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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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    • Eventually Company decides “agile will fix things”
    • Developers are told to work agile but the only stakeholder they talk to is the PO, who talks to PM, who talks to Sales, who talks to Customers
    • PM&Sales don’t want to deliver an unfinished/unpolished product so they give a review every sprint, by themselves, based on what they think the customer wants (they are Very Clever)
    • A year or two later the project is delivered and the customer is predictably unhappy.
    • Management says “how could this have happened!” and does it all over again.

  • Also English is an odd germanic-romance bastard child that Western Europeans tend to like because it has a decent number of cognates for everyone and a simple grammar IF you’re only aiming for simple conversational English. The barrier to entry is quite low, especially if you don’t give a shit about having a thick accent and straight up mispronouncing tricky words (as anyone knows who had a conversation in English with a non-fluent Italian/Spanish/French person).

    OTOH German used to be relatively widely spoken in Eastern Europe, and Slavic languages also use declensions AFAIK, and also even post WWII German held quite a bit of momentum in academic circles.
    So if the Soviet block had gone the Chinese route and become an economic behemoth instead of withering and dying at the dawn of the Information Age, German being the lingua franca (or at least giving English a run for its money) would have been a distinct possibility IMO.


  • Yeah. What kind of GenAI would be so shitty to render something with so many artifacts, yet coherent enough to render 24 words that perfectly map to their direct French translation? But somehow the pictures are half jumbled to the point that the picture of a tail looks like a circle? Which is the opposite way GenAI normally jumbles things, text is always the first to become undecipherable.

    The only way for this to be GenAI would be with close supervision, it’s not impossible but at that point it would have been much less effort for a much better result to edit English text onto an actual French children’s book.

    Anyway who gives a shit but the superior attitude of the people here who think they are so clever pisses me off lol



    1. Don’t infantilise him. He’s not attention-starved, he’s a Nazi.
    2. Did everyone forget Trump already did that during his first term??? I am going absolutely insane. We know he will threaten to nuke anyone and everyone. And right now the odds aren’t looking good that he won’t actually do it. That’s my call. Nuclear war. People called me crazy in 2020 when I called Trump a fascist, and my worst predictions will be proven right again because everyone seems to be dead-set on downplaying the actions of these Nazi lunatics and acting surprised when they pull through with a Nazi promise which only emboldens them.

  • What? I’m not privy to RedHat/IBM/Google’s internal processes but they are all massive FOSS contributors at least some of which I assume are using Agile internally. The Linux kernel is mostly corpo-backed nowadays.

    The development cycle of FOSS is highly compatible with Agile processes, especially as you tend towards the Linux Kernel style of contributing where every patch is expected to be small and atomic. A scrum team can 100% set as a Sprint Goal “implement and submit patches for XYZ in kernel”.

    Also agile ≠ scrum. If you’re managing a small github project by sorting issues by votes and working on the top result, then congratulations, you’re following an ad-hoc agile process.

    I think what you’re actually mad at is corporate structures. They systematically breed misaligned incentives proportional to the structure’s size, and the top-down hierarchy means you can’t just fork a project when disagreements lead to dead ends. This will be true whether you’re doing waterfall or scrum.



  • Gnome is sleek but definitely not KISS, and the fact that plugins break after every update should be proof enough. Bash scripts will work for years or decades without any modification; that’s the Unix philosophy. Yet write one .js extension for gnome and it will be obsolete by next year, even though devs point to the extension system to excuse themselves from implementing the most basic of features (at least they did ten years ago when I got fed up with their bullshit). And they don’t implement the most basic features because their philosophy is not Unix’s, but MacOS’s (specifically in all the ways that MacOS is not Unix).

    People seem to find redeeming qualities to Gnome, and more power to them I guess. But “it is philosophically Unix” is just straight-up an incorrect statement.


  • So is chocolate, yet no one complains about it.

    “Vanilla”, for some reason, has come to mean “plain” in English. That is a specific linguistic quirk. It doesn’t exist in my native language, and not coincidentally no-one who I share this native language with would think to give me shit because my favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla, because it’d be just as nonsensical and out of the left field as making fun of someone for preferring chocolate flavor.


  • Not quite; he supported Hitler, but represented a separate institution: the Church. A reminder that fascism rises not just as a consequence of legislative or executive shenanifans, but when civil institutions are complicit in it.

    It is certainly an interesting perspective. When reading the poem without context it’s easy to think “I wasn’t a Communist” is the perspective of a hypothetical participant, but it is entirely autobiographical and the callousness of the protagonist is painfully real.

    […] what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934—there must have been a possibility—14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40 million people, because that is what it is costing us now.



  • Torx > Hex > Robertson > Pozidriv > Phillips > Slot.

    This is not (just) the ramblings of a mad nerd, but objective fact derived from contact area between screwdriver and screw.

    In practice hex does have one situational advantage over Torx, namely that they are almost always tightened with Allen keys which are more torque-y and can be used in tight spaces. For every other application Torx wins. Every other head type is strictly inferior and only exists for legacy or penny-saving reasons.




  • Whether it’s 48 or 52 % is an immaterial difference. Every other American who voted, voted for Trump. The rest don’t seem to care either way. He has very broad popular assent and is as popular as Harris give or take a margin of error.

    Everyone is lasered-focused on the EC because it makes all the difference for the practicalities, but if one is to make a broad judgement of whether Trump won fair and square the answer is “yeah, mostly”. Further proof is the fact that the House is probably going to be his as well.

    Americans now bear the collective responsibility for the horrors of the next 4(+?) years. Do not make the mistake of blaming the popular will of outright fascism on institutional failures, because institutions didn’t force half of Americans to vote for the fascist, again.



  • Cop-out answer. Ending capitalism and ending ST are not the same fight. I’m not confident I’ll see the former happen in my lifetime, but the latter is a distinct possibility (though the pro-ST “I hate to see the sun in my free time” people have a slight edge where I live). Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

    Also I’m not even sure how ending capitalism is actually relevant. My skillset is office stuff, and until further notice humans still need to collaborate to get things done and therefore have a concept of “business hours” (though those don’t have to be 8-6).

    I see the “8 hours of work is too many” angle, but that problem is mostly orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalist societies can (and have) changed the standard number of working hours. Communist societies are not exempt from the concept of mandatory labor either (quite the contrary for all historical examples!). If you’re looking for an economic model where everyone is free to work whenever they damn well please, I’m afraid you’ll have to bring the replicator thingies from Star Trek into existence first.


  • Oh I’ve got a window alright. It is set up perfectly right so that on the day after ST takes over I can see the sun set 6 minutes before I get off work. Sun’s down, guess I can go outside now!

    That is absolutely devilish. I have to get to work so I’ll wake up whenever to get there. But all outdoors evening activities are, at best, a complete joke 5 months of the year because of fucking ST. Wanna take a quick jog around the neighborhood? Bad news bitch, it’s pitch black outside. Here’s to hoping I don’t get run over by a fucking bus.

    “Sun rises after work starts” is a setup for caffeine addiction, but “sun sets before work ends” is a setup for crippling alcoholism. Literally nothing to look forward to all day long, five months a year. I will not take any shit from so-called morning people about this, there is one objective truth here and it’s that standard business hours being the worldwide standard that they are, ST the absolute fucking worst for office workers.