It's also ignoring the fact that much plagiarized code is already under permissive licenses. If Star Wars or Daft Punk were CC-BY-SA nobody would need to pirate them, and there may even be a vibrant remix culture... which is kind of the whole point of open source, is it not?
These LLMs don't respect those permissive licenses, though. Especially the GPL, but even MIT requires attribution through inclusion of a copyright notice.
UNIX haters handbook exists, because many of us don't worship at the fate of UNIX church.
Yes, it did some things right, but also did plenty of them bad, lets not worship it as the epitome of OS design, cloning it all the time without critical thinking.
Alone the fact that its creators went on to design Plan 9, Inferno, Alef, Limbo and Go, shows even they moved on to better approaches.
The UNIX Hater's Handbook is not about hate against the UNIX philosophy but about frustrations with inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies in UNIX implementations. I have often seen people confusing the idea of UNIX philosophy and various UNIX implementation details (not the implementation of its philosophy but of mundane concepts like printing or the use of /usr), and then using these implementation details as strawman arguments against the philosophy.
People rarely care about the underlying philosophy of anything - not even government, nowadays. They care about results and, fortunately, Unix still delivers for many.
Granted, fortunately lots of that book is now obsolete and mostly just good for laughs about the bad old times. And most of the predictions it had about future innovation never turned out that way either.
The usability issues are mostly "I'm used to X, so I don't like Y".
I've started out on dos, then went from win3.11 to XP/7 and switched to Linux fully when 8 came out. They all suck in their own ways, but nowadays I just prefer Linux because it has become "it just works" for me. Mostly. Because while there is the occasional technical issue with some software or hardware, I personally just prefer the technical problems of Linux over the bullshit problems over on windows. Edge jumping in your face, the "office key", updates interrupting when you don't want them, ads in my start menu, telemetry, major UI changes between versions that seem half-baked and take a decade to be completed,...)
I feel the same with Win7 - for me "it just works" and I don't want to upgrade for as long as possible. I even don't install updates - especially since several of them contain telemetry. I simply don't have the time to fight with Linux. There were other good OSes (e.g. BeOS or OS/2) which were simply killed instead of open-sourcing the code. Haiku seems to be the successor of BeOS but it has too few donations.
You can support them by buying merch. I got a Haiku tshirt last year. I bought it purely to support out of nostalgia (I was on MacOS when Be was making waves and installed it to kick the tires once).
I am broadly from the same tech background, but a decade earlier. (ZX Spectrum and CP/M at home, then DOS at work; "I switched to Linux when XP came out.)
But I disagree with:
> The usability issues are mostly "I'm used to X, so I don't like Y".
I think that's true of some of them, but the usability issues of Unix and C are real, its programmer focus makes it worse for non-programmers, and its legendary lack of user friendliness hasn't changed over the decades -- it's just been wrapped in shiny GUIs.
> Alone the fact that its creators went on to design Plan 9, Inferno, Alef, Limbo and Go, shows even they moved on to better approaches.
I think you're confusing "different" with "better", and you're confusing someone'small almost personal experiments implemented as proof-of-concept projects as actually being improvements.
I mean, Plan 9 was designed with a radical push for distributed computing in mind. This is not "better" than UNIX's design goals, just different.
Nevertheless, Plan 9 failed to gain any traction and in practice was pronounced dead around a decade ago. In the meantime, UNIX and Unix-like OSes dominate the computing world still up to this day. How does that reflect in your "better approaches" assertion?
The argument on the Go programming language is particularly perplexing. The design goal of Go has nothing to do with the design goal of C. Their designers were very clear in how their design goals was to put together a high-level programming language and tech stack designed to improve Google's specific problems. This wasn't C's design requirements, were they?
> We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.
Go is basically Limbo in a new clothing, Limbo took up the lessons on Alef's design failure.
They could have designed their C++ wannabe replacement in many other ways.
If anyone were brave enough to grasp the nettle, I proposed a fairly simple doable set of changes that could make it more useful in this talk last year:
A classic that needs to be updated for the modern (hellish) macOS/Linux/WSL/BSD/Dockernetes era, but it is still (or should be) an inspiration to us all.
I've struggled to buy into this hypothesis. It's always felt so clumsy as a strategy.
How would that not make top performers want to jump ship? The employees who would struggle in a tight job market are the ones who will end up returning to the office.
So to mitigate that you create exceptions for some employees which means everyone is going into the office yet still conducting all those meetings on Zoom.
My theory is RTO is about satiating a certain type of controlling personality.
So what you are forgetting is top performers get taken care of financially. And they also have special deals where RTO is not enforced. It is much easier to have a blanket RTO with incentived attrition and allowing X% exceptions in secret (X is very small). Leadership (yep not management) knows and wants attrition. This is easier than paying severance etc.
It does feel like a shortsighted strategy, for the exact reasons you claim - the high performers can flee and you're stuck with those who can't jump. But, just because it's a bad strategy doesn't mean it isn't also the one being followed. According to at least one study[1], there is a considerable chunk of employers that hope that RTO will lead to voluntary turnover.
> Personally (living in Japan) I've never experienced something like this, but it does happen.
I have some friends-of-friends living in Japan. It’s interesting to hear their experience with culture evolve over time. They openly admit that they get a free pass around some of the more difficult cultural situations due to not being born and raised originally in Japan.
Hearing their stories has definitely given me a different perspective on some of the overly idealized views of Japan that get repeated online. A lot of social media posters with experience in Japan fall into a routine where they post about how things in Japan are so much better and more straightforward than in the United States (and other countries) because it gets attention. They conveniently leave out a lot of the less romantic and positive differences though.
> A lot of social media posters with experience in Japan fall into a routine where they post about how things in Japan are so much better and more straightforward than in the United States (and other countries) because it gets attention. They conveniently leave out a lot of the less romantic and positive differences though.
That kind of whataboutism is a common issue in politics though. Why can't we all go and look for every field of politics look what other countries do and if what they do is better, then do that as well without taking the worse parts?
For example, look at Switzerland when it comes to education, to Germany's Mittelstand and trades education system for a vibrant and healthy SME business field, to the US for access to venture capital and cutting-edge research, to Austria or Denmark for their pension system, to Japan for public transport reliability...
Often, because some entrenched interests stand in the way.
Famously, NYC builds new subway tunnels very expensively, about three times more expensively than Paris. What stands in the way of a substantial cost reduction? Many factors, including local unions that defend their lucrative turf.
The French withdrew from the project of the Californian High-Speed Rail blaming total governmental dysfunction and comparing Californian public sector negatively to Morocco, where a French-built HSR actually was built successfully.
Well, Morocco can hardly be called a democracy [1]. It's easier to (literally) bulldoze through obstacles when you're a kingdom looking for a fancy toy for the ruler to show off, compared to building infrastructure in a democracy.
Many of these projects were started in times where the needs of the infrastructure had priority over local objections and environmental protection laws were not much of a thing though. There's a reason most of Europe's rail network is decades, sometimes centuries old, and there hasn't been much new construction for a loooong time.
Typical contracts will require a 1 month period between you announce you're quitting and you effective termination date.
If you have enough paid vacation you could pad that period with your vacation, but it requires pre-acceptance, so cooperation from your employer. Otherwise you're into non-accepted vacation territory, which could lead to financial penalties (basically withdrawing your salary, with potential tax adjustements. They could also try to sue you, and given you're fleeing assume they'd get a default judgement for instance)
Then there's all the paperwork you actually want to have properly done by your employer. They're legally obligated to, but it's always harder if you're in adversarial mode.
All in all, you can still quit cold turkey ("bakkure"), but that's a usually a PITA. Getting a pro to negociate a clean separation will be better than just disappearing, if you're not in the mood/capacity to face your employer.
PS; There are magical words that would give any employee an immediate option to never see their employer again. I don't want them in my comments, but anyone interested will find them with a simple search.
> If you have enough paid vacation you could pad that period with your vacation, but it requires pre-acceptance, so cooperation from your employer.
It doesn't necessarily need their cooperation. A letter sent by registered mail saying "I am using my paid leave for x days from y day", then another one saying "I resign on y day + two weeks" is enough. Of course, people would actually need to know and be willing to use their labor rights in order to do that, which is the service that quitting agents are providing.
I would assume most HN users are in the United States, where the notice period is two weeks by custom, or thirty seconds if you are mad enough that you don't care about things like references and eligibility for rehire. The latter is considered unprofessional but generally won't keep you from getting another job. Most people aren't aware that European-style job contracts exist.
I've had lots of arguments with Europeans on the internet about whether the benefit of their job security exceeds the costs of what Americans who are aware of the European system tend to perceive as indentured servitude.
4 full calendar months for my current resignation period, e.g. if I resign today, my last official day will be the 31 March (December, January, February , March).
In the US we have at-will employment, which online people like to only talk about the negatives (employer can fire you at any time without notice), but it goes the other way too: We can quit with no notice. It's still courtesy to give two weeks notice though, to handle transferring work/knowledge.
Contracts might require it, but the law says 2 weeks (on a regular full time contract or a limited contract after the first year) and contracts can't supersede the law.
It puts the employee in the strongest position, but doesn't completely voids a contract. For instance the employer can still fight it by justifying a necessity for them to have a longer period, or convincing a court the contract had enough provisions to make it a reasonable clause.
It would be a huge PITA on both sides though, I don't see many companies wanting that much trouble just for a single employee trying to leave the boat.
Are the actual official Japanese words for sexual harassment and power harassment... just Japanese pronunciations / abbreviations of the English terms?
In my experience, the connotations are very similar to English use. What matters is the context. Say sekuhara or sexual harassment at work: very serious connotation. Amongst friends or in media (comdey/anime/etc): potentially frivolous/unserious connotation.
It's very different IME. A catchy abbreviation of a serious subject would almost always be inappropriate in English-speaking spheres, especially in a business setting.
The second reddit link above includes an example, where the person has a visa change and would get in trouble with immigration if they continue to remain employed.
If the person was leaving because they accepted an offer from another employer, being on two payrolls simultaneously might also be a problem.
I can only imagine how frustrating it is for the average user when they click on an "unhydrated" button that does nothing. JS frameworks embracing SSR is definitely a step in the right direction compared to the fully client-side apps of the previous hype cycle, and yet in many cases can still present worse UX than PHP sites of yore.
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