a lil bee 🐝

I think the distributed nature of Mastodon keeps government control from being an issue. It would be kind of cool as a space for citizens to ask for assistance or air grievances while giving the politicians an officially owned space for things like announcements.

They didn’t do one in this case, but I have heard stories of these sorts of malicious actors paying people stateside or elsewhere to take the video interviews. I’ve had to do ID checks on video in recent-ish interviews.

It’s 2050. Every computer scientist is named Conway. ChatGPT releases its new version of Conway4, which scrapes every ounce of private medical data we have.

Well, TIL! Darn famous computer scientists sharing last names. This Conway is still an icon.

I cite Conway’s Law (and it’s reverse corollary) multiple times a week. I’m sorry to hear this, but her contributions were many and 85 is not a bad run. I hope she was happy and fulfilled, in the end.

I found that the tradeoff came in the form of being more explicit, thus requiring fewer comments and less explicit readmes. Developers who normally struggled with naming things well would do better in PowerShell since it kinda “forced” them into the habit and structure. I know fans of Go (myself included) generally like that it takes that concept to the extreme. It fit my needs well at a time when I had a team of juniors to manage and teach.

Overall though, nothing wrong hating that strictness or verbosity! Lots of good options that support the reverse extreme and more moderate ones.

You’re right that Bash is among the worst options available, but it is common and what our friend above indicated he had experience with. I think your points are all valid, but I also find that most professional situations don’t offer much choice in the matter anyway. I used PowerShell because it was my company’s standard and there were 10 years of technical debt built around it. I got to know its ins and outs because of that and find some of them neat.

I don’t think anyone should take any of my messages as saying PowerShell is best in class for any particular use cases, but I do enjoy using it. I’m all Python and Golang now anyway 🙃

Oh and that’s somewhere where PowerShell really shines! Check out the examples on the docs page for some examples and see how easy they are to read and write compared to sed/awk/etc.

I also think PowerShell being object-based instead of string-based gives it flexibility for those of us who have experience with object-oriented programming languages. Being able to ship around objects to functions, splatting, etc are huge value adds for me personally.

Again though, sooooo subjective! Some people will legit hate that it’s object-based and hate the syntax. The world supports all kinds of developers and we’re all making cool stuff, so it’s all good!

Not hating, but you should really try it out before forming an opinion. PowerShell Core is multi platform and if you value readable scripts at all, PowerShell is heads and shoulders over bash. I know all of us admins are proud of our bash scripts, but bash reads like hieroglyphics to anyone who didn’t write it. PowerShell has noun verb syntax and just heaps of syntax sugar. Scripts, even more than code imo, needs that readability for fast debugging and maintenance.

But hey, opinions on languages and such are highly, highly subjective. No skin off my nose if you just don’t like it at all.

And PowerShell, as an addendum

Can you please point out where I said anything against almost anything you said here? Are you here to have a discussion about your shower thought or just grandstand your political opinion to a group that by large already shares it? Thank you for starting the thread, but not sure I’m going to reply to any additional messages because I’m not sure that you’re actually reading any of mine.

Not sure anybody is really arguing in this entire thread. Just discussion of edge cases and the gray areas on an interesting shower thought.

My argument would be that by eliminating the means of wealth being an avenue to power, it will merely shift to the government that is enforcing those rules. Those same shitty people will infiltrate that government and use it to inflate themselves while oppressing others. There was no utopian society prior to capitalism and fiat currency, and there won’t be one after.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that this is an impossible problem to solve. I just do not think eliminating the notion of a billionaire is the cure for all of your listed ills. I agree with you that it would absolutely have impacts on all of them, but we would still wake up to world hunger, climate change, etc.

Each of your listed issues is a complex, multi-faceted problem. We cannot boil down that nuance just so we can point to our favorite enemy, deserving as they might be. Fight them too, but don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.

We’re looking at two extreme ends of the pole here. Zuck, Bezos, Musk are the shittiest public billionaires. There are also more secretive ones who are arguably even more destructive. These people have absolutely justified their own downfall, if it ever comes to pass. On the other side, Dolly doesn’t even technically count on this list because she has given enough away to not be a billionaire. Those are the easy cases where almost every reasonable person agrees on the “right” thing to do.

Now, we have to remember that there are people who exist at every little increment along that scale of giving back to general shittiness for the global population. Focusing on the billionaires themselves and their lifestyles or whatever is not the answer. We need to focus on making effective tax brackets, effective regulations on the avenues billionaires generally target for power (political institutions, media companies, etc), and effective spending of the increased income from those new taxes to help raise the lower class to a more equitable position. That’s a socdem perspective though, because I do not foresee capitalism collapsing in my lifetime and I like to be pragmatic.

Hate both, where it’s appropriate. Some of these players perpetuate the game that we all hate. Elon Musk is a player who has become part of the structure of the game, fighting regulations and damaging democracy for the sake of his own capitalistic endeavors. Someone mentioned below that Dolly Parton could be a billionaire. Not gonna hate on Dolly Parton who I assume did not come by her wealth through being an asshole, but more just being successful and our current “game” rewarding her with more than she would have in a better society. I would tax the absolute fuck out of her though.

I’m not sure that I agree. While I would support something like outlawing billionaires or at the very least, a tax bracket that claws back significant chunks of what they are draining from society, there are vast nuances to these issues beyond “the billionaires want it that way.” When you say “everything from … can all be rendered down”, I think it’s pretty important to recognize how much detail and nuance is lost in that rendering down.

Billionaires and the accumulation of wealth are just stand ins for the accumulation of power in a capitalistic society. When power is removed, it creates a vacuum. Who fills it? In the ideal, I know most of us would say “the people” but this is an insanely complex balancing beam to maintain without some group of assholes finding a new, non-capital way to extract and centralize that power.

None of this is to say that eliminating the notion of a billionaire is a bad idea. I’m with you all that the very idea of a billionaire is heinous and impossible without vast exploitation. I just do not think that issue being solved would be even close to some panacea for all of the world’s problems. There would just be twists in the existing problems and fun new ones.

Krazam completely on point, as usual. Gonna be mouthing “my pipeline is green” to myself even more than usual now.