• 1 Post
  • 86 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle


  • The lack of even the most basic understanding of parliamentary politics flying around in this thread is appalling, but certainly illustrates the reason why there are so many wild takes flying around on Lemmy.

    To summarize:

    • The right got a 2/3rds majority in parliament. The united left had the most votes of any individual group, but that’s only around 1/3 total.
    • The reason the left proclaimed they “won” is they came “first” and thought the center-right party would ally with them rather than the “hard right” (welp)
    • That, in isolation (!), isn’t antidemoratic. A majority of French representatives (presumably) approve of the government. Simple maths. A government can only govern with the approval of parliament, it literally can’t work otherwise.
    • However the French voting system very strongly relies on strategic voting, and the far-right came very close to having a parliamentary majority. Therefore the center-right party only got the seats they did because everybody left of the far-right made electoral agreements to pull out their candidates so only the candidate with the most chances to win against the far right would be running. This heavily benefited the center-right party who then allied with the hard right, which is being perceived as treason (for lots of reasons that I’m not going to get into). Strategic voting is a democratic failures and leads to suboptimal choices for representatives (thought that is still miles better than whatever the fuck the CCP is doing, since apparently that needs saying on here). Furthermore this whole shift to the right certainly isn’t going to help with the socio-economic issues and is going to end up benefiting the far-right.

  • Why would you think only valid military targets were next to these?

    That’s… not a war crime is. I don’t want to be the guy who justifies the death of civilians, because each one is a tragedy, but unfortunately in war there is such a thing as greater evils.

    Why are you still believing the IDFs first reports when the vast majority of the time they’re lying?

    Now that’s fair. And of course we can as well point out that their whole war is self-inflicted to start with so there’s not much legitimacy to any of their acts of war, even the less illegal ones.


  • I’m as critical of Israel as any reasonable person but that’s like the one thing they did recently that was actually a (at least somewhat) targeted attack against their enemies.

    Calling that a war crime unnecessarily and dangerously dilutes the term. Leveling cities and starving the fleeing population is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Intentionally shooting civilians, children, aid workers, and journalists is a war crime. How about we focus on those, it’s not like there’s a shortage of israeli war crimes to report on.

    EDIT: Apparently Lebanon reports 2800 injured and 12 dead from these attacks… How many fucking explosive pagers were involved? I doubt a significant percentage of those were Hezbollah, which would make that a war crime. The callous inefficiency of IDF operations will never cease to amaze me.


  • France’s historic language policy is certainly highly problematic yes. Although the point is not genocide but class warfare and/or colonialism, not that it’s much of an improvement.

    And now do Belgium. French is the language of the elites (the monarchy and, historically, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie) but also a minority regional language. Is Flanders banning French on public signage a form of oppression? I personally think it’s stupid Flemish nationalism but I wouldn’t call it oppression.

    So how about we stop making blanket statements. Moscow’s erasure of Belarusian identity is at least oppressive and imperialistic and follows a long history of oppression. IDK if that qualifies as genocide (IMHO that undermines the gravity of something like the Holodomor), but something not strictly being genocide doesn’t make it unimportant.




  • I looked into it after this year’s massive price hike… There’s no meaningful alternative. We’re on the FOSS version of GitLab now (GitLab-CE), but the lack of code ownership / multiple reviewers / etc. is a real pain and poses problems with accountability.

    Honestly there are not that many features in Gitlab EE that are truly necessary for a corporate environment, so a GitLab-CE fork may be able to set itself apart by providing those. To me there are two hurdles:

    • Legal uncertainties (do we need a clean room implementation to make sure Gitlab Inc doesn’t sue for re-implementing the EE-only features into a Gitlab fork?)
    • The enormous complexity of the GitLab codebase will make any fork, to put it mildly, a major PITA to maintain. 2,264 people work for GitLab FFS (with hundreds in dev/ops), it’s indecent.

    Honestly I think I’d be happy if forgejo supported gitlab-runner, that seems like a much more reasonable ask given the clean interface between runner and server. Maybe I should experiment with that…


  • All of this has already been implemented for over a hundred years for other trades. Us software people have generally escaped this conversation, but I think we’ll have to have it at some point. It doesn’t have to be heavy-handed government regulation; a self-governed trades association may well aim to set the bar for licensing requirements and industry standards. This doesn’t make it illegal to write code however you want, but it does set higher quality expectations and slightly lowers the bar for proving negligence on a company’s part.

    There should be a ISO-whateverthefuck or DIN-thisorother that every developer would know to point to when the software deployment process looks as bad as CrowdStrike’s. Instead we’re happy to shrug and move on when management doesn’t even understand what a CI is or why it should get prioritized. In other trades the follow-up for management would be a CYA email that clearly outlines the risk and standards noncompliance and sets a line in the sand liability-wise. That doesn’t sound particularly outlandish to me.


  • But a company that hires carpenters to build a roof will be held liable if that roof collapses on the first snow storm. Plumbers and electricians must be accredited AFAIK, have the final word on what is good enough by their standards, and signing off on shoddy work exposes them to criminal negligence lawsuits.

    Some software truly has no stakes (e.g. a free mp3 converter), but even boring office productivity tools can be more critical than my colleagues sometimes seem to think. Sure, we work on boring office productivity tools, but hospitals buy those tools and unreliable software means measurably worse health outcomes for the patients.

    Engineers signing off on all software is an extreme end of the spectrum, but there are a whole lot of options between that and the current free-for-all where customers have no way to know if the product they’re buying is following industry standard practices, or if the deployment process is “Dave receives a USB from Paula and connects to the FTP using a 15 year-old version of FileZilla and a post-it note with the credentials”.


  • Oh I was talking in the context of my specialty, software engineering. The main difference between an engineer and an operator is that one designs processes while the other executes on those processes. Negligence/malice aside the operator is never to blame.

    If the dev is “the guy who presses the ‘go live’ button” then he’s an operator. But what is generally being discussed is all the engineering (or lack thereof) around that “go live” button.

    As a software engineer I get queasy when it is conceivable that a noncritical component reaches production without the build artifact being thoroughly tested (with CI tests AND real usage in lower environments).
    The fact that CrowdWorks even had a button that could push a DOA update on such a highly critical component points to their processes being so out of the industry standards that no software engineer would have signed off on anything… If software engineers actually had the same accountability as Civil Engineers. If a bridge gets built outside the specifications of the Civil Engineer who signed off on the plans, and that bridge crumbles, someone is getting their tits sued off. Yet there is no equivalent accountability in Software Engineering (except perhaps in super safety-critical stuff like automotive/medical/aerospace/defense applications, and even there I think we’d be surprised).


  • I strongly believe in no-blame mindsets, but “blame” is not the same as “consequences” and lack of consequences is definitely the biggest driver of corporate apathy. Every incident should trigger a review of systemic and process failures, but in my experience corporate leadership either sucks at this, does not care, or will bury suggestions that involve spending man-hours on a complex solution if the problem lies in that “low likelihood, big impact” corner.
    Because likely when the problem happens (again) they’ll be able to sweep it under the rug (again) or will have moved on to greener pastures.

    What the author of the article suggests is actually a potential fix; if developers (in a broad sense of the word and including POs and such) were accountable (both responsible and empowered) then they would have the power to say No to shortsighted management decisions (and/or deflect the blame in a way that would actually stick to whoever went against an engineer’s recommendation).


  • It makes some sense contextually.

    Purple and light purple are “NFP (left)” and “not NFP (left)”. Socialists are traditionally red.

    The two blues are “LR (right)” and “not LR (right)”. Liberals are traditionally blue.

    Yellow are center-right neolibs.

    The independent left/right seats don’t matter much because they will vote predictably with their political side on most issues, so since this will be a coalition Parliament there is not much point in outlining individual party affiliation (anyways the NFP is already a coalition of several parties).


  • On top of what others have said, most Brits (even a lot of remainers) are under the deep delusion that Rejoin means Rejoin on 2016 terms.

    Earliest rejoin is 10 years in theory, but in reality it will probably be decades before the Brits are ready to swallow their pride and join the EU on the same terms as everyone else (no funny license plates, blue passport, no funny big ag exemptions, no more special opt-outs, and most importantly immediate euro adoption). The EU does not have any more political incentive to offer the broad exemptions the UK used to benefit from, and have publicly stated as much.

    If a British party ran on a rejoin campaign and actually won, they’d fuck themselves about as hard as Cameron did because the political reality does not match the ludicrous expectations. If Brits have to turn in their Pound notes for Euro notes, the political backlash will be so enormous that it will set off seismometers in Bucharest.



  • People, observe the rhetorical devices of tankies. They do not engage in meaningful discourse. They answer with non-sequiturs framed as innocent questions. They present themselves as free speech defenders, yet they use this free speech to defend the most oppressive regimes in the world, though most often implicitly as their whole thesis becomes an obvious sophism were it to be explicitly stated:

    America bad, therefore Russia/China/NK good.

    It’s the exact same rhetorical devices that /r/The_Donald used during the '16 election, only with a different goal. It’s the methodology of people actively working against their own self-interest, shitting all over rational discourse because they found themselves in a self-reassuring echo-chamber of anticonformism.



    • Greenfield (new) nuclear’s LCOE is higher than renewables. This does not account for the additional GHG emissions from the fossil fuels that supplement renewables’ intermittency issues, and if we put a carbon tax on those then the maths would surely change (whether it justifies greenfield nuclear over things like energy storage or just paying the carbon tax I do not know, I haven’t seen a study on that).
    • Existing nuclear is cost-competitive with renewables. Yes, as with any 50 year-old infrastructure it will require maintenance. Refurbishing is still cheaper than shutting everything down and replacing that capacity with gas+renewables. The decision to shut down existing NPPs was political; so political in fact that the government had to put the nuclear shutdown into law (otherwise the energy operator would have done the economically sensible thing and refurbished the NPPs for an additional 10-30 years.
      Since the energy crisis we are planning to refurbish the NPPs that were shut down anyways. Of course the cost analysis is much murkier now that we have years of delayed maintenance to catch up on since the operator expected a complete phaseout in 2022.

    The debate over new nuclear is one thing. It’s not happening in Belgium anyways as literally no political party supports that. But shutting down existing nuclear is a moronic strategy that was only undertaken due to intense lobbying from anti-nuclear (and therefore pro-oil, whether they realize it or not) activists that cannot even remotely pretend that in the early '00s they correctly predicted that existing-nuclear-vs-new-renewables would reach a rough economic equilibrium twenty years later. They were killing the planet and they knew it, and didn’t care because it meant less nuclear (whatever relative intrinsic benefits that supposedly entails from an environmental perspective).


  • The fact that they had 10+ years to revert the decision and didn’t is that much more damning.

    I would know, my country (Belgium) did the same. I will forever hold a grudge against those reality-denying environmentalists who recklessly misrepresented the drawbacks of nuclear to the public and killed any dream of energy independence well before I was old enough to vote.

    You were the chosen ones, Greens. You were supposed to fight the oil lobby, not join them.