Digital society sucks, and to a degree modern society in general.
There used to be religion, which you may dislike, but it offered social bonding at scale. You'd get to known an entire community, neighborhood, might make new friends or even find a spouse. Learn about people hobbies and form sub communities.
Or you go to school. Or to work, where before globalization you'd have a stable local team that you'd get to know very deeply. Or you may go to a bar, a hobby club, and attend public places for shopping, entertainment, whichever.
Now you wake up and the first thing you do is check your phone. Next, you may learn or work remotely, sitting alone, watching a screen breathing low quality air. You don't go to a store, you use delivery. You use your little work breaks to watch another screen, the smartphone. After dinner, there's more screen time. Passive entertainment, doomscrolling or interacting with a "community", weird little avatars on a screen.
You don't even have a relation with objects either. In the digital world, you don't really own anything. There's no stability. It's all fleeting, flexible, disrupted, empty. That's increasingly the dominant lifestyle: void.
The world is entirely financialized, hence you don't really live in a society, it's performance culture. You're expected to juggle 10 balls from an early age, which are life's "expectations". It offers no time for discovery, play or recovery. You need to check the damn boxes. The reward of mastering the boxes is that well actually...you still can't afford a basic middle class existence. The financial system constantly rug-pulls you whilst technology constantly disrupts your relevance.
Am I dramatizing? Yes, somewhat. But I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better. We lost a lot.
We live in a multi-device reality. People expect their notes to sync. If you don't need sync, you might as well use notepad and store .txt files on local disk. Fine by me, but then there's nothing to discuss.
A note taking app or password manager in the modern sense is not a product, it's a service. Your content is stored and this costs money. Not only is it a recurring cost, it's also a growing cost as content keeps getting added and rarely removed. It's not illogical that a recurring fee is asked.
It's very much possible that a large company subsidizes these costs or runs ads, thereby making it "free". But the costs are still there.
You do have a point about office and image editing programs. A local desktop app in itself has no recurring costs for the company that built it, at least not directly. Still, after market and customer saturation it would mean the companies go bankrupt, as little new revenue comes in.
You're doing the exact same thing: reverting to instinctive binary positions and name-calling. Throwing away the baby with the bath water. The thing you accuse the original source of, you're mirroring.
Sure enough, there really are people whom dislike minorities altogether for whatever twisted reasons. Awful people, no argument here.
Yet you're looking over a sizable group who have no issue with minorities, they have an issue with equity politics, which flies in the face of equality and is racist and sexist by design. People whom find it incredibly patronizing and insulting to call an entire demographic "marginalized".
Those people are not conservative nor are they racist. We use to call these people progressive. Center to center-left, classic liberalism. Many aren't on board at all with the postmodernist version of progressive politics. Yet they are lumped in with "racists", this is how you keep a culture war going. Just keep doubling down, and keep losing ever more support.
I think there's a neutral technical aspect and a political aspect.
The neutral aspect is that if you have so much money (a surplus) that you start giving it away to secondary causes, you're being misleading. The begging messages clearly imply they're about to run out of money to run things, which seems opposite to reality.
So they should change the tone of the message, and provide more transparency about where the money goes to. It should be a basic donator's right to understand if the money is needed at all, and where it is used for. No matter from which political angle you're coming from.
As for the political angle, to each their own. I'd say most knowledge institutes are progressive and always have been. Importantly, moderately progressive or "classic liberal". Which is quite different from post-modernist, equity, "woke" type of politics. This last category far less embraced, and not just by conservatives.
The situation seems comparable to Mozilla. Many people would gladly donate to support the development of the Firefox browser but not neccessarily want to reward incompetent leaders or fund the running of a "indigenous intersectional BLM feminist blog" that does absolutely fuck-all for anybody.
"Where the complaint does succeed is in showing an intense disgust for the social justice movement. So, don't donate to Wikimedia if you are also repulsed by the thought of (a small amount of money going towards) young, non-white, possibly non-male people being encouraged to (& see themselves as allowed to) participate in science and journalism. Go buy a copy of Encarta."
Thanks for making the debate worse. It's basically "do what I say or you're a racist".
It's far more than 50%. When specifically considering "woke" politics, centrists and moderate progressives reject it too. I'd say it's in the range of 70-90% rejecting.
Pretty much anybody outside California rejects it.
A BIPOC receiving a grant is not the issue, the issue, and what might be considered "woke" is to give the grant because they are BIPOC. That's "equity".
Equity means awarding people based on immutable characteristics and makes every interaction in society a racist/sexist struggle.
Anyway, you may be in favor of it, which is fine. Just know that it's an incredibly unpopular movement that is widely rejected internationally, and also in most developed nations across the political spectrum, minus the far-left.
Even the idea to call said people "marginalized" is insulting.
I'm from the Netherlands, so very much proud of our bicycle culture which only works because it's a fundamental part of our road design and related facilities, like bicycle parking. It's questionable whether you can retrofit this into a city.
Anyway, even in our little bicycle paradise there's a new danger: electrical bicycles. Currently, about 1 in 3 is electrical, and it seems most new ones sold are electrical. They are most of all popular with people 50+ y/o.
Recently I saw an accident happen from the outside security cam of a friend, the incident explaining the danger very well.
A woman in a car is trying to cross a road that intersects with a bicycle lane, so she checks for oncoming cyclists. One does seem to be oncoming in the distance. She then concludes there's plenty of time to cross, makes the move, and finds the cyclists on the hood of her car.
The way she probably read that situation: pretty far away, old guy, slow leg movement. All adding up to a low speed estimate and a high time estimate. That's how all of us have been subconsciously trained for decades.
Until electrical bicycles. The "cyclist" came on about twice as fast as expected. The obvious solution is to watch longer, to monitor speed over time. Yet to effectively get through traffic and not spend forever parked at a crossing, you do need speedy judgement. Also, these e-bikes can accelerate in ways a normal bicycle can't.
Another common dangerous e-bike situation: One passing you unexpectedly when cycling yourself, on a bicycle lane. Normally, just about 2 bicycles fit next to each other, but only barely. You'd normally anticipate such a passing because you can hear one coming behind. Now they seem to come out of nowhere, passing you by an inch at high speed.
My feelings are far less complicated: TDD is a high-discipline approach to software development, and that's why it doesn't work or doesn't get done.
High-discipline meaning, it entirely depends on highly competent developers (able to produce clean code, deep understanding of programming), rigorously disciplined out of pure intrinsic motivation, and even able to do this under peak pressure.
Which is not at all how most software is built today. Specs are shit so you gradually find out what it needs to do. Most coders are bread programmers and I don't mean that in any insulting way. They barely get by getting anything to work. Most projects are under very high time pressure, shit needs to get delivered and as fast as possible. Code being written in such a way that it's not really testable. We think in 2 week sprints which means anything long term is pretty much ignored.
In such an environment, the shortest path is taken. And since updating your tests is also something you can skip, coverage will sink. Bugs escape the test suite and the belief in the point of TDD crumbles. Like a broken window effect.
My point is not against TDD. It's against ivory tower thinking that does not take into account a typical messy real world situation.
I've noticed a major shift in the last decade. We used to think like this, in TDD, in documenting things with UML, in reasoning about design patterns. It feels like we lost it all, as if it's all totally irrelevant now. The paradigm is now hyper speed. Deliver. Fast. In any way you can.
This short-sighted approach leading to long term catastrophe? Not even that seems to matter anymore, as the thing you're working on has the shelf life of fish. It seems to be business as usual to replace everything in about 3-5 years.
Why is intelligence seen as some inescapable playbook of evolution?
Evolution has no agenda or goals, other than to select for survival. Most species on this planet have a low intelligence yet are successful, and don't seem to evolve into the direction of intelligence.
I'd say pre-internet, not pre-smartphone. Wide availability of free porn has been there since the start of the internet. It precedes smartphones by more than a decade.
There's different takes on this. To me, the workplace is free of romance or any sexual advance of any kind from my part.
I would never go beyond minor superficial personal interest (how was your holiday) at the coffee machine, and it ends there. Even if interest was shown in me, I'd deflect. Not going to happen.
That said, I do agree with the larger overall point that in today's digital and more sensitive world (don't have a better word), it likely is harder for people to connect that way.
I think that sums it up nicely, and indeed was my main point.
The female engineer we've worked with on a daily basis for years, in a very friendly, cooperative and relaxed team. So very far from a stranger to us. She's one of us, basically.
I'd agree that it would be incredibly unlikely that if we did make that compliment, anything bad would happen. But the fact that all five of us shut up regardless, I find telling.
I guess it's math, in a way. If there's a 1% change of getting into trouble for trying to say this nice thing, not saying anything means the chance is 0%, so the better option.
Yes, in the case of the feedback problem with the VCs, it was actually women taking issue with the lack of real critical feedback. They wanted it, they didn't want the muddied down overly protective version.
"I mostly think the argument "Well men will just start treating women and minorities will start being treated like radio active objects" is cultivated and pushed forward by men that aren't willing to hear they did something wrong."
I agree. It's a narrative from the "bad" men, yet it can instill paranoia on the good ones, where they become too careful.
Is this "walking on eggshells" thinking justified? No, I think in most interactions good intent would be detected, and occasionally a minor "correction" follows if not. None of this should be even in the domain of HR reports, job loss, the like. Like you said.
But still, despite that, I do see minor paranoia on the rise.
As in the example I gave regarding the dress. My heart was screaming to say the nice thing, the compliment she deserved so much, but I picked the safer option.
Likewise, code reviews. With a male engineer, I would simply say this: there's a mistake in your code. It's over here. Here's why it's a mistake, and what its impact would be if left unsolved. A fairly clinical and dry transfer of information.
With a female engineer, although I don't want to, I find myself to be far more careful. I aim to remove any trace or shred of a doubt of the message, or the tone of the message, coming across as in any way being dismissive, oppressive, "mansplaining", name any possible negative feeling one can have about critical feedback.
It takes me 3 times as long, and I don't know if it helps at all. But it's another example of minor paranoia straining work relations.
It's an odd thing to realize that the men concerned in the article specifically treat women in a bad way, yet at the same time normal (say, good men) might treat women too carefully.
I don't have a solution, these are just observations.
I would agree that this is easy, but I did run into a weird edge case.
First to be clear, I would never comment on anybody's body or clothes, especially not in the workplace. This is not to comply with some rule, I wouldn't have the urge to do that in the first place. It's weird and unneeded.
Anyway, the edge case. My female coworker is very passionate about making custom dresses. One day, on the day before our country's Queen's Day, she comes to work in an absolute master piece of a custom dress, dedicated to the festivities to come. The quality of that dress, the attention to detail, was out of this world. All custom made.
She walks over to a group of devs (five men, one is me) and basically presents the dress, yet without saying a word.
And now comes the awful thing. By chance, all of us had one of those mandatory "ethical workplace" trainings the day before. And this literal example, some guy commenting on a dress was used as an example of an absolute no-go.
Which sounds reasonable to me, in every context but this one. I had a strong urge to compliment her on her skill and the incredible result of her tireless effort. Surely, she worked on this forever, and this was to be a proud moment of display.
But we all kept our mouth shut, and picked the safe side of things. She left defeated, perhaps humiliated.
I know, it's a very uncommon situation, but the dynamic is interesting. In the gray zone area, most people would prefer to better be safe than sorry. Which almost every time is best anyway, but not this time.
I'll end with an aspect much more common. Feedback, as in professional feedback. Recently a study showed that VCs are far less critical towards female founders compared to male ones. Males would get very direct, sometimes harsh, and detailed negative feedback, whilst women would get the far less usable vague sugar-coated version of it.
Supposedly, out of fear. It shows hyper tensions, paranoia. If that gets out of hand, women and other minorities will be treated as radio-active objects, which is in nobody's interest.
The way I see it, really bad men (subject of article), cause this distrustful relation between perfectly good people.
There used to be religion, which you may dislike, but it offered social bonding at scale. You'd get to known an entire community, neighborhood, might make new friends or even find a spouse. Learn about people hobbies and form sub communities.
Or you go to school. Or to work, where before globalization you'd have a stable local team that you'd get to know very deeply. Or you may go to a bar, a hobby club, and attend public places for shopping, entertainment, whichever.
Now you wake up and the first thing you do is check your phone. Next, you may learn or work remotely, sitting alone, watching a screen breathing low quality air. You don't go to a store, you use delivery. You use your little work breaks to watch another screen, the smartphone. After dinner, there's more screen time. Passive entertainment, doomscrolling or interacting with a "community", weird little avatars on a screen.
You don't even have a relation with objects either. In the digital world, you don't really own anything. There's no stability. It's all fleeting, flexible, disrupted, empty. That's increasingly the dominant lifestyle: void.
The world is entirely financialized, hence you don't really live in a society, it's performance culture. You're expected to juggle 10 balls from an early age, which are life's "expectations". It offers no time for discovery, play or recovery. You need to check the damn boxes. The reward of mastering the boxes is that well actually...you still can't afford a basic middle class existence. The financial system constantly rug-pulls you whilst technology constantly disrupts your relevance.
Am I dramatizing? Yes, somewhat. But I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better. We lost a lot.