vinniep

*Second best army in Russia

I understand your viewpoint, but don't subscribe. Voting isn't about supporting a system. The system exists, with or without your participation. Shy of a full blown civil war (which is more likely to make this worse than better), the only way to change the system is to use the system to change itself. The general election in November every 4 years is the last stage of a long process that starts with local parties and elections, weaves through the primary process, and culminates on election day. We need more people that are dissatisfied with the candidates to get more involved, not less, and to go to the early phases where a smaller number of active participants can have an outsized impact on the whole system. To me, one of the many alternative voting systems would be a huge improvement (I have preferences, but honestly just about every one of them is better than the First Past the Post system we use), so advocating for that and supporting local candidates that can push those ideas forward is where my energies go.

Both parties actively try to give voters from the other party reasons to be dissatisfied and disengaged. Don't play into it.

Also

If enough people stop treating third parties like a wasted vote,

People might if any of the third parties had a serious candidate and a serious governing platform. Each of them is fundamentally flawed in one way or another, and a few of them are flawed from top to bottom. I get that you're dissatisfied with the status quo, but which one of these 3rd parties would be able to actually govern and not make a complete and utter mess of everything? Could you imagine if one of the major 3rd parties actually won? It would be an unmitigated disaster.

Unfortunately, that means that you're taking a vote away from the candidate from the two main parties that is closest to your views, which helps the candidate you oppose the most.

The two party system is truly problematic, but when it comes to November you have two options currently and voting for a 3rd party has the same impact as not voting at all. Voting for the candidate that you oppose the least lets you put a finger on the scale to at least try to avoid the worst possible outcome relative to your beliefs and values.

I absolutely agree, but you're talking about a situation where we already have 10 different ways and 20 EC2 instances. When you get to that point (or start approaching it), yeah, do the complex thing - no argument at all. The challenge is to wait until the last responsible moment to make that pivot and to not dive deeper into the complexity than you need at the current time and place. I've worked with countless small companies and teams in the past that have created whole K8s clusters, Terraform provisioning plans, and the whole kit for a single low volume service because "we'll need it when things scale out later" and later never arrives.

This is great until

I think that's the point. Don't jump to the complex right away. Keep it simple and compose the capabilities you have readily available until you need to become more complex. When the task requires it, yeah, do the complex thing, but keep the simplicity mandate in mind and only add the new complexity that you need. You can get pretty far with the simple, and what about all of the situations where that future pivot or growth never happens?

The philosophy strikes a cord with me - I'm often contending with teams that are building for the future complexities that they think might come up, and we realize later that we did get complexity in the problem later, but not the kind we had planned for, so all of that infrastructure and planning was wasted on an imaginary problem that no only didn't help us but often actually make our task harder. The trick is to keep the solution set composable and flexible so that if complexity shows up later, we can reconfigure and build the new capabilities that we need rather than having to maneuver a large complicated system that we built on a white board before we really knew what the problem looked like.

Yeah, I don't think the dying on the inside is the particular sort dying that is notable here.

The Google Reader shutdown hit me hard also. They offered all of the features in a really great app and many of the competitors shut down in their wake, so when they exited the scene, it left a huge hole.

In the US, there is rarely, if ever, a contract. Unless you can show that you were let go for a legally protected cause (your age, race, religion, gender, and some other things), employers can fire you without any reason at all.

The only caveat here is the differentiation between for cause and without cause, as it impacts your ability to collect unemployment insurance payments. Employers pay those insurance premiums to the government and they are based on how often people let go from that company claim the insurance payments, so a company that lets go of a lot of employees is going to pay more than one that manages to find a way to fire them for cause or get them to quit.

I think this is very likely, though it's also prolonging this whole exercise by avoiding the dramatic conclusion and spreading the pain out over a longer time.

If every manager at Amazon woke up tomorrow and said "screw it, we're enforcing this policy", that would result in a mass firing event of quality talent, and Amazon would feel the pain of their policy decisions and either have to swallow that and try to move on or beat a hasty retreat and call this whole thing off. It would be a quick and decisive end to this whole debate, but instead we have month after month of employees stressed and angry while looking rebellious and unmanageable, managers stressed and frustrated while looking ineffective, and the senior leadership frustrated and looking impotent.

Someone's going to win this fight eventually, but everyone trying to find middle ground and skirt the policy just takes what would be one big fight and turns it into many months of slow unease and turmoil that's bad for everyone. I want the remote people to win this, but sometimes the way to win is the lose on purpose. Let the dog catch the car so he can realize what an idiot he was being.

The bit that kills me is that “make Google Chat not suck” doesn’t seem to be in the list of options for addressing this problem at all. I work for a company that uses GSuite and chat is universally loathed with a bunch of Slack instances running around the company, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. If they spent time working to improve chat, the momentum of being a GSuite company would carry the rest of the weight here. It doesn’t have to be better than Slack, just closer.

China coming in with the latest in new tech for people with too much money to accidentally kill themselves. The finest innovation in the field since the Cesna.

Unity did a bad thing, but the stock sale here is a complete non-event.

According to Guru Focus, Unity CEO John Riccitiello, one of the highest-paid bosses in gaming, sold 2,000 Unity shares on September 6, a week prior to its September 12 announcement. Guru Focus notes that this follows a trend, reporting that Riccitiello has sold a total of 50,610 shares this year, and purchased none.

He receives and sells stock constantly, as do most execs of publicly traded companies. Their compensation is majority stock, which incentivizes them to maximize stock prices since a higher price means more money RIGHT NOW for them. Look up any publicly traded company and peek at their insider trading info. Microsoft as a random reference and here's Unity so you can see everyone else and the long term trends.

The piece cites Guru Focus as their source of this info as if they have some keen inside information or something, but it's literally public data that anyone with an internet connection can look up as these sorts of notices are required for publicly traded companies. Riccitiello only sold about $83k worth of stock before the announcement for a total of about $1.1M worth of stock this year, vs about $33M last year, and close to $100M in 2021. The idea that he dumped $83k worth of stock to beat bad news Unity was dropping is just a hilariously bad take.