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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • You know, when I read The Handmaid’s Tale back in high school, I didn’t think the ending made any sense. How do you have tourists just walking around taking pictures when there’s horrible human rights violations happening in plain sight?

    I think I get it now.

    Honestly the accounts of the woman who visited almost bother me more than the men. Even as a tourist she wasn’t allowed to do certain things, but she can just leave whenever she wants. Wonder how her friends among the locals feel about that.



  • I was a reddit Sync user and was super bummed when (large scale) API access was shut off, so I jumped on the chance to use Sync for Lemmy. It defaulted to world for signups, presumably for ease of use for migrating reddit users. Knowing that Sync already had a loyal audience that was willing to put in a little effort to migrate, it seems the dev opted to make everything as similar to the reddit UX as possible, including registration.

    Now that I’m more familiar with the fediverse, I’ve been considering migrating to a more specialized instance that matches my interests. Truthfully, though, it seems unlikely that much of anything would change if I did since I’m going to keep using the same app, so I’ve been slow to move.

    To compare this with my experience with Mastodon, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the idea of instances and really had no idea which to join, nor did I have a familiar app to work with. I figured it out eventually, but a lot of the artists I follow didn’t or didn’t have time to, so overall I haven’t spent much time on it. I’ve spent way too much time on Lemmy so far.


  • I agree that most people won’t care but take issue with calling them “dumb”. Everyone has a limited amount of time on this planet to build skills and chase hobbies. A lot of people on this site have tech-related jobs and hobbies, so of course this matters to us. I might expect someone who buys pre-built gaming PCs to keep this on their radar, but the vast majority of folks who use computers as email and social media machines, including those who only use it for data entry type jobs, have little reason to care about the specifics of their CPU or any other single component of their computer. If their computer breaks, that’s annoying, but that’s life. They’ll spend the same amount on a new laptop as we might spend on a new CPU and get on with their day.

    I don’t know what brand of spark plugs are in my car, and maybe a mechanic or car enthusiast would find that dumb. But hey, I’m too busy caring about my CPU to spend time worrying about my car unless it breaks.









  • I definitely agree, but that’s true of any system. The particulars of the pitfalls may vary, but a good system can’t overpower bad management. We mitigate the stakeholder issue by having BAs that act as the liason between devs and stakeholders, knowing just enough about the dev side to manage expectations while helping to prioritize the things stakeholders want most. Our stakes are also, mercifully, pretty aware that they don’t always know what will be complex and what will be trivial, so they accept the effort we assign to items.


  • Honestly a little confused by the hatred of agile. As anything that is heavily maligned or exalted in tech, it’s a tool that may or may not work for your team and project. Personally I like agile, or at least the version of it that I’ve been exposed to. No days or weeks of design meetings, just “hey we want this feature” and it’s in an item and ready to go. I also find effort points to be one of the more fair ways to gauge dev performance.

    Projects where engineers felt they had the freedom to discuss and address problems were 87 percent more likely to succeed.

    I’m not really sure how this relates to agile. A good team listens to the concerns of its members regardless of what strategy they use.

    A neverending stream of patches indicates that quality might not be what it once was, and code turning up in an unfinished or ill-considered state have all been attributed to Agile practices.

    Again, not sure how shipping with bugs is an agile issue. My understanding of “fail fast” is “try out individual features to quickly see if they work instead of including them in a large update”, not “release features as fast as possible even if they’re poorly tested and full of bugs.” Our team got itself into a “quality crisis” while using agile, but we got back out of it with the same system. It was way more about improving QA practices than the strategy itself.

    The article kinda hand waves the fact that the study was not only commissioned by Engprax, but published by the author of the book “Impact Engineering,” conveniently available on Engprax’s site. Not to say this necessarily invalidates the study, or that agile hasn’t had its fair share of cash grabs, but it makes me doubt the objectivity of the research. Granted, Ali seems like he’s no hack when it comes to engineering.


  • Windows into I went to college for development and decided to check out this Linux thing. At the time, I wanted something as different from Windows as possible, so I went with Ubuntu with Gnome 3 (I know) for about a year. Tried out Fedora, couldn’t get my sound to work and accidentally uninstalled the desktop environment trying to fix it, slunk back to Ubuntu, tried out a Debian briefly, and eventually ended up on Linux Mint with Cinnamon and KDE.

    At one time I really wanted to try a bunch of stuff and probably would’ve hopped a lot more if Fedora didn’t shatter my confidence, but nowadays I want as little disruption between machines as possible. I have to use Windows for work, so I keep my Linux setup pretty vanilla so I don’t miss features between the two very much. I’ll probably still play with other distros every now and then on old laptops, but I’ve fallen into a “if it ain’t broke” mindset with my daily machines.