It doesn’t seem that shocking that “avoiding vendor lock-in” is behind “most useful tool for my needs”. The latter is essentially necessary for the former to even be a blip on the radar. However, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t want to use some Azure-only data science tool if there was a slightly rougher-around-the-edges open source alternative. And this would be precisely due to vendor lock-in / caprice.

As far as I can tell, “whitelist” and “blacklist” don’t have a racist etymology. My stance is, “okay, I guess if they make you uncomfortable, we can spend our time and money to change these few cases in a bunch of documentation, configuration files, APIs, and variable names for the sake of your feelings…” However, I am worried that not grounding these changes in any kind of principled framework, apart from “at least one person feels uncomfortable”, is a bit risky for the people who have limited time and budgets to accomplish other things.

Edit: that was way too harsh. I guess there are “feelings” and feelings and if the reason is that you feel that the word “black” is associated with negative things and that’s tied up in the modern day continuing systemic racism, that totally makes sense to me. I guess for other words, the justification would have to be similarly impactful, and I just wonder how to go about judging that.

I will say that f-strings have unexpectedly replaced str.format() as my preferred string formatting tool. I don’t like that there are so many and it’s kinda annoying to need to prefix strings with “f” but they are nice.

Skimmed the rest and its seems to be “previous hype bubbles have burst” and “AI isn’t embodied”. These aren’t new arguments, yawn.

That… is a lot of words. Read for a bit but did not see what the special ingredient is in humans that can’t be simulated in silicon.

I asked about this earlier today on another post and someone pointed at the recent Kickstarter union. I followed some links but I wasn’t able to find any details of how it runs and the benefits it provides. And it’s just Kickstarter employees.

I mean, I’m fairly happy at my company. I’d like to get better resources, open salary info but keep salary imbalances due to skill and sweat differences, make it easier to fire worthless employees, make it easier to find worthwhile employees, be able to strike to improve the workers’ lot at other companies that my company can influence but isn’t influencing, and maybe put enough people and funding enough best practices on projects that I feel completely okay with taking two weeks off and never checking email.

Thanks! I remember hearing the start of the Kickstarter unionization and then it dropped off my radar for some reason. According to a linked article, they became part of “the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU)”. So looking into how that union is organized and goes about its business would be a place for someone like me to start.

Not that general resources and momentum-building isn’t useful but I’m surprised that I haven’t heard more concrete proposals about what tech workers should be demanding and what an organization to support workers would look like. I read a fair amount of “tech workers should unionize” discussions but no one who is advocating for a union ever plants a flag and says “this is my proposal”. I’m guessing there are a lot of people like me who are comfortable in our jobs and ambivalent about the benefits versus problems a union might bring but would take the time to read a detailed proposal and allow ourselves and/or our financial support to be won over.

This seems to be for workers at tech companies but not necessarily for technical workers like programmers, IT, etc.? From the first post, Claire was a social media manager of YouTube and the first question is from a marketer about marketing. Even calling it “tech support” seems to piggyback on the idea of it being targeted at technical people. Is the implication that the “tech people” create a special set of circumstances that aren’t present in other non-tech but tech-heavy companies in finance, healthcare, etc.?