Yes, but it’s a little worse than that. One might take that to mean environmental, congenital, or even genetic factors. But there’s more. Consider the role that trauma has to play here as it can directly cause arrested psychological development:
Which
car companybar did you say you work for?
A major one.
Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn’t set up
Wait, what?
Is that MIT (munch it today) or GPL (generally pleasing w/lettuce) licensed?
I’ve been in situations where I wanted to retain credit/ownership of ideas and code, but wanted to be able to use them in the workplace. So building a MIT/BSD licensed library on the weekend and then importing it on Monday was the only game in town. I get the portfolio piece and my job is easier as a result. But I stick to non-novel and non-patentable stuff - “small” work really, as Stallman is quoted here..
In some work environments, GPL or “GPL with an exception” would never get the kind of traction it should. Lots of places I’ve worked lack the legal and logistical framework for wrangling licenses and exceptions. It’s hard to handle such cases if there’s literally nobody to talk to about it, while you have automated systems that flag GPL license landmines anyway. The framing is a kind of security problem, not a license problem, so you never really get to start.
The two licenses have distinct use cases, and only overlap for some definitions of “free” software. I also think both the comic artist and OP set up a fallacious argument. I’ll add that in no way do I support Intel’s shenanigans here.
The comic author takes one specific case of an MIT licensed product being used in a commercial product, and pits it against another GPL product. This ignores situations where MIT is the right answer, where GPL is the wrong one, situations where legal action on GPL violations has failed, and all cases where the author’s intent is considered (Tanenbaum doesn’t mind). From that I conclude that this falls under The Cherry Picking Fallacy. While humorous, it’s a really bad argument.
But don’t take it from me, learn from the master of logic himself.
commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”
This sentiment makes the enclosing sentence an Ad-hominem fallacy, by attacking the would-be MIT license party as having poor morals and/or low social standing. Permissive licenses absolutely do allow others to modify code without limit, but that is suggested to be a bad thing on moral grounds alone. That said, I’d love to see a citation here because that’s the first I’ve heard of this pejorative used to describe software licensing.
I think what burns people the most is that after Photoshop 5 or so, GIMP stopped keeping up with all the improvements in the later Photoshop versions. People making the jump from 2024 Photoshop to 1996 Photoshop UI/UX are gonna have a bad time.
Edit: as a software developer I can say that I’ve never seen a user more frustrated, sometimes even irrationally so, when they are forced to re-learn muscle memory to perform a familiar task. I’ve also seen people practically riot at the mere suggestion that this will happen. If you wish to curry favor with your userbase, never ever, remove keyboard accelerators, move toolbars around, break workflow, etc.
Hate that my government is apparently dead set on all of us driving massive trucks and SUVs spending thousands to money lenders, auto manufacturers, and dealerships over realist vehicles.
Doubly so if those parties are campaign contributors. Always follow the money.
a lot of devs love watching stuff like speedrunning
True, but some of them hate it. But with the growing presence of speedrunning friendly features in new titles (looking at you, Supergiant), I think that’s becoming less of a problem.
Either way, these “devs watch” reaction videos are fantastic.
Thank you for this insight. We all really need more of this kind of dialogue to build awareness around what to look for.
I would sooner see men step up and call out the bad actors
And I would be happy to join you in doing this, but this is not the company I keep. In my life I can barely count the number of times I have, or could have, on one hand. Meanwhile, when talking to women about this sort of thing, everyone has awful stories but they all involve people that simply are not a part of their social sphere (and by extension mine) anymore.
I fear that we, as a society, have done such a good job of pushing bad actors out to the margins that we no longer have eyes on the problem.
can also get a gun and blast these things before it gets out of hand
Honestly, I get the distinct impression that everything in the hunting section at your local Walmart is going to be woefully ineffective. May I recommend a defensive position with difficult to traverse stairs?
Thank you for posting this. I’m on something of a journey myself, and needed this advice.
Sometimes, aptitude and an ability to learn and grow is more valuable than having specific technology knowledge. It suggests a more generalist take on one’s career, which means they are always going to be useful. There’s also something to be said for “soft skills” and a person’s overall attitude. All this can make the balance for a lack of technical experience, provided they have demonstrated talent an ability to close such gaps.
Other times, the whole hiring process is just completely broken. Your friend may have had to contend with co-workers that were utterly incapable at their jobs.
You had a day or two […] none of the last 5 candidates could even send in a solution that would run.
As harsh as this sounds, this test was doing its job. Assuming you’re not hiring junior candidates, that is.
One day is enough to research XSLT enough to get the gist, and two is enough for a polished solution. And since we’re just stripping tags, we’re really just selecting for all the inner text, which is weird but not hard to do with the right selector expression. The task also selects for people that understand XML processing as programmatically manipulating a DOM, which is crucial to wrapping your head around more advanced tasks.
More like: it’s eventually going to break your weekend or even your whole week, but you don’t get to pick which one.
Edit: To put that in perspective, there are 260 working days in a year. Let’s say that you have just one of these hardware failures in a five-year career with the MTA. That’s roughly 1/1000 odds. If the lottery had chances like that, you’d play it every time.
My theory: the system they purchased was based on an older and proven design for railway automation and control. Add to that however said company/contractor was set up to support their customers (e.g. OS only ships on floppy). That said, I agree that ten years without so much as a drive upgrade is a bit long in the tooth for something that can kill people or become a logistic and/or political disaster if it malfunctions.
This is interesting. The longevity of this legacy tech may be secure if they use the right channels.
SoCal happens to have a very active retro-computing scene right now, much of which is in the bay area. If they can breathe life into an Apollo Guidance Computer, bog-standard floppy drives will be a piece of cake.
On the other hand, the same scene has modern emulation for just about every (popular) legacy media format imaginable. Upgrading the drives to use SD cards and USB thumbdrives is something they could buy off the shelf today: Apple II, C64, Tandy, misc. So there’s no reason to suffer through hardware failures when more reliable tech is available.
There are even commercial options out there. Example: https://www.shopfloorautomations.com/hardware/floppy-connect/
More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator
A few things come to mind here.
Sorry to hear about your friend. While I’m no doctor, that seems to fit the bill to me. I’ve known people that had other trauma when young, and yeah, maintaining healthy relationships seems to be the hardest thing for them. Your story reminded me of a lot.