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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Is there anything specific to open source about this question? If you’re a software developer, you might have to decide whether you want to work for a shady company, or whether you want your smaller company to contract with a larger shady company. Those are I think harder decisions to make, because it could be your job on the line.

    In the open source world, at least you don’t know for sure what people are going to do with your work.

    But we do know that if a company is looking to be evil, it’s probably going to find a way, whether or not it uses your library.






  • All of those questions are entirely unreasonable, because they’re all manipulative.

    Many years ago my old boss gave me an interview before I got a promotion and he asked me if I was still going to be working for the company in 20 years. And I lied and said that I thought I probably would. But why did he ask me? I believe he was trying to pressure me into saying that I would be there, knowing that I have integrity, knowing that if I said it then I might be less likely to quit.

    Except that he didn’t have any integrity, and he had on other occasions promised employees that they would get promotions and then delivered them nothing, or even let them go when the contract ran out.

    And that’s normal. Every medium to large sized company in the world has bosses like this.

    Anyway, so if you’re in a situation where they make you lie, then you lie, and then you ask them to improve the quality of the workplace. You just said that you’re planning to stay there for many years into the future, so now you’re wondering what concrete steps the bosses are going to do keep your wonderful co-workers happy enough to stick around and build that bright future together with you, bearing in mind that the best way to retain employees is to pay them more.


  • From a practical standpoint, it’s hard to imagine what you could possibly be doing where it’s beneficial to have a thousand tabs open.

    If I’m writing a research paper, I might want 5 or 10 tabs open at a given time. Let’s say I’m a little chaotic so I get up to 20. And then limitations on my working memory kick in, and having any more open tabs actually makes me worse off.

    But then let’s suppose it’s a thesis that’s 50 pages long. So I might be relying on 40 or 50 references. I’m not relying on them all at the same time, right? So I definitely don’t want to keep those tabs open all at the same time.

    What I could do, and what you could consider, is either bookmarking things or using archive.org to make a backup of the pages.

    In one of the other comments you mentioned Facebook. That has me a little concerned again with your objectives. If it’s something private on Facebook that can’t be recovered later, and you need something reliable, then you have no choice but to do long screenshots or scrolling videos. If it’s not reliable, then why do you care so much to keep the window open? Just close the window, remember whatever you remember, and move on with your life.

    Whatever you do, here’s a few rules of thumb… Your web browser is not an archiving tool. Printing to PDF is one way to archive things. There are other ways to archive things too. You don’t actually need to archive as much as you might think you need to archive. Most of the things that we think might be important now actually won’t be useful at all three months from now. Rarely would one actually want to have a thousand sources of information for any given task.





  • How many hours did you practice? What did you practice? These are fundamental questions for any new instrumental hobby.

    If you are doing everything solo, it’s easy to have misplaced expectations or a bad practice menu, or even worse, no solid practice menu at all. Screwing around is cool once you have a basic level of proficiency.

    But also, it’s OK to try it and later realize that you don’t like it.