I got into cooking during lockdown, and have managed to get surprisingly good at it, to the point where if you asked me to make a meal of your choosing I could probably make it without looking up a recipe. It’s actually unbelievably simple to make even complex stuff, basically using all the same rules you apply at work:

• Use the right tools for the job
• Plan it out first, do your prep and the actual work is simple
• A simple dish will take much longer than you think
• RTFM. Many sauces and dishes from classic cooking are basically a mixture of a small handful of base ingredients/techniques, and they’ve been written down for decades.
• Once you have the basics down, you can basically make it up as you go. You’ll make amazing meals, and you’ll never be able to replicate it again because you eyeballed it or cooked it in a way that made sense at the time. You say you’ll document it well, but deep down, you know you won’t.
• Nothing is original, everything is stolen. Adapt recipes you see, look at ingredients of sauces and sachets you buy/use, etc.
• You can be a solid hobbyist, but against a pro that does this shit all day every day, you don’t know a fucking thing. You’re also probably not going to replicate what they can do in a professional setting while at home unless you’ve got money.

The problem with these fundamental rulings is that they’re largely trying to fit square objects through round holes. When a simple ruling is made to essentially say “to current law, no”, the law itself ultimately becomes meaningless, because older games couldn’t be easier to pirate. Most of them are smaller than a TikTok video, and are so cheap/easy to host that you’ll never stop them from being shared. Hell, emulation has come so far that you can effectively emulate these games on a browser, on multiple devices, even devices that don’t natively support gaming.

The smart thing to do would be to say that maybe the legal framework that embodies retro gaming needs to be researched and heavily considered. It’s a hard task that’ll require many lawyers, many fights, and lots of lobbying to ensure the word of law is worth something. Sadly, it’s easier to say “lol no” and to essentially just promote piracy.

When I was a kid, the saying (here in the UK) was “right ear, right queer”.

Why should a user care about the health of an online community? To them it should “just work”.

(I’m being purposely facetious here, because the average person really doesn’t care about this shit. When Twitter no longer serves its purpose to them they just leave and go to the next place)

But again, what tangible benefit does that have for the average user? They don’t give a fuck about billionaire ownership, moderation, or where an “instance” or server is located.

While true, how is that any different to the arguments that were used for TV? Additionally, Lemmy is a social network in the same way that Reddit is. Is this not also dangerous?

As has been the recommendation for practically everything for the four decades I’ve been on this earth, moderation is key. Instead of hating new media, either regulate it (if the evidence is truly that great) or treat it with healthy moderation.

Let’s be blunt here. Most of the people in this thread aren’t worried about health. They don’t like short-form video/foreign-owned companies/things they didn’t grow up with, and their elitism is getting the better of them instead of them letting people like what they want to like.

That’s…actually a really good use case for something like this. I’d argue that a recommendation algorithm that tailors to the best content a given federated service can provide for their use-case is probably a better source than what you’d get from a single source of truth that could give you everything and nothing.

All true, but what explicit problem do they solve for the average user?

ITT: People in their mid-twenties or later, who feel superior to those that like one form of media over their preferred media.

Elitism aside, I don’t really see what federation solves here. What benefits does federation offer the user? How does the recommendation algorithm give users what they want? How will a decentralised platform perform the kind of centralised events a platform like TikTok is known for?

Haha no.

A lot of people don’t realise how shit a war can be, even when you’re hundreds of miles away from it. Your local economy fucking TANKS, jobs disappear, workers disappear on the next plane out, and you’re left with a population that’s struggling on all fronts, trying to make a brave face.

America is full of crazy disparity, but war doesn’t care. The one benefit is that the billionaire class would get fucking rinsed by the locals for every shiny trinket they have when suddenly food costs a fortune because your last shipment got shot up.

Working in Ruby did 10x more to help me write clean code than reading Clean Code ever did.

Many of the lessons drilled into me with Ruby (keep a consistent style, tests are cheap, keep your methods relatively small where possible, reduce nesting where possible) carry over nicely into other languages without needing to go through any OO bullshit.

IMO, the best lesson around Clean Code is this: you’re not clever, write obvious code that works with as few tricks as possible.

I switched from .local to .honk and I’m never looking back.

Source: I’ve done student outreach for Amazon (sitting at a booth, chatting to students, doing student program interviews).

That ship has sailed. While big tech still means big salaries, many graduates are now smart enough to realise that the magic number a company says they’ll pay you every year is meaningless if they’ll lay you off three months from now to appease some shareholders.

They see OpenAI, and they see a startup that basically mopped the floor with ALL of big tech in something they supposedly did for the better part of a decade. I genuinely think we’re a few small success stories away from FAANG being completely relegated to boomer tech like IBM.

Google is done, IMO. The same goes for Meta, the two big tech companies that showed people how “fun” an office could be. They’re now relegated to normal companies…and their output over the last few years show a set of companies with few stand-out winners. Do you really want to slog through a tough CS degree and a 4-5 stage interview process requiring months of prep to work on Google Docs, or work hard for years only to be woken up every night for a whole week because Amazon Fashion is suffering downtime, all while VP’s move to different departments in a blindingly obvious move to avoid department shutdowns and being associated with mass job losses?

IMO, if Google stick with Sundar, and Amazon stick with Jassy, they are done. They’ll lose their status and go into slow decline over the next decade.

I’m not against bootcamps, but there are so many caveats.

1. Most bootcamp instructors have no business teaching. They have no qualifications for it, and rarely have the experience to teach the subject matter.

2. Many bootcamps are owned by agencies or companies looking for cheap labour, with many making false promises on employment - because they give them a temporary contract to get cheap devs. It was painful to see so many bootcamp grads last year, entering an empty market.

3. They are often very expensive, to the point where I’ve worked with people woefully unqualified, who put up with so much shit because they’re in debt. They were promised a career, only to be taught just enough to do basic tasks in React, and then being limited in what they can do.

4. You end up with a horrendous amount of imposter syndrome, in an industry where people already feel like frauds.

5. I’m in the UK, and you wouldn’t believe how many people go to bootcamps and assume we’re all making £100k salaries. Hell, where I live, I regularly get roles for senior engineers that are £40k a year. A woman I used to work with gave up her £30k a year job to be a front-end developer for £20k, with zero benefits, no union, etc.