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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 6h

And THEN was stupid enough not to respond with stunned horror at this revelation, a follow-on apology, and the obvious promise of removing it when he learned what it was... and instead defended it.

Yeah, if somehow that were true, at BEST he's still a completely politically incompetent moron.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 6h

You know that within 2 years we'll be getting "nerd harder" complaints from right wing weirdos about not turning out new medicines, movies not made in the U.S. anymore, products designed elsewhere, new companies being founded in Europe, the music industry no longer being centered on America, etc.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 6h

We've built a culture that doesn't believe that anything is actually hard, takes time, or builds on previous work. I wonder if it's Hollywood's fault for making science look like it takes hours/days, programming minutes with a gun to your head, and fixing the farm takes a weekend party with friends.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 7h

I always called it "fail early and fail often" :D.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 12h

I get the sentiment though: Readability is paramount.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 12h

I'm retired, though I did mentor junior engineers.

My last job was so afraid of crashes that they often traded stability for correctness. We had almost no data verification because of it. Bugs just happily propagated through the system with no outward signs because that reduced on-call load!

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 12h

I too was following him, and hopeful he was a good candidate.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 12h

I'm honestly surprised he hasn't come out and said "Oh shit. I honestly didn't realize that was a Nazi symbol. I've already scheduled to have it removed next week. I apologize, we're all learning, and I intend to do better"... Even if he IS a Nazi.

"I got it when I was drunk" doesn't cut it.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 12h

The other piece of this is just that computer code is a surprisingly efficient way to communicate ideas between humans.

People assume we can do it easier in english, which is true if it's vague enough, but add a modicum of precision and it quickly gets less efficient.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 12h

Definitely!

I think fear of writing the wrong code really holds back newer devs. Stopping and thinking is good, but writing the wrong code and learning from it is part of the process. Tinkering, as you put it.

Then, once you get it, you write it twice more to make it good.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 13h

... I may be misremembering those numbers, it was a couple of years ago now :)... Hopefully I'm not exagerating by accident.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 13h

Exactly. I just wrote the PRs and sent them. I did ~600 PRs like that in about 9 months, with ~4 minor regressions only one of which hit a user.

They were either trivial (adding atomic), or complex enough other teams lacked the threading expertise to fix them. Either way it's easiest to just do it.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 13h

In particular I'm thinking of a project where we were trying to fix threading bugs across the entire codebase.

Manager wanted me to hand the bugs off to teams that owned the code.

But just filing that ticket was more time consuming than fixing the issue... even before the back-end forth with them.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 13h

On a poorly maintained large legacy codebase I finally explained to my manager. "By the time I'm sure what I need to do I'm basically done."

They wanted me to farm the work to other people, but that was MORE time consuming than just doing it once I'd worked out how, which was the hard part.

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 16h

Most of these topics are facets of the same root cause: the majority of the work lies in determining what to do, which cannot be estimated, rather than doing it, which can be estimated easily.

To that end, KISS: all work is Small or Large, and if you aren't sure, call it Medium and move on.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 13h

But... I am a dweeb, so I might as well look like one.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 14h

I've given money to congress people in various states around the country that I like and support. I was following Platner because he seemed interesting, and might've considered giving him money.

So yes, this news is relevant to me, and likely other people who do not live in Maine.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 14h

My entire personality can't be "Linux" because at least a quarter of my personality is "Owning old 4WD Toyotas".

mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 19h

I finally ordered a dashcam. A Viofo with rear camera and no cloud support, so my data stays mine. I'll install it in the car my wife usually drives. I'm concerned about racial profiling of her. I'll get another if it goes well.

I want to ensure we have evidence for us or another.

mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 1d

Of all the foods to decide to bring down the price of he chooses beef.
Oh wait, he didn't choose beef, he's just trying to figure out more ways to throw money at Argentina for... some reason.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 1d

We should all boycott health insurance if they bring back preexisting conditions and retroactive rejection due to "misfiling".

They want you to pay them and get literally nothing in return. Repeal of the ACA should be the death of the health insurance industry.

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Reposted by mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈

Dan the Gnome @brewergnome.bsky.social · 1d

Really well put. You cannot walk the same road and expect to go somewhere else. "Let's pick a different road this time" is not a purity test.

Toonces the Cat would steer this country better @bankuei.bsky.social · 1d

You can't keep the structural inequalities that got you here... and not expect to come back here again.

Something something "same action expecting different results" something something.

The "purity test" you're screaming about is people saying "let's not do this again" quite reasonably.

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 1d

IMHO, Ubuntu and Ubuntu server are great choices for institutions due to things like LTS support, and it's not redhat... But I wouldn't choose it as an end user distro

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Reposted by mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈

Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 1d

"But why don't we have more reliable software? Is it really just a cost thing?"

My brother in code, corporate America is currently experiencing an outage because even though Amazon offers multiple distinct regions to run storage and compute, most companies are on us-east-1 because (a) it's […]

Original post on mastodon.fixermark.com

mastodon.fixermark.com

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Reposted by mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈

razzamult @razzamult.bsky.social · 4d

From a x11/wayland dev:

The real story behind Wayland and X

YouTube video by Linux.conf.au 2013 -- Canberra, Australia

youtu.be

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mbrewer 🏳️‍🌈 @smalladventures.net · 2d

"Switch to Linux!"
"Ugh Linux users"
"It's not that hard, anyone and everyone can and should!"
"It's impossible, give up hope all ye who enter here"
"What distro: MIIIIIIINNNNNTTTTT... Or <other distro I like>"

Yeah, this conversation is DONE. We covered it. Move on.

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