@ajroach42 I've always wondered if it would be possible to have some kind of "poison pill" become standard in rights agreements with big publishers. Essentially a clause that says "I'll sell you the rights to this, but you have to actually do something with it within a reasonable time or I get them back"

CC is fantastic, of course, but I also understand why artists are nervous about it scaring off studios — some kind of "poison pill Creative Commons" would be cool, if that's even possible

Of course the ideal thing would be to reform our insane copyright terms and supporting system, but I'm not holding my breath on that…

@daniel in my experience, "hey it hasn't been changed in a while" doesn't really carry much signal

Bitrot is, of course, a real thing. But it's so variable that code age doesn't really tell you if it's a problem. Recent code is likely less tested, but not always. Older code could be abandoned or broken in subtle ways, but not always.

Code that's old but lots of people are actively using tends to be a really good thing (but, again, not always), because it means it's been tested 8 ways from Sunday and no one is having reportable problems. Problem is people think "old = abandoned and abandoned means bugs"; but that has so many exceptions that it's not nearly as useful as people think.

@mdhughes nah, this is solveable by educating the newer/younger folks that "time since commit" isn't as strong an indicator of utility as they assume, especially for internal projects

I want to fix the perception problem, not reinforce it. One of the perks of having seniority and authority in an org is you can actually improve culture

Hey Cal, are you the maintainer of this tool we use in our build?

(ooh, maybe they're asking about adding a new feature!) Yeah, what's up?

The last commit was 3 years ago…

Seems right, yeah

Shouldn't it be updated?

If there's a problem to solve or an improvement, then of course. What do you need?

I can't think of anything, it just seems kind of old

When you write careful code, it doesn't rot as quickly…

Breathe, Cal. Breathe.

Never release on a Friday because if something goes wrong you make people work a weekend

Never release on a Thursday for the same reason

Never release on a Monday, because if something goes wrong you could tank a week of dev work. Same with Tuesday.

Never release on Wednesday because that's when everyone else releases and your chance of an integration break is too high.

Never release. Run into the wild, let your feet touch grass, be free of the chains

Oh for fucks sake: no, blocking people or domains is not censorship. It’s freedom of association. I’m not silencing you, I’m walking away from you.

If I ever build something that depends on a CDN to work reasonably, I'm going to pour myself a large glass of Bourbon and decide it's time to retire

@c0debabe because there are people and orgs who have been using WordPerfect suite for years and changing workflows, retraining users, doing format conversion of a long history of documents, rewriting macros/updating integrations, etc. are more expensive than just buying an upgrade

In other words, the exact same reasons people still buy MS Office

@tricia @socketwench this is partly because Monopoly was designed as an anti-capitalist game; it was meant to show the negative impact of concentrating property in few hands

Parker Brothers bought it from a different person, and when they found out that the anti-capitalist lady who invented it had a claim they pressured her into accepting a buy out

@Anarkat those systems sure do like to make those claims (precluding accountability and regulation), but it's not actually true. They're novel enough not to fall under most existing regulatory regimes, but lack of regulation in that space is based on a lack of political will only. If regulators/legislators want to regulate cryptocurrency or NFTs or anything in that class, they absolutely can effectively do so; the only issue is they haven't figured out if they want to or what the best of many approaches would be for their goals.

Cryptobros are mistaking "regulation moves slowly in response to disruption" for some kind of systemic resistance that just isn't there.

@Anarkat and if the fraudsters are cautious, it is difficult and expensive to uncover their identities. Perfect storm

@Anarkat since most jurisdictions are treating cryptocoins et al as property, you have theoretical recourse through the legal system. Basically, you can sue to get the value returned to you even if the literal coins/whatever aren't refundable. That's impractical to do, but no more impractical than it is with being defrauded of cash (the other common fraudster target).

The main advantages fraudsters have with crypto are: (1) some of the scams are legal, (2) it's difficult to identify the payee if they're cautious, (3) it's easy to defraud people who are in different jurisdictions, (4) it's hard to get the legal system to understand and act on the fraud

(Sorry, defending against frauds and scams is a part of my work, so I get super nerdy about this stuff)

@waterbear they don't have an out. They tried to take their out; they quit. The court said they aren't allowed to do that until their employer chooses to hire replacements.

It's not just "wage slavery", it's compelled labor. It might not be chattel slavery, but that's still slavery by any sane definition

@Anarkat

I try not to be petty, I really do. But a former boss who constantly told me I would never amount to anything, made regular homophobic jokes, and was just generally a shithead to me and my coworkers reached out to ask if I'd put a word in for him at my current employer

I probably should have just stopped at giving an honest and professional summary to the hiring manager. But in this one case, I definitely decided to be petty and I don't regret it for even a second

I pulled zero punches. His candidacy has been pulled, and the hiring manager told him that the reason was: based on my assessment of his character, she had serious concerns about his professional judgement

I probably shouldn't be happy. But I am.