An individual would risk corporate lawyers lobbing suits at them they don’t have nearly enough resources to fight. In that way, it’s much like other forms of activism: individual actions are easily singled out and retaliated against.

If a ton of people were to do so, however, they might have an impact. Either the registrar would have to take steps to limit who can submit them, which might conflict with some laws, or they’d invest a great deal of resources trying to sort out the legit ones. Trying to single out people for retaliation is hard when there’s enough of them. In this way, too, it is like other forms of activism:

There is strength in numbers. There is power in unity.

If, hypothetically, someone were to coordinate such actions in the style of a crowdsources DDoS, and they could get enough participants, they might get away with it.

I’m thankful I don’t do software dev (I did two years as a working student, that was enough), but working in Data Engineering / Analytics* doesn’t make things better. I’ll overengineer the database, ETL and reporting, define a dozen measures I’ll never use, prepare a dozen ways to slice and view the data I’ll never look at and build a whole data warehouse I’ll never look at.

Eventually I remember that it exists, realise that I’ve answered all my questions by directly querying the database, except for “What am I running out of?”, which I answer by looking in the cabinet because I never update my inventory anyway.

*I don’t even know where the line is anymore and how much of my responsibilities is on either side of it

“6 for the beer, 9 for the longdrink, 4.20 for the water… That’s a total of 694.20 please.”

He uses a pencil, paper and a mechanical calculator to tally up the bill, which I absolutely understand when your career is in IT.

When the alternative is either having to search, evaluate, compare, select and configure an application for that purpose that you’re never quite happy with, or to scope, design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, eternally find things you wish you’d done better, refactor, realise you’re spending your free time on doing more of your job, regret your life choices, resolve to only make this last improvement and then call it good enough, renege on that promise to yourself a week later, burn out, curse that damn app for ruining your hobby…

…yeah, using the most trivial low-tech solution possible does look rather sensible.

My new data structure:

Given a heuristic for determining data quality, it homogenises the quality of its contents. Data you write to it has pieces exchanged with other entries depending on its quality. The lower the quality, the higher the rate of exchange.

If you put only perfect data, nothing is exchanged. Put high quality, you’ll mostly get high quality too, but probably with some errors. Put in garbage, it starts poisoning the rest of the data. Garbage in, garbage out.

“Why would you want that”, you ask? Wrong question, buddy - how about “Do you want to be left behind when this new data quality management technology takes off?” And if that doesn’t convince you, let me dig around my buzzword budget to see if I can throw some “Make Investors Drool And Swoon”-skills your way to convince you I’ll turn your crap data into gold.

I think it’s a symptom of the age-old issue of missing QA: Without solid QA you have no figures on how often your human solutions get things wrong, how often your AI does and how it stacks up.

ActiveSheet? Please no

First Elsass-Lothringen, now Heckler & Koch… when are they going to stop taking our stuff?

(Yes, I know the actual history is more complex. I’m just memeing.)

For the elites: conserve their hierarchy and the structures that enable the gradual accumulation of power in the hands of the few.

For the rest: conserve their place in the hierarchy and the comfort of the familiar.

Hourly wages for school teachers? I’m worried I might know the response, but does prep work outside school hours, in breaks etc. count as hours worked?

If you don’t pay for late checkout, you can’t check out late. If you don’t pay for the DLC, you can’t play the DLC. You can still check out at the normal time (which is the basic service) or play the base game, respectively.

Dammit, EAC may be an issue on Linux though. It’s kinda hit or miss whether a given developer will take the extra steps, particularly given the conflicting sources on just how complex it actually is. According to Valve, it’s a checkbox and dropping a file in your depot. Others claim it would require an Epic Online Services version of EAC, with all the baggage that carries, including potentially rewriting a whole chunk of your code.

It’s like booking a hotel: Basic price will get you a room for the night, with all the common amenities, but if you want late checkout, you’ll pay extra. Sure, they could fold that into the basic price and make it the norm, but if you know you’ll leave early anyway, you’ll be paying for something you don’t want.

The metaphor breaks apart if you look too closely - for hotels, early checkout is a convenience since they can get the room ready sooner for the next guest, so they’ll incentivise that, while the devs have already put in the work. On the other hand, the late checkout is a service of convenience while a DLC is an excitement feature, where the content is instead an incentive to pay more.

Either way, I feel like add-ons for games aren’t too different from add-ons in many other industries: “This is the basic <thing>, with the price we feel we can charge for it. This here is an extra you can have for an extra charge.”

Butterfly gang

Bribe them with snacks. Source: Am IT. Have been bribed with snacks. You can bet that user got priority treatment from that day on.

If it’s real, I’m confident he had some competent assistant hire a competent crew for that photo-op. I’m guessing a competent PR consultant suggested a good photo-op in the first place, hit the right buttons to appeal to his wannabe cool image.

If it’s fake, some competent developer created a good tool, fed with competently selected data to create a rather convincing image.

What I’m trying to say is that there most certainly were several competent people involved in the making of this picture.

Just not the subject.

Both Medieval Europe and Antiquity were defined by wealthy landowners and poor workers. We don’t always see a whole lot of that in the writings that have survived until our time, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.

Most of the ancient sources we have were written by people with the both leisure to learn, travel around and write stuff down and the connections to have their writings be considered worth duplicating and preserving. In a word: the elites.

The issue here is that the poor and destitute didn’t exist in a vacuum just because resources were scarce. Even in bad years for the peasantry, the elites generally did fine.

These ancient sources don’t always spell that out, because it isn’t worth spelling out to them: this is just how they and their peers live. Most of these elite members owned property or the workshop and tools with which their workers labored.

By and large, they were rich. Whether that richness is defined in numbers on some net worth estimate or just in the amount of things they owned, the result is the same.

And even in Ancient Greece, the rich had to make some contributions back to the community (except for Sparta, but they’re a whole different beast of exploitation). Philanthropy has its roots there, even if it is a far cry from what we would term Philantropy today: The wealthy either voluntarily or out of obligation funded buildings, artworks etc. for the general public.

What changed with Industrial Capitalism and later Globalisation was mostly the scale of exploitation. But the principle - an owner class exploiting a labour class - has been around forever.

I’ve twice now gotten a position without prior knowledge of the tools in question. I think a lot is just taking a gamble on your ability to learn as you go - which clearly worked out in your case.

I had my start with Python, albeit as a kid and I didn’t actually understand too much about the principles at the time. Still, I think that was a good place to start learning about the concepts of instructions and variables.

I learned more about the ideas underpinning it all later, and most of my understanding came when actually working in software development on a live and in-development codebase. I think that’s a good progression: start small, then learn some theory just so you’ve heard the terms once, then try to make sense of actual code using that.

Edit: definitely work on some goal though. Don’t code in a vacuum, think of something small you want to achieve and learn to do that.

Ooh that’s a good one