“Punching down” is in the eye of the beholder, and kind of supports my point about having empathy in the way you speak. I guarantee that steel workers feel like they got the short end of the stick in life, and that feminist academia is the elite.

The Onion does something really clever: they simply show what the world would be like if feminists actually succeeded in convincing people with their arguments. The end result is comically bizarre and obviously extremely unlikely. The joke/criticism is how disconnected feminists are from the real world with their overly complicated, academic and abstract language, despite the fact that they ostensibly have a goal of influencing ordinary people into being better.

I’ve had this beef for a long time with feminists: they lack empathy and insight into the actual lived experience of the people they want to convince. They’re caught up in an authoritarian, entitled worldview where they imagine they can just coerce others into becoming better through force and shaming, using language that is so far above most people’s heads that it all just seems imaginary. Whenever I try to raise these concerns I am met with hate and am called a misogynist even though my intentions are to help. They have virtually no ability to listen. There are exceptions, but they are drowned out among all the (in my opinion) misguided people.

Second place goes to Memorial Honors Victims Of Imminent Dam Disaster.

Trump Voter Feels Betrayed By President After Reading 800 Pages Of Queer Theory. Important commentary and funny at the same time.

It’s a compliment. You’re skilled and valuable enough that the company won’t dare to give you any bullshit for leaving on time.

sometimes, it feels like managers hate engineers

They hate engineers because the engineers ask difficult questions that somebody needs to answer in order to really automate a process, and they take the time necessary to do so.

SQL was explicitly designed to allow “normal humans” to query the database. Nowadays even “normal developers” aren’t able to use it properly.

Oracle has a product called Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) that it sells as “you can write the rules in plain English in MS Word documents, you don’t need developers”. I worked for an insurance organization where the business side bought OPA without consulting IT, hoping they wouldn’t have to deal with developers. It totally failed because it doesn’t matter that they get to write “plain English” in Word documents. They still lack the structured, formal thinking to deal with anything except the happiest of happy paths.

The important difference between a developer and a non-developer isn’t the ability to understand the syntax of a programming language. It’s the willingness and ability to formalize and crystallize requirements and think about all the edge cases. As an architect/programmer when I talk to the business side, they get bored and lose interest from all my questions about what they actually want.

I want something that runs a small local LLM for text prediction, but there’s no proprietary alternative for that either.

No argument there. But apparently there’s a market for it.

Is it really too much to ask that apps/devices are made secure from the ground up?

In a way, yes. They can and should definitely be made with security in mind from the ground up. But they will never be totally secure, and a necessary part of what constitutes a “secure product” is to continuously and quickly patch security issues as they become known.

Surely that’s just a secure end-to-end encrypted connection?

I would bet it’s still a bit more than that. But even if it’s just a secure end-to-end encrypted connection, here is the list of vulnerabilities fixed in OpenSSL (which is probably what they use for secure encrypted connections). It’s five so far in 2024. Then there’s some OS kernel below that which can have security issues as well. The Thermomix probably also has user authorization components and payment methods, plus various personal information that has to be protected under GDPR.

I agree that the current system is broken. So let’s say that instead of paying $300 for a pair of headphones that last three years, you pay $8.33 / month for renting the headphones. Now, if the headphones break after three years the manufacturer has to produce new ones for you. That’s an undesirable cost for them.

It is now in their best interest to make headphones that will last a long time and that they can repair if something breaks. But also, since you can easily cancel the subscription at any time, it is in their interest to offer you something that is competitive. They might even upgrade to better technology over time or add new features to the bundled app to keep you as a customer. Or alternatively, lower the subscription cost over time to reflect the relative value of the headphones.

For you, there’s also the benefit that there’s no high upfront cost that you can’t reverse. You’re paying for what you can afford in your current situation. If you lose your job you can stop paying for the headphones at a moment’s notice. I imagine that this would leave fewer people in credit card debt.

Depends what kind of ownership you’re thinking about. When it comes to electronics, “ownership” is just subscription with a longer period between payments. Your existing phone, tablet, TV, dishwasher or what have you will last a finite time and then you have to buy a new one.

If there’s something that will last a lifetime, that’s a different discussion. But those are rare. Almost every purchase you make is a commitment to a recurring cost.

Something like myfitnesspal or a thermomix shouldn’t be a subscription, there is no major updates to how someone tracks their exercise uses a hot blender that justifies it beyond users being locked in.

I won’t dispute that both of these likely abuse the subscription model for their benefit. But they definitely have a social responsibility (and in many cases a legal responsibility) to keep updating the software in these products and the network infrastructure that go with them. The internet of things is one of the most vulnerable attack vectors we have. It has been exploited many times not just to attack individuals, but to create massive bot nets that can target corporations or even countries. The onus is on the manufacturer to continuously keep that at bay. You know what they say - the “S” in “IOT” stands for security.

I know I’m in the minority but I am also a software developer, and I think subscriptions are a much healthier payment model for everyone. The issue IMO is not recurring payments but the total cost of ownership.

“Digitial goods” is very rarely just a thing that you produce once and then it’s done. The OS is regularly updated which causes incompatibilities, app stores introduce new demands, and there’s a constant stream of security vulnerabilities in your dependencies that need to be patched. Failing to adress any of these things breaks the social contract and causes rage among your users (“I PAID FOR THIS, WHY ISN’T IT WORKING/WHY AREN’T YOU FIXING BUGS/etc”). Even movies and music need to be maintained because new media formats are introduced, streaming services have to be kept responsive and up to date etc.

A subscription models the cost distribution over time much better, and it does benefit the users because it means the company can keep updating their shit even if new sales drop, instead of going bankrupt.

I don’t think this stops with just digital goods. Manufactured products (and the environment) would also benefit from a subscription model because it means there’s no incentive for planned obsolescence. It’s an incentive for keeping the stuff we already built working for a long time, instead of constantly producing new crap and throwing the old in a landfill.

But, the caveat is that this shift must not result in higher total cost of ownership for the end users over time. In fact, it should reduce the cost because repairing and updating is cheaper than building new stuff. The way many companies are pricing subscriptions today, they are being too greedy.

Sure, but that’s far from a universal experience.

Not only shitty, it’s dumb. Even Adobe knows to give students hefty discounts. It’s how they get new users on the hook.

IntelliJ is an all-out full IDE in the tradition of the old Visual Studio or Borland IDE:s, so it makes sense there. Zed is ostensibly a text editor in the same niche as VS Code, vim and Sublime, where I expect to be able to just open a single file and edit it without any bigger investment.

I typically have both an IDE and a text editor installed, for different use cases. But Zed can never replace IntelliJ and because of this design choice it can’t replace VS Code/vim/Notepad++ either.

It drives me nuts that there’s no way to close a folder once you opened it. There’s no way to just edit a file without making it a “project”. In my mind that’s a weird design decision (which is probably rooted in weird fundamental ideas) and gives me no warm & fuzzy feeling about what direction it will take in the future.

Why does it need to reach 1 million names exactly? This is a petition, right?