I love Dune but that game is so powerfully unappealing to me… I didn’t play it so maybe I got the wrong impression from a few minutes of gameplay but it read to me like every generic crafting-survival-base-building live service game from the last 15 years since MC and DayZ. Does it do something subversive or is it really just Rust on Arrakis?

Sure, but I don’t think Waterfall is going to save you from the soul-crushingness in such an environment.

How much of it is due to Agile (which is a very broad concept even though some people mistakenly equate it with scrum), and how much is it due to corporate pressures and inadequate processes though?

I find Agile conceptually meshes a lot better with “standard” product and solutions development thanks to the tighter feedback loops and increased reliance on local expertise over centralized planning. This only gets truer as project complexity grows.

However some companies try to make Agile work with top-down decision making and/or hard deadlines, which are deadly antipatterns. As for lack of time/resources and/or timesheet micro-management, this isn’t a problem unique to Agile nor something that waterfall is exempt from.

Good agile teams are mostly independent and can define their own testing/release cycle as required for a given project; though of course when that happens there are at least a couple layers of management who feel a burning itch to stuff their dirty nosed where they don’t belong because if the team succeeds despite their lack of direct involvement then everyone might realize the emperor has no pants.

That may be true in some truly well organized (usually “legacy big corpo” companies).

Where I’ve worked it’s more like:

• Requirements only cover user-facing features, if that. (Not so) senior engineers are left to bridge the gap between UI mockups and literally everything else.
• Implementation issue is accidentally introduced
• Priority on the bug is lower than new features so no-one has any way to justify working on it
• One day a dev might be personally annoyed enough by the issue that they fix the part as part of some tangentially related work. Else it stays like that forever.

That is a basic side-effect of Agile development. If you have implementation details figured out to such an extent before writing the code, you are not doing agile, you are doing waterfall. Which has a time and a place, but that time and place is typically banking or medical or wherever you’re okay with spending several times the time and money to get maximum reliability (which is a different metric than quality!).

I bet NVIDIA has driver crashes to figure out, and I know which of those issues I’d want them to focus on first if I used their windows driver.

You know, maybe my grandparents had it right.

It is weird that computers give so little sensory feedback for what they’re doing. Flashlights go click. Cassette decks go clack-vrrrr. Whiteboards go squeek-squeek. Screen sharing goes… nothing, just a small mostly white rectangle on top of my much bigger rectangle until a disembodied, 4 kHz-wide simulacrum of someone’s voice from halfway around the world says “yeah we see your screen”. Unnatural is what it is.

I work in the industry (not MSFT) on cloud reliability so I have insight.

• The cloud itself is not as stable as some people may think. Standard is 99.9 % uptime. Which sounds great, but if your DB is 99.9 % and your compute is 99.9% and your storage is 99.9 % and your network and so on and any one of those going out breaks your application, then you don’t have 99.9 % but (99.9 %)^n which is a lot less impressive. You can make things fault-tolerant through redundancy but that comes with great complexity which can cause outages of its own.
• Apps like teams, like most B2B bullshit, provide added value by bundling together as much shit as possible. Chat, calls, calendar, spreadsheets, you name it. So now any one of those features going out individually can impact the whole app.
• Every one of those features in the bundle is managed by a different team, possibly in a different country and coming from a different company acquisition. So now you have to glue unrelated tech stacks together which is super expensive.
• The way you bundle things together in a SPA in a corporate environment with finite resources is by basically bundling together a bunch of iframes. Ever notice that the calendar tab on teams sometimes tells you to refresh your page to get new credentials? That’s why, this fucking thing bundles its own authentication lib and barely talks to MS Teams so it can’t properly refresh its tokens! If you like having one product’s technical debt, now think about having 20 products’ technical debt all conveniently forced to interact together in one web page!

Honestly I’m impressed by how well teams works with the very severe constraints they clearly have. Shit’s got more moving parts than Ryanair’s entire fleet and it only breaks once in a while.

The Latin thing is only a partial explanation. Some of it is changes in pronunciation coupled with a very authoritarian attitude to orthography. Few languages out there that changed so little in 400 years.

So for instance the -ent ending for plural verbs (“ils mangent”) is silent because the “ent” sounds were progressively dropped. Then the written suffix logically started disappearing, and only then did the Académie bring it back because it was more Latin. If it wasn’t for these reactionary fucks that rule would have been reformed centuries ago.

Unfortunately in the intervening time, knowledge of orthography became a very strong social marker. Because spelling French is so hard, the dictée came to disproportionately affect grades (seriously, old-fashioned schools still do it daily and it’s all graded and very severely), which coupled with the industrial revolution and alphabetization of the lower classes meant that shit spelling = prole = bad. So now orthography is at the center of the traditional value system which has all the conservatives pearl-clutching at the idea that children can’t spell “nénuphar” properly. Children’s purported inability to spell properly is like the number one moral panic that has sprung up every few years for the last century or two, but also orthographic reforms are woke (derogatory). The point of orthography, to conservative types, is for it to be hard so you can show off your perfect spelling to justify your social standing.

Running Linux on closed source hardware. Classic.

I bet you aren’t even using your own open RISC-V based SBC, with fully open-source peripherals. Is your computer monitor even running an open-source firmware or are you just a FOSS poser?

I’ve mostly got experience with Battlefield in that genre but if you’re getting repeatedly killed by “campers” you’re playing the game wrong, aka aiming for KDR instead of PTFO.

Believe it or not devs are aware of the mechanical advantages of long-range weapons, so in-game objectives are intentionally littered with crates and boxes and walls to provide cover from “camping spots”. The ones getting repeatedly killed are noobs who keep walking around the objective, in the open, because they are scared of all the cover positions which might hide an enemy.

Well too fucking bad sugarlips, stop being a little bitch and rush in. Better to die clearing out the cover spots for your teammates to capture the objective than to a useless game of skeet that doesn’t generate any benefit for either team. I don’t care that you have a KDR of 1.2 and “you would have gotten more if it wasn’t for the campers”, you captured exactly zero flags and so as far as I’m concerned you’re dead weight.

… Wow sorry about that, I guess I got post-traumatic gamer rage on this topic lol

Having talked to people who were in charge of making some strategic decisions regarding a business messaging application…

Slack/Discord is “too complex and confusing”. Apparently the pile of unsorted chats, group chats, and meeting chats, are superior to Discord’s threading model.

Also corpos literally do not notice that teams is slow as molasses which is a big part of the friction. You could show them a perfect demonstration that Teams’ UI is so much slower to react to anything (nevermind load the actual resource) than the competition and that they often have a 1000+ms audio RTT in meetings (not a hyperbole) and the business people would be like “yeah, I guess? Who cares?”

Corporate types literally can’t understand that bad audio and audio latency costs a huge percentage of revenue in lost productivity because everyone’s constantly talking over each other and simultaneously being too afraid to speak because the audio delay makes it impossible to fit into a lull in the conversation and also everyone is in a competition for the tiniest shittiest mic with the worst noise canceling that somehow stacks on top of Teams’ pretty bad noise cancelation such that their voice is being noise canceled and you’re just left with like 1.2 kHz of actual range and somehow everyone seems fine to spend their entire day listening to that and aaaaaaaaa I have a headache and I want to die

Then after work you get on a discord call with the mates and everyone is crystal clear with no noticeable latency, even the students on a secondhand 30 € gaming headset.

My Audi typically displays the outdoors temp on the digital dash, which is convenient. Except when there is any warning light on, which takes its place. Want to take a quick glance at the temp? Well right now it’s “low on windshield wiper fluid” degrees outside.

Also why the fuck does this shitty dash scream at me about warnings when I get in the car but not out. By the time I get home I will have completely forgotten about the windshield wiper. How is “also display reminders after shutting the engine off” not the obvious implementation?

The algorithms used to “derank” swear-laden videos on platforms like TikTok and YouTube are the exact same one used to derank “political” content and/or queer content.

So yeah, it fucking pisses me off every time someone self-censors to appease the Algorithm, lending it more credibility.

Not very high on our very long list of items on the Descent Into Fascism checklist, but it’s on there.

Which versioning???

somekey: yes

Go right ahead and tell me what the YAML version is and what is the type of somekey is. Oh that’s right, it’s impossible, because the versioning is entirely up to the serializers for some godforsaken reason.

Only 1.1. Which everybody has been fiercely clinging onto since 2009, because YAML 1.2 did not seem to consider it a problem that they broke backwards compatibility on that behavior. So now the only way to keep existing YAML files working is for us all to keep pretending YAML 1.2 does not exist.

One of these literally shows a dead soldier in a field of flowers so, yeah.

It’s idle longing. I could give up my career, move to a deeply rural area, and break my back doing menial jobs until I die of health complications at 64. I won’t, but it’s nice to long for the imagined simplicity sometimes y’know?

See also:

Any examples spring to mind? I’ve built apps that are only distributed as containers (because for their specific purpose it made sense and I am also the operator of the service), but if ya don’t want to run it in a container… just follow the Dockerfile’s “instructions” to package the app yourself? I’m sure I could come up with a contrived example where that would be impractical, but in almost every case a container app is just a basic install script written for a standard distro and therefore easily translatable to something else.

FOSS developers don’t owe you a pre-packaged .deb. If you think distributing one would be useful, read up on debhelper. But as someone who’s done both, Dockerfile is certainly much easier than debhelper. So “don’t need it” is a statement that only favors native packaging from the user’s perspective, not the maintainer. Can’t really fault a FOSS developer for doing the bare minimum when packaging an app.

I’m not a revolutionary and I disagree that the semantic difference is unimportant.

“The system must be destroyed” implies, assuming we’re talking about national politics, at the very least a short period of very deep constitutional and institutional reform, but really refers to nothing less than civil war, violent revolution, and the systematic dismantlement of existing institutions from which proponents of such action generally assume that their preferred method of government will naturally emerge.

This is opposed to a belief that, flawed may they be, democratic institutions also act as safeguards against the tyranny of the majority as well as the tyranny of whoever has the most money/guns, and slow incremental change to these institutions is preferable to their dismantlement.

Of course everything in the world isn’t so black and white. Nonetheless the existence of gray doesn’t diminish the difference between black and white. “The system must be destroyed”, by virtue of the violence it implies, is an extremist statement and different in nature to “the system must be fixed”.

Generally French speakers don’t consider English to be phonetically messy. Because when you pronounce every word with the thickest French accent known to man without any regard for correctness, suddenly the phonology becomes quite regular! (Side-effect being that native English speakers may not understand what the fuck a French speaker is saying, but that’s never stopped French speakers who famously disregard the English’s opinion on… well everything)

What’s really annoying about French besides the needlessly complicated tenses is that it had a bunch of already archaic orthographic and grammatical rules 300 years ago or so, and at that point the aristocracy decided to freeze it in place. I won’t get on another rant about the Académie française but if a French word has an overly complicated spelling given its pronunciation, it’s these guys’ fault who have refused to enact any real reform since the early 1800s despite calls for it since at least the 1700s. Despite it supposedly being their jobs.

At least these all have the same radical. Here’s the different radicals you can use in French for the verb “be”:

• Être
• Je suis
• Tu es
• Nous sommes
• Nous étions
• Je fus
• Tu seras
• Soyons

The only common point between some of those is the letter “S”, which is not even part of the infinitive.

(Not all tenses are represented because at least they share the radical with that list, but like Polish we have a bunch of tenses and the verb changes with plurality and pronoun).

Anyway I don’t fucking know why everyone glamorizes French because as a native speaker please do not attempt to learn it, you will just hurt yourself.

You underestimate the sheer volume in my hippocampus dedicated to tracking tabs.

… Kidding, mostly. Because generally tabs are grouped together in a way that makes sense so it’s easy to remember. These 10 tabs are me researching a new tool… A couple tags for articles I will surely get to… Then these 15 tabs are documentation for XYZ… Those 5 tabs are YouTube videos I want to watch… These are three Wikipedia searches that popped in my head and oh look a couple songs I want to listen to before adding them to my playlist.

If I want to find a tab and they are fully minimized then I click on the group with the relevant icon then I Ctrl+Tab through them until I find what I want. Perfectly reasonable.

I swear it makes sense and bookmarks are not an adequate replacement.