off hours.
- Accrued comp time over 20 hours must be payed at 10x normal pay if the employee leaves the company for any reason. The idea here isn’t for employees to accrue comp time, but to give the company a strong incentive to ensure employees use their comp time.
Basically, if a company is having lots of on-call alerts, or the company is preventing employees from using their comp time, you want this to be directly painful to the company. Incentives should be aligned, what is painful for the worker should be painful for the company.
Or, regarding “unlimited PTO”. I’d love to see a union force companies to:
- “Unlimited PTO” policies are fine, but they must have a guaranteed minimum amount of PTO specified in writing. So none of this “yeah, we heave ‘unlimited PTO’; oh, we’re really busy this quarter, so can you wait to take PTO until next quarter?”.
Tech workers have it good compared to a lot of workers, but there are still plenty of abuses a union could help with, even if the union never even mentions pay.
- Comment on I make games and this literally happened to me this morning 1 month ago:
What is the game? It’s not being a shill to answer questions.
- Comment on Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton 1 month ago:
The reason why is that they need my email address?
- Comment on Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton 1 month ago:
Like anything medically related in the US, it’s our time to crack open our wallets and do our patriotic duty of paying half the nation.
Like, if I want to talk to a doctor for 5 minutes, then it’s my time to pay the all the insurance industry workers, and I have to pay my part of those 3 minutes long drug commercials you see on TV ever ad break, and I have to pay all those people locking down the medical devices so that the users can’t use their own data. This is my time to shine, I got to pay for all this because I talked to the doctor for 5 minutes. Also, hopefully in the end I have a few cents left over to give to the doctor.
- Comment on Ubisofts stock tanked this morning ahead of the markets opening 1 month ago:
Look at the entire history.
In 2018 their stock price was 24, now it’s 2.
- Comment on Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code 1 month ago:
And I think their board is panicking trying to figure out how they can regain me, specifically, as a customer.
More seriously, I apparently am not the only one who eventually got their fill of Ubisoft games. I think Ubisoft has planted resentment in the minds of all their customers, and as soon as they slipped a little in game quality their customers were more than happy to leave, just for the sake of leaving.
- Comment on YouTube has found a new way to load ads | AdGuard Blog 1 month ago:
I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.
I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.
What you’re saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: “here’s a frame”, “okay, I watched that frame”, “okay, here’s the next frame”.
With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead, doesn’t work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because I knows the next 30 seconds of video, thanks to buffering.
- Comment on Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code 1 month ago:
Couldn’t we avoid all this by giving players the option to host and moderate their own servers?
- Comment on Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code 1 month ago:
Use a more holistic approach. Combine heuristics like the average speed and aim hit percentage with reports from other players.
Review player reports, if a player makes a false allegation in their reports, mark that player as having less reliable reports. If a player reports someone who turns out to be a definite cheater, mark whoever reported the cheater as having more reliable reports. Etc etc.
- Comment on Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code 1 month ago:
I bought Crysis and didn’t like the DRM, so I haven’t bought a Ubisoft game since. How’s that working out for Ubisoft?
- Comment on Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code 1 month ago:
- Comment on Amazon's Monopoly of the tech industry is ruining the US economy 1 month ago:
I agree. Price is important in a classic “free market” where people compete to sell goods and services for cheaper and whoever does it best makes a profit and grows, etc, etc.
This ain’t a classic free market. We frequently see companies become market leaders without ever earning a profit. That’s not a classic free market.
Succeeding as a company because you make customers happy sounds nice, but the most powerful companies today succeed by gaining favor from those already in power (venture capitalists, etc), and the customers are just a bargaining chip to be tossed about on the bargaining tables of the wealthy.
- Comment on YouTube has found a new way to load ads | AdGuard Blog 1 month ago:
Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.
If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.
If all else fails, I’d enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing–whenever it’s no possible to speed up or skip ahead. I’ll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.
- Comment on US can’t ban TikTok for security reasons while ignoring Temu, other apps, TikTok argues 2 months ago:
You mean the CCP is not an “individual or group”?
- Comment on Nothing is requiring employees to be in the office five days a week 2 months ago:
Instead of a planned layoff, it’s a layoff of random people, with a bias towards laying off the most capable.
- Comment on BMW Adaptive Suspension Can Be Added via Subscription. Suspension As A Service (SAAS) 2 months ago:
If all the cars are the same price I’ll buy the one with the upgrade options and then not pay for them.
- Comment on Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads 3 months ago:
Anti-trust lawyers are rubbing their hands in anticipation.
- Comment on Most consumers hate the idea of AI-generated customer service 4 months ago:
This is how companies that don’t have competition act. This is how most companies act. We need more anti-trust enforcement.
- Comment on Arizona toddler rescued after getting trapped in a Tesla with a dead battery | The Model Y’s 12-volt battery, which powers things like the doors and windows, died 4 months ago:
There was a time I wanted a Tesla, but I don’t anymore. This is just another reason why.
Does Tesla care about making a “neat thing” or do they care about making “a car that can drive me places”. The doors clearly show they prioritize making a “neat thing”, but I want a reliable car.
Opening and closing doors was a solved problem. Somehow Tesla made it worse.
- Comment on NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense 4 months ago:
🎵 Don’t wanna close my eyes 🎵
- Comment on Netflix Windows app is set to remove its downloads feature, while introducing ads 5 months ago:
They are doing extra work to change the product in ways that customers don’t want.
Can someone explain to me again how “free markets” and “competition” are supposed to work?
- Comment on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban 5 months ago:
I’m okay with algorithms not recommending certain posts. I just don’t like shadowbans because the platform is lying to the user, the user interface is essentially telling the user “your post is available for viewing” when it really isn’t.
- Comment on Images leak of Valve's next game, and it's an Overwatch-style hero shooter 5 months ago:
Speaking of Valve games, why did I ever stop playing Left 4 Dead? I need to play that again.
- Comment on Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone Can’t Let Go Of Stardew Valley 6 months ago:
I don’t appreciate being called out like that!
- Comment on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban 6 months ago:
Yet another tool that uses “freedom of speech” incorrectly
Often freedom of speech is a moral ideal, a moral aspiration, and dismissing it on legal grounds is missing the point.
If I say “people should have a right to healthcare”, and you respond “people do not have a legal right to healthcare”, you are correct, but you have missed the point. If I say people should have freedom of speech and you respond that the first amendment doesn’t apply to Facebook, you are right, but have again missed the point.
In general, when people advocate for any change, they can be countered with “well, that law doesn’t require that”. Yes, society currently works the way the law says it should. But what we’re talking about is how society should work and how the law should change.
- Comment on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban 6 months ago:
A problem is that social media websites are simultaneously open platforms with Section 230 protections, and also publishers who have free speech rights. Those are contradictory, so which is it?
Perhaps @rottingleaf was speaking morally rather than legally. For example, I might say “I believe everyone in America should have access to healthcare”; if you respond “no, there is no right to healthcare” you would be right, but you missed my point. I was expressing an moral aspiration.
I think shadowbans are a bad mix of censorship and hard to detect. Morally, I believe they should be illegal. If a company wants to ban someone, they can be up front about someone and ban them; make it clear what you are doing. To implement this legally, we could alter Section 230 protections so that they don’t apply to companies performing shadowbans.
- Comment on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban 6 months ago:
Yes, because Americans would never consider electing a President with health issues.
- Comment on Marvels Rivals requires creators to sign a contract that removes your right to give a negative review to access the playtest 6 months ago:
This is so stupid. Isn’t this a free-to-play game? With one-time-purchase games you can try to fool people, then take your money and leave while people complain about the game behind you.
But this is a free-to-play game, they intend to make money by gradual ongoing revenue from in-game purchases, etc. You can’t fool people who are actively playing the game.
The contract hurts their image, and prevents them from receiving critical feedback.
- Comment on Marvels Rivals requires creators to sign a contract that removes your right to give a negative review to access the playtest 6 months ago:
“Good game, but the company behind it is shit and required me to sign this contract. <Insert contract clause>. Remember this whenever your reading the honest reviews about how good the game is.”