Every industry is full of technical hills that people plant their flag on. What is yours?
I work in disability support. People in my industry fail to understand the distinction between duty of care and dignity of risk. When I go home after work I can choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. My clients who are disabled are able to make decisions including smoking and drinking, not to mention smoking pot or watching porn. It is disgusting to intrude on someone else’s life and shit your own values all over them.
I don’t drink or smoke but that is me. My clients can drink or smoke or whatever based on their own choices and my job is not to force them to do things I want them to do so they meet my moral standards.
My job is to support them in deciding what matters to them and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals and to support them in enacting that plan.
The moment I start deciding what is best for them is the moment I have dehumanised them and made them lesser. I see it all the time but my responsibility is to treat my clients as human beings first and foremost. If a support worker treated me the way some of my clients have been treated there would have been a stabbing.
Disabled people are so often treated like children and it just sucks.
Like you, I tend to feel that in general, people need to stop trying to force people to live the way they think is best. Unless there is a very real, very serious impact on others (“I enjoy driving through town while firing a machine gun randomly out my car windows”), people should be permitted to choose how to live as far as possible. Flip side is that they gotta accept potential negative consequences of doing so. Obviously, there’s gonna be some line to draw on what consitutes “seriously affecting others”, and there’s going to be different people who have different positions on where that line should be. Does maybe spreading disease because you’re not wearing a facemask during a pandemic count? What about others breathing sidestream smoke from a cigarette smoker in a restaurant? But I tend towards a position that society should generally be less-restrictive on what people do as long as the harm is to themselves.
However.
I would also point out that in some areas, this comes up because someone is receiving some form of aid. Take food stamps. Those are designed to make it easy to obtain food, but hard to obtain alcohol. In that case, the aid is being provided by someone else. I think that it’s reasonable for those other people to say “I am willing to buy you food, but I don’t want to fund your alcohol habit. I should have the ability to make that decision.” That is, they chose to provide food aid because food is a necessity, but alcohol isn’t.
I think that there’s a qualitative difference between saying “I don’t want to pay to buy someone else alcohol” and “I want to pass a law prohibiting someone from consuming alcohol that they’ve bought themselves.”
I disagree with restricting alcohol for food stamps. In fact, it shouldn’t be food stamps, it should be cash. When you attach all these requirements and drug testing and restrictions you are destroying the autonomy of the person you are claiming to help.
It is like with housing. Many of the housing programs available require drug tests, job seeking documentation, separating men and women, and so on. In some cases this can make a little sense, given that men are much more likely than women to be domestic abusers, but other cases make less sense. If someone uses drugs to cope with their life and then you offer housing only if they stop the thing that is helping them cope they will not be helped, they will be harmed. They will not be able to take the housing and end up off the street in a secure place building a life, they will be still on the street and still on the drugs.
If I go and work a job and get paid should my employer be able to say “I’m fine with paying you so you can have housing and food, but alcohol? No, I don’t want to pay for alcohol”? This would be insane. Your employer choosing what you can do with your money outside of work hours is authoritarian nonsense and yet when it comes to welfare or charity people think it is fine. I disagree vehemently.
If I give you money to alleviate your suffering who am I to decide how you employ that? I want you to have more money because it is fungible, you can do almost anything with money, so you can make choices. I want you to have more power to effect your life, not less.
I assume you are an American given your reference to food stamps. Where is the American spirit of independence? Of self determination? Of rugged individualism? It seems quite dead in the modern era of state capture and authoritarian oligarchy. It is a loss and a tragedy.
How are you distinguishing:
- it’s ok to treat all men as criminals who may attack women and women as victims who may be attacked so we need to keep them from fraternizing
From
- it’s not ok to try to reduce their self-destructive behaviors that are keeping them from being able to support themselves
Statistically speaking the rate of abuse from men to their partners is extremely high. I don’t know how to manage this best but it seems likely that at least some of the situations of abuse would be helped by having spaces without men in them. Does that mean we should force men and women apart? No. But how to manage that I will concede is a difficult problem.
In many cases of abuse the abuser keeps the victim close and prevents any outside contact as much as possible. Having the moment without the abuser nearby can provide an opportunity to escape which seems to provide some significant utility. On the other hand someone who is supported by their partner and actually does derive benefit from that would suffer from the separation, not to mention the suffering of the men who would theoretically be separated from their partners and kids.
I don’t have the answer, but I do see it as fundamentally different from the self destructive behaviour situation. Someone who is disabled is no less able to make bad choices. If I could be a tradie, say an electrician, and I can go to the pub after work and smoke a pack of cigarettes then the same should apply to a disabled person. Is it the best decision? No. But it is theirs.
In the same way an abused partner should be able to make the decision to stay in the abusive relationship, whether that be a good or had choice. That said, paths out from abusive relationships and from smoking should both be made available as much as is reasonably possible.
Statistically speaking the rate of abuse from men to their partners is extremely high.
No. Higher than the other direction but hardly extreme
Statistically speaking the harm from drug adficts and alcohol is is much higher
In Australia, the country I live in, roughly 1 in 4 women have experienced intimate partner violence since age 15. For men this is 1 in 14. 23% compared to 7.3% to be clear. That means that about 3 times as many women have experienced IPV than men. This includes LGBT relationships, so abusive men who abuse other men would show up as part of the men being abused statistic, as with women abusing women.
As for the harm from drug addicts and alcohol use/abuse, where does the harm come from? Surely if I am in my own home and I take a drug and while high I stay at home I am not harming anyone? If I were to hurt my partner or other people in my house that would be a possible route for harm to occur. But if I don’t drive drunk or high and I don’t hurt those immediately around me how does harm happen?
I would suggest that much of the harm around drugs comes from the criminal enterprises involved with production and supply, crime committed to fund addictive drug use, and over policing coming from having already had one interaction with police leading to petty things becoming criminal due to that interaction. Surely there are other harms, but think about how much of this would be alleviated by legalising the less harmful drugs and decriminalising the rest. The legalised ones can be produced under regulation and made safer to consume as well as being made affordable. This would kill the criminal systems around drug production and supply. For the decriminalised ones it would shift the lower towards the user, allowing users to have power over dealers and have a way out of those fairly toxic relationships.
But again, we can always talk about some other harm out there and ignore the case at hand. I would rather close the conversation with a simple statement. We do have a problem with men abusing women which is larger than all other forms of abuse. We would all benefit from this being reduced. And lastly when managing something like a shelter it is reasonable to take a few extra steps to provide a way out for women who are particularly vulnerable at that time. Should we offer that for men? Of course. But is it going to be used far more by women? Yes.
You’re confusing “way too women experience partner violence sometime in their lives” with “all men are violent criminals and need to be separated”.
While yes, a lot of drug related violence is caused by the drug war, the harm for drugs is easy to see from with a significant portion of the homeless, theft and ciolence as the worst addicts fall out of society, and ruined wasted lives. Harm for alcoholism is much more obvious and easy to see, but I’d also add all the victims of drunk driving to it’s harm
Nope. Don’t start putting caveats on aid.
You can’t buy comforts. You will live the life i think you should be accustomed to. It’s infantilising and controlling
It’s more like - I’ll help with the necessities to keep you alive. Anything extra is on you. We all have our vices but why should I pay for yours
And who decides what is or is not a necessity? Is entertainment necessary? How much? Are certain shows OK but others not? Should they be restricted to the shows that you like? What about choice? Dignity? Autonomy?
When we lessen others we inherently lessen ourselves. We have a moral duty to consider the harm from both our actions and our inactions. If you choose to not restrict someone else self determine and live their own life it is no less morally wrong than if you took that person and imprisoned them. From a position of power it is tempting to think “I don’t like this thing therefore others should not have it” but follow it through to the logical conclusion. You are binding your neighbour with the very same chains that will land upon you given time.
**It is better to be an enemy of chains than judicious in their use. **
The person donating decides what they wish to donate.
Sure, for donation, but the original context we are talking about disability services which are government funded through taxation. You don’t get to object to the military budget because you are a pacifist, you have to pay regardless. In that context the person receiving the service is entitled to that service by law. They access the service and the service providers are supposed to do their jobs without personal judgement getting in the way. My issue is with providers not doing their jobs because of this type of judgement. I am not donating my time when working with a client, they (or their allocation) are paying me to work.
How much of your income do you want to give to buy alcohol for strangers? Would you donate a large amount of your money to an aid fund that spent 10%? 50%? 80%? on booze? What about meth? Guns? Nazi memorabilia? What it’s only 5% on Nazi stuff, 95% on food?
I’m being a dick but they have a fair point in why people put caveats on aid. I’m a fan of UBI to some degree personally, because I think people as a rule should be trusted with making their own decisions, but I do like choosing where the value of labor goes too.
You might personally think it sucks, but it’s how it rolls. I live in a country where social systemnpayments are straight up monetary amounts. If you are eligible to receive aid, you receive it. How you manage your affairs is none of the government’s business .
There are caveats, such as the income management system, but for the most part that’s actually opt-in and they’re reviewing junking the entire concept as it was originally introduced very very badly by an administration that attempted to leverage vulnerable groups
My taxpayer dollars go to support people doing their peopley things as they choose, as adults. And I’m actually ok with that. It’s a safety net, not a leash. Poverty isn’t a moral position
I mean, sure. But we were talking about disabled people, and disabled people possibly can’t buy anything for themselves for reasons out of their control. You’re essentially imposing a different standard of life on them just based on that.
And maybe that’s not wrong - you’re not the only one that takes this stance - but it does deserve pointing out.
(And with, like, porn it doesn’t even apply. That’s mostly for free)
Patient autonomy!
Take the time to do it right the first time but also don’t waste time if it doesn’t add value.
Having a process is great but if the process exceeds the value then the process not only harms profit margins but also erodes morale. If the reason a process exists is to counter bad behavior then it’s an employee problem not a process problem.
Open office floorplans are a terrible idea!
Work from home shouldn’t be considered a given based on the job tasks but a privilege and benefit extended to those employees that have shown the discipline and reliability to work from home. But the in office requirement shouldn’t be forced on everyone just to satisfy a “butts in seat policy” or a managers insecurity.
There is no goddamn reason to continue to use magneto ignition in aircraft engines. I’ve been a Rotax authorized service technician for 13 years, I have never seen the digital CDI installed on a Rotax 900 series engine fail in any way, and you’ve still got two. Honestly I believe a CDI module is more reliable and less prone to failure than a mechanical magneto. The only reason why we’re still using pre-WWII technology in modern production aircraft engines is societal rot.
For any non-trivial software project, spending time on code quality and a good architecture is worth the effort. Every hour I spend on that saves me two hours when I have to fix bugs or implement new features.
Years ago I had to review code from a different team and it was an absolute mess. They (and our boss) defended it with “That way they can get it done faster. We can clean up after the initial release”. Guess what, that initial release took over three years instead of the planned six months.
I 100% agree with you but I have a hard time convincing my team of that. And so we have a mess of a codebase… It’s not directly important to business, so it is secondary. And obviously nobody notices when fixing bugs take way longer or implementing new features introduces more new bugs than necessary, as it always has been like that. 🤷♂️
In my team we manage 2 software components. 1 of them (A) has 2 devs, the other (B) approximately 5.
Every time a feature needs to be added, B complains that it’s going to take forever, while A is done in a fraction of the time.
The difference? B is a clusterfuck of a codebase that they have no time to refactor because they run low on time to implement the features.
I work in A, but I’m not going to steal the credit, when I entered the company, A already had a much cleaner codebase. It’s not that me and my partner are 10x better than the ones working in B, they just have uglier code to deal with.
I can’t comprehend why management doesn’t see the reason A needs half the devs to do the job faster.
I can’t comprehend why management doesn’t see the reason
Management cannot see beyond the next quarter, it’s a genetic precondition of the species.
The joys of agile programming…
Sounds like you had a bad experience with the failed attempt at establishing agile development methods - sorry to hear that.
I just want to encourage you to give it another go with other developers that are more experienced with the methodology - in my company we’re working successfully that way for over a decade.
[edited because the initial comment was unkind]
When agile works, it actually works pretty well.
99% of the agile projects i’ve been in were waterfall in disguise (fragile for short).What they did was far beyond “agile”. They didn’t care for naming conventions, documentation, not committing commented-out code, using existing solutions (both in-house and third-party) instead of reinventing the wheel…
In that first review I had literally hundreds of comments that each on their own would be a reason to reject the pull request.
Maybe not technical, but teaching is weird.
If people aren’t having fun/engaged they’re not learning much. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. It’s so frustrating to come across someone who writes the standards you’re supposed to follow and they are the most boring and fake teacher you’ve experienced.
Professionally: Waterfall release cycle kills innovation, and whoever advocates it should be fired on the spot. MVP releases and small, incremental changes and improvements are the way to go.
Personally: Don’t use CSS if tables do what you need. Don’t use Javascript for static Web pages. Don’t overcomplicate things when building Web sites.
Use tables for presenting tabular data, not for layout of non-tabular data.
If you’d put it in a relational db or spreadsheet, then tables is fine.
THE AMOUNT OF TIMES I SEE PEOPLE USE A TABLE WHEN BULLET POINTS WOULD WORK IS TOO DAMN HIGH. Tables SUCK is you’re putting long paragraphs randomly in specific places and not others.
It’s also bad for accessibility.
Don’t use CSS if tables do what you need.
As a web dev, please don’t. Use a table if you have data that should be (re)presented. Don’t use tables for layout. Please use semantic HTML elements, for the love of accessibility.
Efficient code beats easy code, regardless of resources.
Isn’t it like saying “a fast car is faster than a cheap car”
Weird i haven’t seen this one yet: the cloud is just someone else’s computers.
…which are much more secure than yours ?
It is, but I’m ready to officially throw in the towel and embrace the fact that running your own hardware is not much more than a hobby these days. I’ve preached and preached the value of multi or hybrid cloud, only for the people with money to pour it down the same hole time and time again.
I’ve always said IT is essentially an entirely CYA driven industry. Having someone to blame is more valuable for them than uptime, and if they can show their outages, even if the numbers suck, was not their fault (easy to do when all your competitors are down at the same time), it’s all good…
Update- lol, YouTube is currently down.
Geopolitics is kind of coming to the rescue, since it’s bad if your server is subject to a hostile power’s laws. Although it remains to be seen if there’s fundamental change, or just what we call in Canada “maplewashing”.
Hardly a hot take really…
OP didn’t really ask for a hot take…
It was kind of implied, though.
How do you die on a hill if nobody’s fighting you? Is it just a hill suicide? That wasn’t in any war I’ve read about. I guess Life of Brian had something a bit like that.
Dying on the hill doesn’t mean it has to be controversial or a “hot take” IMO, but whatever.
If you’re selfhosting, the cloud is your someone else’s computer ;)
I think too much safety is annoying and stupid. To me safety is often about mindset. I think companies like to force a bunch of stupid safety rules on people so they can try to get out of being sued for doing really dumb shit like hiring drug addicts or people with zero experience to do dangerous jobs. I think it’s really insulting that as an adult, you have to be uncomfortable all day and deal with stupid stuff to work at a job you are being massively underpaid for anyways.
Safety is important sometimes. You should definitely be careful around machines and wear safety glasses sometimes, but for some reason the people who do most of the work at companies often end up being abused by shitty companies who want to lobby the government for tax breaks, but never on behalf of their workers.
It’s quite sad how people spend decades wearing uncomfortable clothing working long hours, and have to subject themselves to humiliation by wearing stupid and ugly clothes simply to get a bit of sympathy from our extremely materially obsessed society and our toxic capitalist system.
Workplace safety is quickly turning from a factual and risk-based field into a vibes-based field, and that’s a bad thing for 95% of real-world risks.
To elaborate a bit: the current trend in safety is “Safety Culture”, meaning “Getting Betty to tell Alex that they should actually wear that helmet and not just carry it around”. And at that level, that’s a great thing. On-the-ground compliance is one of the hardest things to actually implement.
But that training is taking the place of actual, risk-based training. It’s all well and good that you feel comfortable talking about safety, but if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re not actually making things more safe. This is also a form of training that’s completely useless at any level above the worksite. You can’t make management-level choices based on feeling comfortable, you need to actually know some stuff.
I’ve run into numerous issues where people feel safe when they’re not, and feel at risk when they’re safe. Safety Culture is absolutely important, and feeling safe to talk about your problems is a good thing. But that should come AFTER being actually able to spot problems.
The mining industry emphasizes safely culture, just like what you said, and a lot of it is focused on wearing PPE.
There are still too many preventable deaths and accidents.
I think safety is talked about and vibe-based to please investors.
I’m always in favour of actually testing safety stuff.
Does that fall arrest line actually work? Go walk over to that way until you can’t.
Can this harness hold you without cutting circulation off to your legs? Go sit in it for an hour and see.
I fucking hate AI in HR/hiring. I try so hard not to spread my personal data to LLMs/AI ghuls and the moment I apply for a job I need to survive I have to accept that the HR department’s AI sorting hat now knows a shit ton about me. I just hope these are closed systems. if anyone from a HR department knows more, please let me know
“I try so hard not to spread my personal data” reminded me Linkin Park
One thing, we both know why.
It doesn’t even matter how hard you try.
Keep that in mind, the design has right to exploit your time.All I know privacy is a valuable thing.
Watch it fly by as the disks spin.
Watch it collect down to the end of the day,
the applications piling awayIt’s so unfair, didn’t look out below
Watch the ram go right out the windows.
Tryna get job, d-didn’t even know
I wasted it all just to watch spies goI kept everything disabled.
And even though I tried, it traced apart
What was personal to me will eventually be a tracked thing in a time whenI tried so hard, not spread it all.
But in the end, it doesn’t even matter.
I had to apply to not lose it all.
But in the end, it doesn’t even matter.I’m lucky in that I’ve been in the same job for ages (since before AI) and so I haven’t had to deal with this yet, but a friend of mine was using AI to write his resume recently and I had the thought that the resume is probably being written by an AI, then sent to another AI to read it and that you could conceivably get a job with a resume that no human has ever entirely read. Probably not an original thought but it had never occurred to me before lol.
You could also starve in the street after your résumé is rejected by several levels of LLMs, never having had human eyes land on it once.
Yeah probably the more likely outcome.
Hardly a hot take really…
Don’t fucking paste content from a word doc into your IDE. Some people I work with think it’s a time saver.
Do it via an actual text editor like Notepad++ to clear out all the bullshit.
I think you can do ctrl shift v in some programs to strip down to text only
Snapshot tests suck. That’s a test that stores the dom (or I guess any json serializable thing) and when you run the test again, compares what you have now to what it has saved.
No one is going to carefully examine a 300 line json diff. They’re just going to say “well I updated the file so it makes sense it changed” and slap the update button.
Theoretically you could only feed it very small things, but if that’s the case you could also just assert on what’s important yourself.
Snapshots don’t encode intent. They make everything look just as important as everything else. And then hotshot developers think they have 100% coverage
Cognitive behavioral therapy/dialectical behavioral therapy are not the universal cure for everything and they need to stop being treated as such
It’s popular because it does work for a lot of things, from fear of spiders to eating disorders. Of course they would try it on as many different problems as possible.
Beats the currently popular “that’s just the way you are and if it affects other people that’s their problem. In fact, you’re actually better than other people.”-therapy
CBT is just a rip off of psychoanalysis with different words.
I’ll join you on this hill, soldier.
CBT is the only one they’ve tested, and they tested themselves, and of course they look great. It offloads all success and failure 100% to the victim, and so many failures don’t reflect on the process; ever. It resembles a massive sham.
My counsellor friend calls it “sigma-6 for mental health” and notes how it’s often not covered by insurance (even outside America’s mercenary system) so it’s a nice cash cow for the indu$try.
So what are the alternatives? When I think about non-CBT therapy I think of like, Freud asking about problems with papa und penis, which just from a common sense angle seems more questionable.
Somatic focused therapy has been much more helpful and less gaslighty for me, but it’s also not right for everyone.
Say you have anxiety that’s more top down. You usually aren’t feeling anxious, but then you start thinking anxious thoughts and that spirals out of control and now you’re an anxious mess on the verge of a panic attack. CBT could make sense for some people in this situation because you’re reminding yourself there’s nothing to really be anxious about in the moment and redirecting your thoughts to less anxious things.
If your anxiety is more bottom up, you might not even have to think about anything that makes you anxious. Your nervous system is just in a chronic state of activation/hyperdrive, and warning you there’s danger even if there’s not. You can think calming thoughts all you want but that doesn’t usually change the fact that your body is kicked into survival mode.
Instead of trying to redirect your thoughts, you can focus your thoughts on noticing physical sensations and putting a label on the way your body is feeling.
So you wouldn’t say “I am safe.” You would stop and acknowledge how you’re feeling, and acknowledge it’s your body’s way of trying to communicate danger to keep you alive. You don’t want to necessarily act based on that warning (unless you are truly in danger, which is the case sometimes), but instead of just dismissing it, recognize what you’re physically feeling. Ok, my heart is beating really fast, my chest is kind of tight and I feel physically unsafe. What are some other physical sensations I feel right now that I know are safe?
A popular one is focusing on your “sit bones” or the way a surface you’re sitting on feels beneath you. Or focusing on your posture, if how the floor feels beneath your feet when they’re planted flat on the ground. It works surprisingly well to reset/calm your nervous system.
This guy offers a free course of several short videos that are really helpful. I started them last year but let it drop off. Reminds me I need to pick up where I left off and finish them
Sounds a bit like the mindfulness thing, as well. Thanks!
“installing a library” should not exist as a concept. A library is either so essential that the OS needs it (and therefore it is already installed), or is not essential enough that each program can have its own copy of the library.
“But I want all my 3 programs that use this random library to be updated at the same time in case a security flaw is found in it!” Is no excuse for the millions of hours wasted looking for missing dependencies or dependencies not available for your system. If that library does have a security vulnerability your package manager should just find your 3 programs that use it and update their copy of the library.
each program can have its own copy of the library.
Efficiency out the window…
I don’t care about 10KB or even 100KB of disk space per installed program if it saves humanity the collective millions of hours wasted on .dll/.so issues.
If your program needs libcirnfucb to run, it should be in the same directory as your program, and you are responsible for putting it there for me. No other program in my computer needs libcirnfucb, there’s no efficiency gains and now I have to go to some random website from the 90s and find where they put the damn download link and now I have to learn all about how libcirnfucb manages their versions and if I am in the correct webpage, because the project is abandonware that was formed 10 years ago and now it is in another 90s looking website that has a name completely unrelated to libcirnfucb.
But what if we realize that a library is so essential it should be included in the OS, but the OS is old and already running, so now we need to install it, so everyone can make use of it.
Then just install it? I don’t see what’s the issue here.
Only issue is that you said installing a library should not exist as a concept.
Not by the user. By the OS.
