• 2 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • minorninth@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml***
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    9 months ago

    Certainly many others would have tried to invent something like the web.

    HyperCard predated the web browser and had the concept of easy to build pages that linked. Lots of people were working on ways to deliver apps over the Internet.

    I think in some alternative timeline we’d still have a lot of interactive content on the Internet somewhat like the web, but probably based on different technology. Maybe more proprietary.






  • Is it possible to be a productive programmer with slow typing speed? Yes. I have met some.

    But…can fast typing speed be an advantage for most people? Yes!

    Like you said, once you come up with an idea it can be a huge advantage to be able to type out that idea quickly to try it out before your mind wanders.

    But also, I use typing for so many others things: writing Slack messages and emails. Writing responses to bug tickets. Writing new tickets. Documentation. Search queries.

    The faster I type, the faster I can do those things. Also, the more I’m incentivized to do it. It’s no big deal to file a big report for something I discovered along the way because I can type it up in 30 seconds. Someone else who’s slow at typing might not bother because it’d take too long.






  • I don’t think we know that yet, and I think the discovery will be interesting.

    How many reports were there? Were they credible? What other sources of truth did Google consult in deciding to ignore those reports?

    Google gets lots of reports and needs to filter out spam, and especially malicious reports like trying to mark a competitor’s business as closed, or trying to get less traffic in your neighborhood for selfish reasons. It wouldn’t be reasonable for Google to accept every user suggestion either.

    So if Google reached out to the town and the town said the bridge is fine, then it’s not Google’s fault. If they ignored multiple credible complaints because the area was too rural to care about, that might be negligent.







  • Wasn’t she an unknown, while they were all famous stars, though?

    The same happens today.

    “The cast of Moana earned a total of $56 million. Auli’i Cravalho, who voiced the title character, made $200,000. Dwayne Johnson, who voiced Maui, earned $21 million. Temuera Morrison, who voiced Moana’s father, earned $2 million.”

    I’m not excusing any of the ways they abused Garland. But it made her a star and she earned far more in future roles, just like Cravalho now commands a much higher salary.


  • Actually I’m going to disagree strongly with that statement.

    Small business are far, far worse at abusing workers. If a small business fires you, you’ve got absolutely no recourse. They can lay you off with no severance and then hire someone new a day layer, and who’s going to do anything about it? They don’t have that many employees so there’s no pattern and no class-action, and you can’t afford to hire a lawyer to spend years fighting them in court.

    In comparison, when you work at a big company, they have rules and an HR department to make sure they’re going everything legally. Your boss wants to fire you? First your boss has to give you a negative performance review detailing exactly what you’re doing wrong. Then they have to give you an opportunity to correct it. Only then can they fire you. At an absolute minimum, it gives you a chance to start looking for a new job. Often it gives you a chance to transfer within the company, if you were otherwise a well-liked and valuable employee.

    If a large company wants to let you go, they’re going to give you severance pay and extended benefits.

    Of course you hear about the occasional incident where Elon Musk fires someone on the spot or a Disney employee gets reprimanded for something silly. But those incidents are extremely rare, and most of the time they end up settling behind the scenes for a nice severance.

    Now, I know, I know. The HR department is there to protect the company, not you. But that’s exactly why the HR department ensures employees are treated well, even when they’re fired - because they don’t want a lawsuit later.


  • I have a hard time reconciling that with my observations in Europe:

    • People travel significantly faster than in the U.S., for example on the autobahn
    • Taxi drivers routinely do things I consider crazy in order to get around old European cities, like driving up on sidewalks, passing on narrow two-lane roads
    • There are a lot of narrow mountain roads and people seem to drive way too fast to be safe

    I’ve never felt like European drivers were “more safe”.

    The only differences I can think of that are positive for Europe:

    • Less drunk driving
    • Traffic circles instead of stop signs

  • GNU gets credit for the GPL, and for being the first major project to start to create a free Unix operating system. So it’s true that when the Linux kernel was first released, the fact that you could boot a usable operating system on top of it was due to GNU.

    But…the success of what most of us just call “Linux” since then is due to thousands of individuals and organizations other than GNU. The vast majority of free software running on top of a Linux operating system has nothing to do with GNU and is not licensed under the GPL.

    Let’s say I’m running Linux on a server, for a small app running the MERN stack. Literally none of the MERN stack is GNU.

    Let’s say I’m running Linux on a desktop. I’m depending on Wayland, KDE, Chromium, VSCodium, and a dozen other tools, none of which are GNU.

    However, the fact that I can use the same OS to run a tiny embedded device or a superpowered server, that’s due to the Linux kernel and the thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies who have made it into the most efficient and versatile operating system kernel in the world, period.

    So to me, I have no problems at all calling the operating system “Linux”.