They’re on Mastodon too if you’re looking for a fedi-friendly link: https://mastodon.social/@warandpeas

I keep seeing Zulip tossed around as an alternative, but I don’t know what’s up with their licencing. There’s also Framateam, but I think that might just be Mattermost as a service.

Matrix would be great if it wasnt so user-hostile, but it is :-(

A rebate sounds like a positively insane idea. It’s just a corporate subsidy with extra steps.

If you want to lower prices, you can’t give people money to give to the oligopolies. You have to break up the oligopolies, regulate the hell out of them, and send some people to prison for price fixing.

No. It will not help. Maybe in a competitive market it might, but Canada has been nursing an oligopoly for decades now, and oligopolies set their own prices based on what the public will tolerate.

Lowering prices requires either (a) breaking up the giants, or (b) offering a publicly-run alternative that somehow bypasses the vertically integrated supply chain.

Thinking that the headline might be a bit hyperbolic, I thought I’d check and…

The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant is on track Thursday to finish at its worst day since March 2020 and has seen approximately $400bn in valuation wiped out.

Holy shit.

I really didn’t care for this one.

The premise of the debate was flawed from the start. The Federation has an obligation to offer help, but there’s no requirement anywhere that it must compel another race to accept that help. Indeed many, many episodes have gone out of their way to point this out. So the whole idea of a “debate” was pointless. Of course they should offer the help, but that’s the end of any moral or legal responsibility. Doing anything more would itself be unethical.

Interestingly as an aside, I found this whole prospect very American at its root. Not only should we accept that we must offer help, but of course we must compel these people to accept our idea of help. It stinks of regime change from without and I find the idea that the Federation would ever work this way ridiculous.

On top of that, we’re somehow supposed to pretend we didn’t all watch Esri Dax’s excellent critique of the Klingon Empire back on DS9 and instead accept that this lie of “conquest” is supposed to prop up the Klingon culture. Are we to believe that it’s been hundreds of years and the Empire is still built in lies they tell each other about honour and battle? Instead of showing any hint of evolution (and potentially stoking internal conflict at the idea of accepting charity from an enemy), we just had a 5 minute “battle” and it’s all ok now.

This wasn’t even a respectful battle. No blood was spilt by either side, no sacrifices made. Where is the honour in that? It was a mock battle to preserve a lie. Esri would not be amused.

I’m just going to leave this here…

Hooray! I actually bought a legit CD on eBay and couldn’t get it to work some years ago. I shall try again with Heroic. Thanks!

Hooray!

Has anyone managed to play “Black & White” this way? Ive tried so many ways I’m not sure I have it in me to do it again.

Emily Lowan has a great hashtag she’s running called the #FightTheOligarchs tour and it’s really well done. Never in a million years would I have expected a media game so smooth from the BC Greens.

Avi Lewis’s account is pretty new, but honestly from what I’m setting, he could learn a thing or two from Lowan’s feed.

Ooh! I wrote something for this… back in 2018:

https://danielquinn.github.io/aletheia/

I will never get used to the comfort Britons appear to have with surveillance. I guess it’s time to set up a Wireguard instance of my own in the Netherlands to proxy everything through.

Is anyone else concerned that they might making the same decision they did with Discovery and making the series into “Star Trek: Caleb Mir”? At this point, everyone else already feel like background singers to me.

I’ll have a look once I’ve had a little sleep! I generally like GIS projects and am pretty solid on the Python front so maybe I can be useful.

That’s both rude and inaccurate:

“Only release every two weeks.”

No. Nowhere did I say that. In fact, the team I wrote this about worked on a 1 week sprint. And as I said, I generally prefer kanban these days, but note the date on the post: this was essentially before continuous deployment was in common use, so sprints were very common and deploys were often a manual process that had to be greenlit by management. Many companies still do something similar. It is far from “insane”.

“This includes bugfixes”

This is true. It’s is primarily because deviating from the commitment you made with the company to have x jobs done by the end of the sprint necessarily means being unable to meet that commitment. If the bug is catastrophic, you obviously have to fix it right away (this isn’t religion, use your brain), but doing so busts the sprint and that has a real cost so yes, bug fixes should be delayed when possible. What I said was to show discipline in keeping “can you just fix this?” out of the sprint because it can introduce unexpected behaviour (new bugs!) and undermine your relationship with the client and sow frustration and discontent with the team as they’re driven to context switch.

It’s much easier to say:

“We found this bug on Thursday, and a fix in the works to have it patched for the next sprint due out next week”

…than it is to say:

“We failed to have bugfix/feature/whatever done by the end of the sprint as promised because our developers were taken off-task, catering to the latest freak out session by the COO”.

“Emergencies can be dealt with immediately, but any root cause analysis or deeper work on underlying issues must wait for the next sprint.”

Absolutely. Are we here to get work done, or throw everything out the window to sit around and talk through a 6-person meeting whenever something goes wrong? You can, for example schedule a post-mortem for the next sprint when something breaks, but (a) more often than not, this can be handled in retro, and (b) if you need something bigger, then there’s no way you know everything right away anyway.

“If it can’t be done in 4 hours, it can’t be done at all.”

That’s a gross misrepresentation. What I said was that a job must be limited to roughly 4 hours of work. If that job is going to be more, then you should break it up to allow the work to be spread around.

“Don’t document things.”

I didn’t say that. What I said was that much of the time, people waste time/energy on writing documentation that is shortly out of date. What I didn’t say however is that I meant “commenting your code” here rather than “documentation”. I will die on the hill that most code comments are a waste at best, and a dangerous lie at worst, while obviously user documentation is very different and obviously important. It should however be listed as a ticketed job and therefore added to the sprint.

“Don’t write bad code. (Also: You must use classes and methods, and variable names must be words.)”

Yeah I stand by this.

“Rigid adherence to the “agile process” is required”

Yes. That’s the whole point. You be as rigid as possible (within reason, again, use your brain). Rigidity provides structure and manages expectations on both sides. Being flexible leads to a mess. I know this because I’ve been doing this for 27 years and it has been my experience everywhere.

“The job of a software developer is to crank out code and nothing else, especially not design, testing, or documentation”

It should not be a surprise that one would expect software developers to develop software. If you want design, you hire a designer. Testing is part of the process though, and I never said otherwise. Don’t be shitty. I’ve noted documentation above.

“Don’t even think about ethics.”

FUCK THIS. Don’t you dare suggest to me that I wouldn’t demand ethics of everyone I work with. You know nothing about me, or my career, or what I’ve sacrificed to stay on the right side of the moral line. Engineers have a responsibility to do right by the world they live in, and nothing I’ve mentioned in that post would suggest otherwise. This was a post about building an efficient team capable of building great things quickly and well, while keeping the client happy with the progress. Of course you should refuse to do evil on the job. That should go without saying. Your decision to pretend that I care nothing about ethics says more about you than it does me.

Very cool. It’s a pity there’s no option to highlight transit over roads or something though.

As someone who worked in an actually agile team years before the project managers co-opted the idea and contorted it into “Scrum” I feel this comic in my bones.

It is absolutely maddening how these people have perverted a system that worked so beautifully into the concentration-breaking wasteland we have now just to make themselves feel relevant.

While I’m presently a fan of Kanban, my happy agile experience was under sprints. If anyone is curious what that looked like, I’ve written about it here.

Did you… just find an actually helpful use-case for LLMs?

This is sarcasm, right? It’s hard to tell sometimes.