If I 'choose not to let you post on my website' would you consider this a ban? This reads like a really dishonest shifting of the goalpost for what is effectively censorship of literature. And, if you look at some of the books that were "chose not to have this book in their library" it overwhelmingly focuses on books that feature queer characters, or discuss these themes. Any honest observer knows exactly what is going on here, and as others have noted, this was not limited to school libraries.
Software "engineering" also differs in the way from more formal engineering in that there are very rarely absolutes, there's often many different correct ways to solve a problem, each possessing their own pros and cons. So, it could feel like "guessing" choosing a certain approach over another, but more senior people usually have an intuition brought from experience which one will work better and be more informed of the tradeoffs, so it looks a lot less like guessing.
I once found a very interesting definition of engineering. It is about making something that just barely does the job. Doing it better costs more usually and doing it worse costs lives.
Not much different in software. There is always many ways of solving problems and that is typical of any engineering. Contrary to sciences.
Yet when we talk about controlling trains, airplanes, freight ships, medical devices, nuclear power plants and space stuff we suddenly know how to do it?
There is software engineering and it is known how to do things that absolutely must not fail. It is just thst these standard are not commonly deployed if nobody forces you to deploy them. And why would you? Costs money and a software error is widely treated like divine intervention.
There is a big difference between knowing something must not fail, and how to make it so it will not fail. The latter is where opinions and approaches often differ, in ways that more formal engineering does not.
I'm very wary of anyone in tech/software eng that says "this is the only right way to do this." I'm aware those attitudes exist everywhere.
> There’s not enough women in technology. What a fucked up industry. That needs to change. I’ve been trying to be more encouraging and helpful to the women engineers in our org, but I don’t know what else to do. Same with black engineers. What the hell?
See what the current thought leaders in tech believe and say out loud and this makes a lot more sense.
This would indicate wherever they were hosting their site on no longer exists. 503's even on pages that should mostly be static suggest the backend no longer exists, or whatever ingress they're using in front of it disappeared. As far as I can tell every single page on their site is 503'ing.
They are putting out a lot of stuff that to me is very obvious to read between the lines what led to this because I've been brought in to clean messes like this before:
>The goal of the current maintenance is to fix a lot of long-standing issues with the site. The underlying infrastructure was getting very fragile as technical debt accumulated over time. A team is working very hard right now to make sure that once the site is back up, it's on much better footing and will be solid and reliable for the long term. Despite the unfortunate amount of time this is taking, it will be a major benefit to the site in the long run.
They are saying it was "spring cleaning" or a migration that took out the site for days. "infrastructure getting very fragile" reeks of bad or nonexistent ops practices, probably very little or unreliable IAC (if any, I've seen shops get by for 10+ years by just clicking things in console, til unfortunately it gets to this point).
This though, rubs me the wrong way:
> We want to offer a much better quality of service going foward. We understand that the lack of communication has been frustrating, and I have been closely watching social media and reporting the community's feelings up the chain, so your voices are being heard. The plan was not to have a long outage like this, but due to factors beyond the dev team's control, things have taken much longer than anticipated. Please be patient with us - I will keep updating here and on our other social media.
"Factors beyond the dev teams control." Sorry, no. If you have an ops team, you don't get to toss blame over the wall like that, and if you don't, you have no one to blame but yourselves. I feel bad for whoever the unofficial official ops dude is right now. These kind of infrastructure "tech debt" woopsies come from years of people just not giving a crap to doing things properly, it's never seen as important until it suddenly is. Hope they learn a lesson and hire an infrastructure guy properly. There's long been a persistent delusion in the pure dev world that they should be able to be completely agnostic to the hardware lying underneath their beautiful code - ideally yes, in practice almost never, unless you come from a place that has the significant resources to make something nice like that, or are willing to pay out the azz for managed cloud services or licenses.
It is entirely possible, especially in small companies in my experience, that “factors beyond the dev teams control” means “technical founder with severe myopia and decision fatigue who prevents “complexity”” as they see it, which for them means everything you discuss here as being necessary.
It can be as simple as a terraform apply wiping out huge swaths of the backend infra, getting that back, depending on how disciplined you are, can take in the order of days/weeks.
This is a great, reflective article that made me think of specific situations I've been in with people in my career that did not possess the same level of introspection. They are everywhere, which is why those interview questions he mentions get asked.
Particularly though, this hit home -
> The interviews were not silent on my end. I was not freezing and saying nothing. I was pretending. I was trying to sound like I knew, hoping the interviewer would believe me and move on. They always knew. You cannot fake technical answers in front of people who have asked the same questions hundreds of times. Looking back, that performance was worse than just saying I do not know. It wasted their time and it delayed my own learning.
This is the thing that absolutely maddens me with some people who I have worked very closely with before. They don't know enough to know that they don't know, but either are so insecure or with outsized ego, they cannot admit it publicly, because that threatens their sense of expertise. They also aren't willing or able to do the "boring" work to catch up (that the author mentions at one point). The farther you go into your career without getting past what this guy went through, the worse it gets, and you'd be shocked how long some people can last living in this world, which to me looks like hell.
I've had people confidently tell me stuff about niche areas of my expertise I knew they'd never worked on in their life, and start trying to drive decisions around those things based on that fake expertise, and being in the awkward spot of "do I protect their ego, let them fail, or tell them to please listen to me?" But I found when you do the latter, it falls on deaf ears, because they do not know enough to even understand that you can tell the confabulated responses they give to questions tell me immediately they have no effing clue what they're talking about, so any feedback will just be interpreted as threatening or incorrect.
I'm positive I have done this in the past, not saying I am perfect, but entering a mid to mid senior part of my career now and having worked with a ton of different people, when I see it now, I'm very unsure how to deal with it. This guy, bless his heart because it's so honest, likely received tons of direct feedback he wouldn't or couldn't listen to.
But it almost doesn't matter anymore - the bribing is being done so much in plain sight anymore, that these mechanisms are hardly needed anyway. It is a cultural rot that won't be fixed by "just make some rule," the people making the rules are the ones benefiting the most from the corruption.
If every employee at a corporation has the right to free speech and to make political donations, why should the corporation itself have need of such rights? Just because big money won in 2010 doesn't mean the ruling should go unchallenged for all time.
People, not capital, should have rights, because rights are there to protect people from power.
I'm not being supportive of it, I'm explaining how unlikely it is that this ruling will be overturned. It tends to be very rare, especially a scope of 1st amendment ruling. that's just how that court works, and if it does happen, is on decades time scales, not a matter of a year or two, which is sort of what is needed right now. I would say in this case it's essentially impossible, given that this same SC also ruled that it's acceptable for they themselves to get "gifts" from politically motivated persons, as long as the gift is received after the act done, and no explicit quid pro quo conversation happened. In other words, they literally legalized bribery. There is no universe this court or any future court overturns this, the levers of power have been seized, no one is coming to save anyone, "vote harder" isn't going to work. If that sounds fatalistic or hard to read, sorry, but people have been predicting this outcome for 20+ years and nothing has come close to being done about it, much the opposite.
This is what I don't understand as a non-American. Why is this creeping corruption not opposed? What happened to, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"?
A CBC political commentator recently said, "America is not this way because Trump is president. Trump is president because America is this way." Things aren't going to magically improve if the Democrats win the mid-terms or the next election. America is this way and will likely get worse. Her former friends and allies need to take steps to protect themselves.
> This is what I don't understand as a non-American. Why is this creeping corruption not opposed? What happened to, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"?
This is just one person's POV that I would say is more informed than the average american, by no means an expert -
I would say to answer your question very simply - most Americans, if you asked, would have no idea about the Supreme Court in general, let alone the nuances of those rulings I have linked up thread, let alone the implications of them. Americans are raised from a very early age, in school and reinforced by culture, that their institutions and rights are unflappable and almost even incapable of error or harm - while simultaneously teaching historical lessons that blatantly show this isn't true, like chattel slavery, women's sufferage, civil war, etc. This creates a sort of cognitive dissonance that I can't really explain but seems to make people incapable of seeing any harm done by their own systems.
That's one area. The other area is, in the current environment, major news sources are mostly coming from social media these days, that is gamed to hell, and the news sources themselves are bought and paid for by people with corrupt interests. So even getting a fair view of what's actually happening requires work, and a lot of critical thought because there's so much bs out there, that most people just won't bother.
The other thing is that if anyone does push the line a bit and tries to challenge things, if it becomes threatening to the mainstream narrative or people in power, gets squelched, sometimes brutally, by these same systems. A really good example of this is the widespread censorship (explicit censorship, and things like shadow bans/watch lists inducing fear to make people self censor) of the Gaza "conflict" - and this started in the Biden admin, it wasn't really one particular party at all. You can see the same silencing effect happen when any progressive upstart begins threatening the establishment party, they just get outspent. There was one incident in a California senator race, due to it's "top 2" system, where a democrat actually spent money on his likely republican opponent's campaign to push out the progressive, because he felt he would be easier to beat than his progressive challenger.
A system like that cannot possibly function fairly or in the interest of its own people. I do not see how the union is preserved, this is too unstable. I do not want to live through it.
> "America is not this way because Trump is president. Trump is president because America is this way."
Trivially true, of course.
> Things aren't going to magically improve if the Democrats win the mid-terms or the next election.
Also true but far from trivial for the vast majority of the US population. The medias of all sorts fervently maintain the illusion that electing the other party is going to fix the damage done by the current one, ad infinitum.
Anyone who dares to challenge the above orthodoxy is quickly canceled/shouted-down/name-called/downvoted/etc into oblivion by bot farms with the latest AI at their disposal.
> Her former friends and allies need to take steps to protect themselves.
I don't see a big difference in the situation of former friends and allies. More likely than not they'd be sold a veiled version of the same, in other words, they'd follow - under the usual vague slogans which mean different things for their authors and audience. To be precise, if there is a way out of this mess, America and her former friends will have to find it, and walk on it, together.
> America is this way and will likely get worse.
Only if we keep wasting time in fatalistic contemplation and fruitless hopes of finding hiding places individually.
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