• 10 Posts
  • 371 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I like this term, “billionaire media”, because right-wing media likes to use “mainstream media” as a slur to dismiss any other media source that disagrees with them. It’s a term that shuts down thinking and gets people to automatically dismiss any claim from “mainstream media”.

    “Billionaire media” doesn’t really work this way, because if Fox News starts criticizing “billionaire media”, eventually some viewers are going to wake up and realize, “wait, isn’t Fox News owned by a billionaire too?”


  • People, especially Republicans, love to talk about the “mainstream media”. That term needs to die.

    There is only “billionaire media” and “independent media”.

    You’re billionaire media if your owned or funded by a billionaire; I don’t care if you’re only on YouTube, if you’re getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from sponsors, you’re part of the billionaire media.

    If you’re funded by a bunch of small donations or have no funding at all, then you are independent media.

    Today my trust for billionaire media sank even lower.















  • I did not suggest banning any words.

    To understand why I’m opposed to the word “woke”, you must first acknowledge this fact:

    Sometimes people have different definitions of the same word.

    If you’re willing to accept that, then it logically follows that using a word that people have different definitions of will cause more confusion than understanding. If our goal in speaking is to convey understanding, then that is best accomplished by avoiding words where people have conflicting definitions.

    We’ve all learned that there are facts and opinions, but there is a third category: definitions.

    If you watch for it, you will see that many disagreements boil down to nothing more than disagreeing about the definition of a single word. If we temporarily avoid using that word, suddenly we find ourselves in agreement, or at least having a better understanding of each other.


  • Finally a place I can share my cold takes. (I’m not on Twitter, I won’t discuss this on Reddit either.)

    1. The community manager had a meltdown and blocking everyone was a power trip and was wrong.

    2. Godot’s tweet was wrong, because it used the word “woke” which immediately drives any conversation into the gutter. Doesn’t matter if you’re on the right or left, as soon as you say the word “woke” you have ruined the conversation.

    3. It is good that Godot explicitly supports LGBT+ people. They should be welcome. The community CoC should make this explicit, and it does. A tweet to reaffirm this is fine, a cringe joke born from the dredges of Twitter is less fine.

    4. Godot’s “revenge forks” are amusing and will not go anywhere. Someone might collect some donations before grifting into the night though.

    5. None of this has any effect on Godot’s technical suitability for creating a game.


  • 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.

    I’ll say it again. It’s about aligning incentives. When things that are painful for the worker are also painful for the company, that is alignment. Unfortunately, most companies have the opposite of alignment, if a developer gets woken in the middle of the night the end result for the company is that they got some additional free labor, that’s pain for the worker, reward for the company; that’s wrong.