It's the year of the Linux desktop! /s

But seriously, I think I'm going to buy a SteamDeck.

Yep. There's nothing like face-to-face interactions to dispell myths, bias, and assumptions.

"When we decided to give the test to the development team (about 15 developers) — most of them got scores that were lower than our threshold (45%), despite them all being rock-solid developers. Also, there were some candidates who managed to get 95% and above — but would then just be absolutely awful during the interview — we would later discover that they were paying someone to complete the technical test on their behalf.

There is no substitute for taking the time to sit down and talk to someone."

That's pretty good advice. Interesting read.

In this thread, a lot of folks who would use their one wish to make the language better.

But I would change "their" to be spelled "the're" and pronounced "all'y'all's".

I hope I do grow up to be more like the rest of you, and make better choices, in the future.

If you're a European citizen, nothing Reddit does can remove your right to be forgotten.

If you're a citizen of a lot of other places, your government doesn't enforce that right.

Employees should be automatic shareholders. Ought to be a workers right by default to receive some portion of the equity they're producing.

Edit: And to be clear, shareholders win too. More companies should voluntarily structure themselves to grant shareholder rights to employees. Dumbass company ending mistakes are usually seen a long way off by line and rank employees.

But it should also be legally mandated structure, much like 401k rules exist now. I propose that all players involved are better off with such a rule, other than the (not currently rare) asshole CEOs who only want to pump and dump their stock.

Do I just upvote this post if my answer is the same?

Asking for a friend.

So, "CEO stock value pump and dump scam". Again. As is tradition for CEOs in 2023.

"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"

That boat sailed off into the sunset a really long time ago.

Whatever comes next should consider not starting by talking down to new users.

Source: I'm still pissed about a ten year old bug that threw out my helpful answer after I composed it because I didn't have enough bullshit Internet points.

A decade later it doesn't really feel like SO has fixed their fundamentally "asshole to new contributors" vibe.

I'm glad someone else contributes, but I can't be arsed myself. And honestly, it doesn't look like the staff at SO really care.

So I expect the current SO cohort will eventually age out and something new, with a new vibe, will replace it. I hope it has pokemon memes.

If that new thing is polite, I might contribute there.

Pro tip: I'm at least twice as likely to contribute to the next thing if they revive the domain ExpertSexChange.com.

Let's not defederate from every corporate player. Some of them can probably respect reasonable rules of civility.

But fuck Meta. We already know how this plays out.

We know there's a huge wave of hatred and misinformation incoming. We've seen it on their other platforms.

Some amusing context (as a big Mercurial fan, myself):

According to the 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Mercurial is the 4th most popular response, beaten only by Git, Subversion, and "I don't use version control".

Git was roughly 94x as popular as Mercurial.

"I don't use version control." was a bit more than 4x as popular as Mercurial.

The same CEO who didn't understand the law when purchasing Twitter, also didn't understand employment law when unceremoniously dumping employees?!

There's a big surprise. Like Iago, I'm about to have a heart attack and die of "not surprise".

Considering the almost complete lack of standards, certification, licensing in most areas of programming, I don't think there's a ton of difference.

I've held both titles without rhyme or reason between the two. Even in areas requiring high compliance - HIPAA, PCI/DSS, NIST Standards, FERPA, etc - training achieved doesn't tend to be reflected in a programmer's title. (Even while the same level of training turns into acronym soup among their IT peers.)

One way I try to live up to the title "Engineer" - even when I don't wear it - is by holding myself to the Engineering Code of Ethics.

The existence in the first place of robo-dialing loopholes is criminal, and we ought to be able to prosecute it as such. I have no doubt that FCC leaders have accepted bribes to make everyone's phones shittier.

It would be really nice for everyone if we could get a consistent streak of non-criminals leading the FCC.

The reason we don't see seizure of those servers is that those services have established working relationships with law enforcement, so there's no need to physically seize the servers.

It's worth noting that while various CEOs claim not to cooperate with law enforcement, the Patriot Act created provisions for establishing that cooperation without CEO permission or awareness.

Looks like the survey was done this month (Oct 2023).

The recent let goes have been strongly over-publicized in a desperate effort to keep software developer salaries down.

The actual change in the unemployment rate of software developers was a fraction of a percentage.

It's easily the biggest shift in the employment rate of developers we've seen in at least a decade. But it also did almost nothing to relieve the actual backlog of unmet demand for developers.

"But why do we hear so many stories of developers having trouble finding jobs?"

I'm glad you asked. (Steps up in soap box.)

Because for the first time in forever the shitty employers who can't keep their developers feel like they have negotiating power, and they love the feeling, and are making a big show of it. Those assholes are posting the majority of the current available jobs, because folks like me don't need to hire right now.

I don't need to hire right now, because I give my team a pay bump when the developer market rate guess up. It went up this year. I bumped their pay to match. They still work for me. Who could possibly have predicted that would work? Everyone could have, except somehow asshat-mc-always-hiring.

Most of the employers gloatingly turning down less-than-ideal candidates are going to completely miss this opportunity to hire at all, and will go back to paying 3x consulting rates to smaller firms that charge them $300.00 per hour worked. And rightly so. They suck and deserve to pay extra for sucking.

Source: I often get to charge these clowns an arm and a leg simply because I can, and they cannot, recruit and retain developer talent. I do try to mentor them on the topic, because I simply don't have the time to find and charge them all the glorious money they deserve to get charged. But I'm only one person, and I can only write so many huge invoices to huge assholes.

My mentoring attempts aside, I have job security because the majority of them don't actually want to get any less stupid about the whole thing.

(End soap box)

Exactly.

Alternately, perhaps the algorithm knows me better than I know myself. Perhaps the humidifier I just bought is about to kick off a new hobby of collecting humidifiers. /s

"They're laughing at us."

Narrator: They were.

Agreed with many others here. GrapheneOS it's fantastic.

A few points that haven't been highlighted:

• The GrapheneOS camera is fast and responsive. I haven't had a responsive camera in several generations of Android until I installed GrapheneOS.

• Everything is faster and more responsive on GrapheneOS. A $300.00 phone from last year running GrapheneOS responds to input like a $1000.00 phone, while keeping the longer battery life of a $300.00 phone.

• Defense-in-depth privacy and security controls. A lot of good privacy and security defaults add up to a lot more peace of mind. Thiis phone feels like my property, not just a portal to deliver ads and collect data about me.

In fairness to CCleaner, there's lots of other organizations that were victims of MoveIt's breach.

"mass exploitation of a vulnerability in the widely-used file transfer software MOVEit has allowed cybercriminals to steal data from a dizzying array of businesses and governments..." - Wired Article on the MoveIt breaches

Trusting MoveIt was regrettable, but lots of folks made the same mistake.

In this thread: People who haven't seen the Star Wars Christmas Special.

And that's a good thing. Don't see it. Don't do it. You think you're curious, I get it. But you've been warned. If you try to watch it, for goodness sake, at least bring a group of friends so that someone else will understand your lingering pain.

Yeah. There's some speculation that most of those who stayed are probably stuck due to life circumstances like visa sponsorship.

Edit: I imagine they're not staying for the stock options, at this point, in any case!

Nice. Your excellent suggestion probably belongs in a meta-package somewhere so that users get it for free when appropriate.

We have stuff that is not Linux, too.

I don't know where we keep any of that, but I'm like 80% sure we have it somewhere.

When I'm doing too much to maintain in bash, and not enough to merit Python, I use PowerShell.

My controversial take: if you're looking for a better scripting language and haven't tried PowerShell, you should give it a try.

It's weird that Microsoft made a real shell.

PowerShell is actually open source, and it runs everywhere, including Mac and Linux. On Windows and Ubuntu, it's already installed.

Powershell's quality JSON and CSV handling is a huge game changer for quick scripts. The webrequest module is high quality. File operations are a breeze. Unlike bash, PowerShell can be formated to be pretty readable, when you care. Environment variable handling is mildly improved. Resusable code via modules is huge for quality of life.

PowerShell is the bash rewrite with lessons learned we all have wanted, but it's not on a lot Linux folks radar because Microsoft published it.

Agreed with others that city living causes liberalism.

There's a flip side too - rural areas experience many kinds of change more slowly and that can lead to conservatism. While we all enjoy new things, I feel like it's easier to notice what is being lost - when things change - in a small rural community.

Maybe it's just that we become used to putting up with older things and older social norms, so we feel the downsides less and so become less eager to replace them with what is next.

A less generous way of saying this is that in a small town it's easier to not feel how much harm is being done by "the way we've always done it".

Ooh. This would make a great tradition, here. Count me in.

Edit: LibreOffice. Good call. Done.

It's a fluid situation, but the key is to keep the Boston dynamics robot unarmed.

Every specialization grants some immunity for weaker social skills. Everyone seems to know they need cybersecurity and database skills. Everyone also needs accessibility, networking, disaster recovery and test automation. Many also know that.

That said, interviews suck for everyone. I try to look at every interview as a gift I'm giving. Maybe my answers can help them, even if they can't hire me.

If they ask a lot of stupid useless fizzbuzz, then framing the time as a gift helps me pity them instead of feeling angry. I already gave them my time, they just wasted it. Their foolishness doesn't reduce the worthiness of my choice to try to help them.

As a parent, you had me at "no room to roll around". As long as I have a 100% guarantee that none of my kids will find me in there to ask for something, I'm in. I'm gonna get so much sleep.

My bank is welcome to implement features that prevent using Firefox. It'll cost them when I move my deposits, but they're welcome to do it.

I'm all for companies participating in open source communities... but this is the company that routinely blocks me from viewing my aunt's reposts of Russian state sponsored racist propeganda just because I don't install the incredibly invasive mobile app.

I can imagine a few ways that this could go wrong...

Would it be enough to be able to run .deb packages on fedora?

Unpacking a .deb on Fedora, or unpacking an .rpm on Ubuntu isn't a big deal. The files inside are often actually identical.

But would not be useful because the files inside usually rely on shared libraries, which may or may not already be installed. Those shared libraries are installed in different places on each Linux distro. Figuring out which ones to ask for (and making sure the program can find them) is the real work that the .Deb or .RPM installers do.

A fun way to try this out is with Portable Apps. Anything called a "portable app" either doesn't use additional libraries, or carries the libraries it needs with it.

If you find a portable app for Ubunutu, there's a good chance the Fedora version is an identical file, and works fine on Ubuntu. There's lots of reasons it might not work, but it can be fun to try.

For the most part, the only reason any Linux program is unavailable on a different version of Linux is that no one has bothered to build the necessary installer for that combination of program and OS.

.RPM was supposed to solve this by being universal, since any other OS can implement it to match .Deb was supposed to solve this by being universal, since any other OS can implement it to match (about 60% actually do). I think Flatpacks and Snaps might solve this by being universal, at some point...

Source: I've built installer packages for various operating systems.

As someone knowledgeable on the subject, this was my journey:

Mozilla: "While HTTPS encryts web page contents, many middlemen can still see the URL of the sites you visit."

Me: "Yes, we know this is a problem. It has been for a long time. But if you're adding some kind of complex new solution, it's going to cause issues for..."

Mozilla: "We added public key encryption to DNS."

Me: "Oh shit, that's really smart, and it'll just work."

The brilliance of this move is public key encryption is old and widely supported and DNS is old and universally supported. I think we will see broad support roll out quickly on this one (at least compared to glacial scale of changes across the Internet.)

We care. We don't have the same resources as some of these assholes, but we care.

It is quite satisfying to amble up next to them at the next light... And the one after that... And the one after that.

Edit: I don't recommend rolling down the window and shouting "IT'S NOT WORKING! WEAVE HARDER! WEAVE HARDER!" at them. I think about it, but I don't recommend it.

Corporation sacrificed user trust, but isn't completely gone yet. More at 11, stay tuned!

Based on my experience with venture capital, I'm not convinced venture capital has ever produced anything worthwhile.

Yeah. I too have had some great times with Microsoft browsers over the years...

Downloading Firefox, downloading Opera, downloading Chromium, downloading Firefox again.

Yeah, I've made some great memories with Microsoft browsers.