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"Would U.S. tech workers join a union?" survey average: 67% likely
  • When I think of a tech worker union my thoughts first go to standardizing everyone's pay and limiting what I can earn myself. I've probably fallen to anti-union propaganda.

    A tech worker union that says nothing about pay could still do so much.

    A union could ensure that the company's incentives are aligned with worker's incentives around things like on-call.

    I'd love a union that forced a company to give all on-call workers compensation. Something like:

    1. If you're woken up in the middle of the night, you automatically get 8 hours comp time (time off), plus 2x the time you spend on-call during off hours.
    2. Accrued comp time over 20 hours must be payed at 10x normal pay if the employee leaves the company for any reason. The idea here isn't for employees to accrue comp time, but to give the company a strong incentive to ensure employees use their comp time.

    Basically, if a company is having lots of on-call alerts, or the company is preventing employees from using their comp time, you want this to be directly painful to the company. Incentives should be aligned, what is painful for the worker should be painful for the company.

    Or, regarding "unlimited PTO". I'd love to see a union force companies to:

    1. "Unlimited PTO" policies are fine, but they must have a guaranteed minimum amount of PTO specified in writing. So none of this "yeah, we heave 'unlimited PTO'; oh, we're really busy this quarter, so can you wait to take PTO until next quarter?".

    Tech workers have it good compared to a lot of workers, but there are still plenty of abuses a union could help with, even if the union never even mentions pay.

  • I make games and this literally happened to me this morning
  • What is the game? It's not being a shill to answer questions.

  • Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton
  • Like anything medically related in the US, it's our time to crack open our wallets and do our patriotic duty of paying half the nation.

    Like, if I want to talk to a doctor for 5 minutes, then it's my time to pay the all the insurance industry workers, and I have to pay my part of those 3 minutes long drug commercials you see on TV every ad break and before every YouTube video, and I have to pay all those people locking down the medical devices so that the users can't use their own data. This is my time to shine, I got to pay for all this because I talked to the doctor for 5 minutes. Also, hopefully in the end I have a few cents left over to give to the doctor.

    Fucking rent seekers...

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  • I haven't written any Java since Java 6. This makes me so happy to hear.

    What about XML, and XML based configs? Is the Java ecosystem still obsessed with XML?

    I remember I was once trying to learn Hibernate. After finding what I thought looked like the best tutorial, I skimmed through it and there was literally no Java code in the tutorial about a Java library! It was all XML! I never could understand it, but this was early in my career, maybe I could handle it now, maybe not.

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  • I don't know. That's what I was saying. I can't possibly imagine what I could say to help someone understand that error message.

    😉

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  • If you can't understand that error message then I don't know what to tell you.

  • Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code
  • And I think their board is panicking trying to figure out how they can regain me, specifically, as a customer.

    More seriously, I apparently am not the only one who eventually got their fill of Ubisoft games. I think Ubisoft has planted resentment in the minds of all their customers, and as soon as they slipped a little in game quality their customers were more than happy to leave, just for the sake of leaving.

  • YouTube has found a new way to load ads | AdGuard Blog
  • I may not like it, but you do make an interesting technical argument.

    I think it would still be detectable though because of buffering.

    What you're saying assumes that videos are streamed frame-by-frame: "here's a frame", "okay, I watched that frame", "okay, here's the next frame".

    With buffering videos will preload the next 30 seconds of video, and so if you pressed a button to skip ahead 10 seconds, that often happens instantly because the computer has already stored the next 30 seconds of video. Your plan to just pretend to skip ahead doesn't work in this case, because my computer can know whether or not it really did skip ahead, because of buffering.

  • Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code
  • Couldn't we avoid all this by giving players the option to host and moderate their own servers?

  • Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code
  • I bought Crysis and didn't like the DRM, so I haven't bought a Ubisoft game since. How's that working out for Ubisoft?

  • Amazon's Monopoly of the tech industry is ruining the US economy
  • I agree. Price is important in a classic "free market" where people compete to sell goods and services for cheaper and whoever does it best makes a profit and grows, etc, etc.

    This ain't a classic free market. We frequently see companies become market leaders without ever earning a profit. That's not a classic free market.

    Succeeding as a company because you make customers happy sounds nice, but the most powerful companies today succeed by gaining favor from those already in power (venture capitalists, etc), and the customers are just a bargaining chip to be tossed around on the bargaining tables of the wealthy.

  • YouTube has found a new way to load ads | AdGuard Blog
  • Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.

    If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.

    If all else fails, I'd enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing. I'll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.

  • Palworld maker vows to fight Nintendo lawsuit on behalf of fans and indie developers
  • Good call, the shape arranging mechanic existing in board game form before Tetris, and the "challenge approaching from the top of the screen" thing was a staple of many many Atari and arcade games.

  • Palworld maker vows to fight Nintendo lawsuit on behalf of fans and indie developers
  • Name a game you have enjoyed that isn't a ripoff.

  • Can I remove a git repo without resorting to `rm -rf` ?

    Git repos have lots of write protected files in the .git directory, sometimes hundreds, and the default rm my_project_managed_by_git will prompt before deleting each write protected file. So, to actually delete my project I have to do rm -rf my_project_managed_by_git.

    Using rm -rf scares me. Is there a reasonable way to delete git repos without it?

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    Possible bug: I can't reply to a specific comment?

    I cannot reply to the following comment. I have tried a dozen times over the last couple hours. Anyone else able to?

    https://programming.dev/comment/185004

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    Godot looks great, but I want to separate game logic and display.

    I like most things I see about Godot, and I'm going to try making some games with it.

    Whenever I imagine programming a game though, I imagine the game logic and simulation being separate from the display. For instance, if I was to make a game like FTL, I would plan to simulate all the ship interactions and the movement of the characters purely in code, and then write a separate module to render that simulation. The simulation could be rendered with graphics, or with text, or whatever (of course, a text render wouldn't be human friendly, but could act as a dedicated server for some games, or I could use it for machine learning, etc).

    I'm not an expert at Godot, but it seems this mindset is not going to fit well into Godot. Is this correct? It seems like the same object that is responsible for tracking the players health is going to also be responsible for drawing that player on the screen and tracking their location on the screen, etc. Will my player class have to end up being a subclass of some complicated Godot class? (Also, I'm a fan of functional programming and don't always use a lot of classes if given the choice.)

    What are your thoughts about this. Would you recommend another engine? No other engine seem to be in the same sweet spot that Godot is currently in.

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    Does Lemmy really benefit from Rust? Is code execution speed the bottleneck?

    My first experience with Lemmy was thinking that the UI was beautiful, and lemmy.ml (the first instance I looked at) was asking people not to join because they already had 1500 users and were struggling to scale.

    1500 users just doesn't seem like much, it seems like the type of load you could handle with a Raspberry Pi in a dusty corner.

    Are the Lemmy servers struggling to scale because of the federation process / protocols?

    Maybe I underestimate how much compute goes into hosting user generated content? Users generate very little text, but uploading pictures takes more space. Users are generating millions of bytes of content and it's overloading computers that can handle billions of bytes with ease, what happened? Am I missing something here?

    Or maybe the code is just inefficient?

    Which brings me to the title's question: Does Lemmy benefit from using Rust? None of the problems I can imagine are related to code execution speed.

    If the federation process and protocols are inefficient, then everything is being built on sand. Popular protocols are hard to change. How often does the HTTP protocol change? Never. The language used for the code doesn't matter in this case.

    If the code is just inefficient, well, inefficient Rust is probably slower than efficient Python or JavaScript. Could the complexity of Rust have pushed the devs towards a simpler but less efficient solution that ends up being slower than garbage collected languages? I'm sure this has happened before, but I don't know anything about the Lemmy code.

    Or, again, maybe I'm just underestimating the amount of compute required to support 1500 users sharing a little bit of text and a few images?

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    www.joelonsoftware.com The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

    Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you’re supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be? Did you ever get an email from your friends in…

    The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
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    Buttons Buttons @programming.dev
    Posts 11
    Comments 328