jpab | 5 years ago | on: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google
jpab's comments
jpab | 5 years ago | on: AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google
This is actually kind of funny to me, because in the open source world plenty of people have extremely productive working relationships without ever seeing or hearing each other, and in many cases without even knowing what country the other person lives in, how old they are, or what their legal name is.
So while there are definitely arguments that face to face communication is "higher bandwidth" or has other advantages, it doesn't seem out of the question to me that the hiring process could be "blinded" to a similar extent to orchestra auditions, without any significant reduction in hiring accuracy.
(Ok, maybe not quite the same extent; language fluency and style of speech are still significant signals even if everything is done over text)
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Spotted: Amazon robot maps sidewalks of Seattle
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Anarch: Super small public domain no-dependency from-scratch suckless Doom clone
To conclude that these are properties of capitalism you need to examine both capitalist and non-capitalist societies and observe that capitalist societies exhibit poverty, crime and violence (true), and that non-capitalist societies don't (false).
jpab | 5 years ago | on: UK Codemasters Sold to Take-Two Games
jpab | 5 years ago | on: UK Codemasters Sold to Take-Two Games
And Leamington is quite attractive - not a bad place to live. Coventry is probably ok too. Personally I would much rather be in a town like Leamington Spa than Birmingham or Milton Keynes. In general, small and medium size towns in the UK are far nicer than the big cities.
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Cyberpunk 2077 delayed to December 10
But I don't work in the industry, so read my statements as just the ramblings of an interested amateur.
Regardless of the technical reasons for them, I personally dislike the reliance on day-0 patches.
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Origami Simulator
Neither of these control styles are 6dof; they don't provide a roll control, only elevation, azimuth and position. Roll is rarely useful IMHO and including it in the normal control scheme makes things hard to use. Put roll behind an explicit modifier key, and have a reset-roll action somewhere.
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Discipline Doesn’t Scale
See also, eg, the LOCK prefix on x86 instructions.
(disclaimer: I only have approximate knowledge of anything, I'm not an expert)
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Twitter accused of double standards over ban on tweets wishing death on Trump
There has been a specific legal battle about almost exactly this question. So far, the US court system disagrees with you.
> "These tweets are published by a public official clothed with the authority of the state using social media as a tool of governance and as an official channel of communication on an interactive public platform," [2nd circuit] appeals court Judge Barrington Parker wrote.
Trump is appealing that outcome though.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/08/20/donal...
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Cyberpunk studio breaks promise, forces overtime on developers
Duke Nukem Forever was first announced in 1997. It was released in 2011, and got terrible reviews.
All in all, giving yourself an unlimited timeline for development is perhaps not a recipe for success.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Fo...
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Oil Companies Touted Recycling to Sell More Plastic
jpab | 5 years ago | on: State of Self-Serve Website Building in 2020
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Moreutils – Unix tools that nobody thought to write (2012)
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Moreutils – Unix tools that nobody thought to write (2012)
grep foo file.txt | sponge file.txt
If you do this with redirections then file.txt will be truncated before it's been processed, leaving you with an empty file instead of what you wanted. Sponge collects its input first and then writes everything out at the end, so you can output to a file that was used as an input.
(Parent updated while I was writing. Oh well)
jpab | 5 years ago | on: On Using Twitter
I follow several people in the game development industry, and historically used to see a lot of interesting technical articles being shared on Twitter within this community. That seems to have declined unfortunately, though there is still some.
I follow various people who have a habit of posting dumb funny jokes (usually puns) and memes. Not everyone likes that style of humour, but I do.
I mute or unfollow people if too many of the things they choose to share are things I don't want to see (like outrage bait).
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Reviewing the worst piece of code ever
What am I missing? (Genuinely curious - I'm not a crypto expert)
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Safely Reviving Shared Memory
Or by example: You still want someone to organise weekly garbage collection efficiently and equitably. The government does that.
jpab | 5 years ago | on: The Adjacent User Theory
Because cancerous cells prioritize their own growth over the health of the wider system in which they exist.
Companies with this mindset do not reach a point at which they say "ok, we're big enough now". There is no target size they're trying to reach, there is only a target year-over-year multiplicative growth rate. They prioritize growth over providing value to the users they have. They grow without regard for the effect it has on social dynamics within the system (changing what the product is good for and what it's bad for), or the effect it has on social dynamics beyond the system.
It's the Paperclip Maximizer approach to business. And, of course, it's the stock market approach to business too.
jpab | 5 years ago | on: Playing around with the Fuchsia operating system
Google is a web company; they want people to use the web. They made a laptop/desktop operating system built around their web browser, because they want everything to be on the web. It does most of the things you list, including synchronizing between devices since your data is all "in the Cloud".
As for market share, I'm not sure what power you think Google has, but getting 10% of the desktop OS market has got to be pretty difficult for anyone. I do not know what share of the market Chrome OS has.
What feels like a breakdown of trust in society has been on my mind a lot recently. Without trust, it seems communication and collaboration becomes impossible. How can society solve any of its problems when people can't discuss anything about those problems or potential solutions without it turning into a fight?