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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Yeah that’s what we did last time. I implemented a basic framework on top of a very widespread system in our codebase, which would allow a number of requested minor features to be implemented similarly, with the minimal amount of required boilerplate, and leaving the bulk of the work to implementing the actual meat of the requests.

    These requests were completely independent and so could be parallelized easily. The “framework” I implemented was also incredibly thin (basically just a helper function and an human instruction in the shape of “do this for this usecase”) over a system that is preexisting knowledge. My expectation was to have to bring someone up to speed on certain things and then let them loose on this collection of tasks, maybe having to answer some question a couple times a day.

    Instead, since the assigned colleague is basically just a copilot frontend, I had to spend 80% or more of my days explaining exactly what needed to be done (I would always start with the whys od things since the whats are derived from them, but this particular colleague seems uninterested in that).

    So I was basically spending my time programming a set of features by proxy, while I was ostensibly working on a different set of features.

    So yeah, splitting work only works if you also have people capable of doing it in the first place. Of course I couldn’t not help this colleague either, that’s a bad mark on performance review you know. Even when the colleagues have no intention of learning or being productive in any way (I live in a country with strong employee regulations so almost nobody can be fired for anything concerning actual work performance, and this particular colleague doesn’t hide that they don’t care about actually doing a good job, except to managers so they still get pay raises for “improving”).

    Yeah, you can tell I’m unhappy


  • who is actually stopping them from dealing with it?

    Management. Someone in management sets idiotic deadlines, then someone tells you “do X”, you estimate and come up with “it will take T amount of time” and production simply tells you “that’s too long, do it faster”

    they don’t care about the details or maintenance

    They don’t, they care about time. If there are 6 weeks to implement a feature that requires reworking half the product, they don’t care to know half the product needs to be reworked. They only care to hear you say that you’ll get it done in 6 weeks. And if you say that’s impossible, they tell you to do it anyway

    you have to include the cost of managing technical debt

    I do, and when I get asked why my time estimations are so long compared to those of other colleagues I say I include known costs that are required to develop the feature, as well as a buffer for known unknowns and unknown unknowns which, historically, has been necessary 100% of the time and never included causing us development difficulties and us running over cost and over time causing delays and quality issues that caused internal unhappiness, sometimes mandatory overtime, and usually a crappy product that the customers are unhappy with. That’s me doing a good job right? Except I got told to ignore all of that and only include the minimum time to get all of the dozens of tiny pieces working. We went over time, over cost, and each tiny piece “works” when taken in isolation but doesn’t really mix with everything else because there was no integration time and so each feature kinda just exists there on its own.

    Then we do retrospectives in which we highlight all the process mistakes that we ran into only to do them all again next time. And I get blamed come performance review time because I was stressed and I wasn’t at the top of my game in the last year due to being chronically overburdened, overworked, and underpaid.





  • Thank you for the explanation, now I understand the context on the original message. It’s definitely an entirely different environment, especially the kind of software that runs on a bunch of servers.

    I have built business programs before being a game dev, still the kinds that runs on device rather than on a server. Even then, I always strived to write the most correct and performant code. Of course, I still wrote bugs like that time that a release broke the app for a subset of users because one of the database migrations didn’t apply to some real-world use case. Unfortunately, that one was due to us not having access to real world databases pr good enough surrogates due to customer policy (we were writing an unification software of sorts, up until this project every customer could give different meanings to each database column as they were just freeform text fields. Some customers even changed the schema). The migrations ran perfectly on each one of the test databases that we did have access to, but even then I did the obvious: roll the release back, add another test database that replicated the failing real world use case, fixed the failing migrations, and re released.

    So yeah, from your post it sounds that either the company is bad at hiring, bad at teaching new hires, or simply has the culture of “lol who cares someone else will fix it”. You should probably talk to management. It probably won’t do anything in the majority of cases, but it’s the only way change can actually happen.

    Try to schedule one on one session with your manager every 2 to 3 weeks to assess which systematic errors in the company are causing issues. 30 minutes sessions, just to make them aware of which parts of the company need fixing.


  • Sorry, this comment is causing me mental whiplash so I am either ignorant, am subject to non-standard circumstances, or both.

    My personal experience is that developers (the decent ones at least) know hardware better than IT people. But maybe we mean different things by “hardware”?

    You see, I work as a game dev so a good chunk of the technical part of my job is thinking about things like memory layout, cache locality, memory access patterns, branch predictor behavior, cache lines, false sharing, and so on and so forth. I know very little about hardware, and yet all of the above are things I need to keep in mind and consider and know to at least some usable extent to do my job.

    While IT are mostly concerned on how to keep the idiots from shooting the company in the foot, by having to roll out software that allows them to diagnose, reset, install or uninstall things on, etc, to entire fleets of computers at once. It also just so happens that this software is often buggy and uses 99% of your cpu taking it for spin loops (they had to roll that back of course) or the antivirus rules don’t apply on your system for whatever reason causing the antivirus to scan all the object files generated by the compiler even if they are generated in a whitelisted directory, causing a rebuild to take an hour rather than 10 minutes.

    They are also the ones that force me to change my (already unique and internal) password every few months for “security”.

    So yeah, when you say that developers often have no idea how the hardware works, the chief questions that come to mind are

    1. What kinda dev doesn’t know how hardware works to at least an usable extent?
    2. What kinda hardware are we talking about?
    3. What kinda hardware would an IT person need to know about? Network gear?

  • It’s one thing to pay, and another to be squeezed dry.

    When ads were mostly static banners on websites almost nobody was blocking them, because they were mostly unobtrusive.

    However, they would often link to shady websites that would install random crap, so the usecase for blocking them was already there.

    Then they became animated, and they multiplied. It was one at the bottom of content at first. Then a couple. Then two vertical banners on the sides too. Then more rectangular banners here and there for good measure.

    Then they became unkillable javascript popups, then proper new browser windows. Then autoplaying videos with audio were added. And this is just the visible stuff. Add tracking pixels, tracking cookies, browser fingerprinting, and tons of other spying technology deployed under the guise of “but the content is free”.

    After every step the use of ad and tracking blockers became more legitimate as serving ads moved further and further away from paying for free content and squarely in the space of selling user data collected without consent for huge profit margins.

    If ads and subscriptions were enough to just make a normal amount of profit, very few would be blocking ads or pirating content, because the amount of ads or the price of subscriptions would be reasonable and affordable.

    But since everyone wants to make a 1000% markup on the content they generate, they will drive their very own paying customers away.

    Youtube could have served me a couple ads per video and I would have kept using it forever. Instead they served me a minimum of 20 ads per video, so now they will serve me zero, forever.

    Netflix could have gotten 12 euros every month out of me for their dwindling and dwindling content selection. Instead they wanted 14 after a while. And 17 after a while. And 19 after a little while more. All the while refusing to serve me the 4k content I paid for.

    So instead they now get zero too.

    I am very happy to pay for content, and a lot of people like me. But the comment you originally replied to was in reference to youtube increasing the price of their subscription by ludicrous amounts. You replied there content isn’t free, and I replied that youtube has no problem making money. The increases are not to keep youtube afloat, is to make youtube make 10 billions in profit rather than 8 next year.

    It’s not about paying a fair amount of money for content, it’s about making you pay all that you can give and suck you dry.

    So to your question “how do you pay for content/services in general?” I answer “with money”, but that is not what is happening here.



  • What “it” is configurable? If the code is indented with 4 spaces, it is indented with 4 spaces. You can configure your editor to indent with 1 space if you want, but then your code is not going to respect the 4 spaces of indentation used by the rest of the code.

    I repeat, the only accessible indentation option is using tabs. This is not an opinion because every other option forces extra painful steps for those with vision issues (including, but not limited to, having to reformat the source files to tabs so they can work on them and then reformat them back to using spaces in order to commit them)





  • Looks to me like the ruling is saying that the output of a model trained on copyrighted data is not copyrighted in itself.

    By that logic, if I train a model on marvel movies and get something that is exactly the same as an existing movie, that output is not copyrighted.

    It’s a stretch, for sure, and the judge did say that he didn’t consider the output to be similar enough to the source copyrighted material, but it’s unclear what “close enough” is.

    What if my model is trained on star wars and outputs a story that is novel, with different characters with different voices. That’s not copyrighted then, despite the model being trained exclusively on copyrighted data?





  • The “or later” is optional, the FSF specifically doesn’t have the power to update the terms of every GPL-licensed software because the wrote the clause in such a way that they don’t.

    If I give you software licensed under the GPL3, and a GPL3.1 comes out, it doesn’t apply to your copy of the software. Likewise the copyright holder of the work is also not forced to relicense their software under the GPL3.1. And even if they did, copies of the software distributed under the GPL3 would still be licensed under the GPL3.

    The “or later” clause simply means that if I received a copy of a GPL3 software, I can redistribute it under the GPL3.1 if I so wish (where “I” in the previous sentence is everyone with a copy of the work, as the GPL gives everyone with a copy redistribution rights)


  • ugo@feddit.ittoLinux Gaming@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    11 months ago

    I don’t know how to help you directly, but you could write a script that turns vibration on, then sleeps for an appropriate amount of time, and loops indefinitely. This way even if vibration stops after a few seconds, the script will turn it back on immediately.

    As for vibration strength, I have no clue. SDL has controller APIs, maybe it’s able to control vibration intensity. In which case, one could write a CLI SDL-based program for this.