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goatinaboat

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goatinaboat
·5 年前·discuss
virtually nothing actually uses these characters for these purposes.

Right. Which is why we have all these hilarious escaping and interpolation problems. Any why programmers will never be taken seriously by real engineers. It's like we have cement mixed and ready to go but we decide to go and forage for mud instead and think that makes us cleverer than the cement guys.
goatinaboat
·5 年前·discuss
This is one of those great ideas that sadly one needs experience to realize are really bad ideas. Every new generation of programmers has to relearn it.

It's a bad idea because ASCII already includes dedicated characters for field separator, record separator and so on. These could easily be made displayable in a text editor if you wanted just as you can display newlines as ↲. Anyone who invents a format that involves using normal printable characters as delimiters and escaping them when you need them, is, I feel very confident in saying, grotesquely and malevolently incompetent and should be barred from writing software for life. CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, all guilty.
goatinaboat
·5 年前·discuss
Californians fleeing the the things they voted for, then voting for the very same things again. Is there a legal way Texas residents can block them coming?
goatinaboat
·5 年前·discuss
traditional racist caricatures of Chinese people

Is it racist to depict a citizen of a country in that country’s traditional national garb? Simplified to cartoon form for children?

I guarantee no actual Chinese are offended by this.
goatinaboat
·5 年前·discuss
Yes, it sounds like someone is being paid as a "micro-manager" to check whether others are working. It is very dismissive towards the other employees, and it is very troubling to pay someone at a management level to do such work. Someone whose job only consists in checking over the shoulders of the people doing the actual work should be paid less, not more, than them

I hope the "silver lining" of everyone having to WFH due to COVID is that companies realise how little contribution middle managers make to getting work done and hence the bottom line. They are just dead weight, get rid of them and share the spoils between workers and senior managers, it's a win-win.
goatinaboat
·5 年前·discuss
GDPR doesn't even automatically apply to European NYT subscribers, unless the NYT advertises directly to Europeans

It definitely does have UK specific ads, I’ve seen them, and GDPR is grandfathered into UK law.

I cancelled mine by cancelling the PayPal, there was no other way to cancel without phoning them. There is no online cancellation even for those in GDPR jurisdictions.
goatinaboat
·5 年前·discuss
mostly opinions that are often considered "common sense" on our side of the pond.

The NYT’s views on race relations are so far from normal Europeans that Macron called them an existential threat to France.
goatinaboat
·5 年前·discuss
The minimum wage increase that Biden is pushing for is radical. He wants a 15$/hour minimum wage

By 2025, and only for Federal workers. The small print in that promise that only came out after the election.
goatinaboat
·5 年前·discuss
If you live in the EU, you might need to request account deletion, I think GDPR doesn't require that data is deleted

GDPR also requires you to be able to cancel by the same way you signed up, so any company that doesn’t let you cancel online is in flagrant violation.
goatinaboat
·6 年前·discuss
there was a migration from livejournal to dreamwidth for reasons I don't fully remember

Livejournal became associated with CP thinly disguised as fanfic. Think Snape and an underage Harry Potter kind of stuff. It was sold to the Russians after its value imploded because all the English-speaking normal users left. The Russian content on there now is as far as I know innocuous; that kind of fanfic is mainly a Western thing.
goatinaboat
·6 年前·discuss
demanded that we censor some of our users' content (mostly involving people talking about sex, usually fictionally, in explicit terms

Livejournal was a hotbed of dubious fanfic (shall we say) in which one or more characters was underage. Maybe such a thing is technically not illegal but even so, many left that platform once it started to develop a reputation for it. Then it went bust and was sold to a Russian company, it is still used for normal blogging in Russia.
goatinaboat
·6 年前·discuss
Dreamwidth is a blogging site, an offshoot of Livejournal, I would expect content on it to be across the full spectrum of both opinions and quality. Banning it as a domain makes about as much sense as banning Wordpress or Blogspot.
goatinaboat
·6 年前·discuss
many engineers were actively against - aghast, even - at the idea of unions

“Union” is a trigger word but call it an association like BMA, BALPA, or a Federation (Police) or even a guild, and everyone would be if not on board, at least willing to have a non-emotive conversation.
goatinaboat
·6 年前·discuss
Correct. Random companies cargo-culting what Google does has made half the industry massively dysfunctional e.g. in hiring processes
goatinaboat
·6 年前·discuss
One click while logged into any Google property will be enough for them to permanently associate this GUID with your (shadow) account, they know it, and they know you know it too
goatinaboat
·6 年前·discuss
The French company Thales basically re-invented BlackBerry for the exclusive use of their government https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/worldwide/security/telephony-...
goatinaboat
·7 年前·discuss
He’s not motivated by money but by something no one else can offer: knowing secrets.
goatinaboat
·7 年前·discuss
It’s the Perl culture, to do even simple things in the weirdest way possible and everyone will call you a wizard. Whereas the Python community praises complex ideas expressed as simple code and frowns on tricks. That’s why all but the the most obsessive have moved on. And from what I’ve seen Perl 6 takes it to the next level.
goatinaboat
·7 年前·discuss
He has the stress of worrying what the family whose money this was will do if they think he ripped them off...
goatinaboat
·7 年前·discuss
WeWork is that the offices are fun. The one I know in SF is an OK place to hang out in the evening.

This is so SV. In the real world CEOs aren’t so into paying a premium so that their employees can chug “free” brewskis at work. Going home at 5 and coming in at 9 is the norm.