The thing I like, but many ignore, about PEP-8 is that it encourages breaking the rules when it makes sense to do so: A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds.

And Beyond PEP-8 is a good talk about how people tend to miss the point of style guides.

I’ve also seen this style, which in certain cases hides the conditional:

def check_thermal_safety
  stop_warp_engine if widgets_temperature > 100
end

This feature allows iTerm to check whether links are clickable, which is a really cool feature IMO.

It’s a nice feature, but it’d work just as well if it only checked a regex. Web browsers don’t even disable invalid links, so it’s a stretch to expect a terminal to do so.

I do agree it’s a bit harsh to completely uninstall just over this issue, though.

This seems a bit harsh.

I don’t think so: if you need a bug to grasp why leaking DNS queries is bad, what other insane privacy gaps did you build in to your software?

This feature allows iTerm to check whether links are clickable, which is a really cool feature IMO.

• build a list of clickable URIs in code
• let the user specify URI prefixes
• … or a regex!
• … or even better push it to my plumber daemon!

There are plenty of ways to make clickable links without adding a massive privacy vulnerability.

Good looks owning up to it. I’ve been happy with iTerm2 for some time now, and this issue won’t change that, now that they have responded quickly and appropriately (in my mind).

Perhaps. But I’m more making a comment on the philosophy of it all. I guess it’s worth a blog post. In short, as a human I am allowed to determine what moves me, and the knowledge that this was not the product of human hands but rather mostly done by a computer lessens it’s aesthetic value for me personally.

Escher, for example moves me more than the more complex computer generated art that is perhaps conceptually more complex. This is because I sit and wonder “How the hell did he conceive of this? How did he make the lines meet? How did he get this effect? How many times did he have to make that sketch, over how many years? And in the end, he kept it all in his head, and made a woodcut with his own hands!”

Or when I look at a oil paintings I marvel at the actual physical ness of the paint on the canvas and how the artist has learned to make use of the vagaries of the medium to get a particular effect that happens because of the way the paint flows and dries.

Even with photography, the artist uses light and has to work with the properties of the light and has to flow their ideas around that constraint.

With all this CAD stuff I look at a few and just think, wow, so perfect and so lifeless.

I keep seeing this as a reply but I’m not sure what purpose does it serve: you still can’t read the site. The only thing you can get from comments is that yes, the site is using a self-signed certificate, meaning that the breakage is intentional.

It’s not just a self-signed cert, it’s a custom CA cert. If it were a self-signed cert, great, trust the site or don’t and move on. As a CA, the question is whether you trust @tedu to sign certs for your email, bank, and every other site.

Super Mario World-theme world map. Just a static wallpaper.

Definitely true. I think that having a space in the house where you work, and only work, is valuable. It’s less happy when you end up having to share your workspace for some reason (as I’ve found recently, to my chagrin).

An employee being sued by an employer for working multiple jobs concurrently?

Objection noted, but I would appreciate keeping these discussions limited to culture posts or elsewhere .

This is as paternalistic as angersocks post. It’s basically “criticise our industries mode of speaking, as long as you make it over there in the corner”.

We all would write things differently based on our experiences, but I think it’s important to try to be charitable when reading the works of others.

I also think we should be charitable about things that impact other peoples lives. For all the reasons I’ve given above an below, this article would not be acceptable in many place where I hang around - even worse: because of an easily fixable, and improvable error, be it a mistake or not.

Yes - and thank you, skade, for speaking up. That’s a better link than the one I had handy.

It’s one of those words which it’s honestly really emotionally draining to point out to people, because it is used so heavily as part of the culture, and hardly anybody even thinks about it as “a thing”. I’ve heard people say things like “How else would you say it?” and “Well, sorry, emotions come out and I don’t watch my words. It happens.”

I think it’s really useful, in coming to terms with the fact that everyday ableist language does harm despite being so common, to remember that most slurs, at one time, were simply the way people talked and the obvious factual word for that group - at least to the people using them from a position of privilege. If anything, that made them more damaging, not less.

(As you can see, I’m not wearing my op hat with this comment. Just to make that explicit.)

Yes, it equates lack of knowledge with lack of intelligence, possibly through some kind of disability.

Some people write more words about that then I do. http://disabledfeminists.com/2009/10/11/ableist-word-profile-idiot/

Beyond that: The guide is intended for people without much knowledge though. Failing to address the audience properly in the title is a critical miss. (Imagine getting such a guide sent to you via email by a colleague who knows much more about Postgres than you and doesn’t really like you very much.)

If it were the case, a lot of our fellow developers would be drawing hefty pensions…

“Beginner”, “newbie”…

Disabled people are, in fact, precisely the target of the healthcare changes which are now in the pipeline. Much like “last time”, we make an easy target because hardly anybody is willing to speak up on our behalf. Fascists seeking to do large-scale bad things need to first get the public used to large-scale attacks on people, and having a group that nobody will defend speeds that up significantly.

I don’t know skade’s intent specifically, but I think it’s a valid comparison, though it’s also important to remember that we can’t assume we know the exact nature of the badness that’s coming. As I’ve joked privately a few times, Godwin’s law has reached its limit recently.

First of all: I criticise a specific word, you come up with an example of another word.

Your complaint is, I fear, exactly what a lot of people who complain about the overreach of PC are talking about.

Sure. Because you would complain on an racist and sexist term, but it’s fine as long as disability is the issue.

That’s what “PC” complaints are about: being paternalistic about what people find unacceptable or not.

Also, Godwin much?

I’m german, I draw from my history as much as I want. Don’t berate me on that.

I’m also not running around and asking people from the US not to talk about McCarthy too much.

That horror cost millions of lives, I’ll use it as an example until I die. And it’s a well documented fact that Nazis were apt at working with language and boundaries, so the example fits.

I hope that wasn’t too PC.

It seems like most commenters here had a very uncharitable interpretation of your blog. Which is somewhat understandable given the amount of bad experience folks have had with bosses exploiting “passion” on at least a few different levels. I do think the comments here are an overreaction though.

I will say that I’m personally not a fan of these types of posts. When reading it, I feel like I’m being should'ed to death, which I personally hate even if I identify with the author’s experience (and I do, to a degree, in this case).

I think this type of topic is way too personal for a writing style like this. My unsolicited advice is to frame this type of writing as an experience report rather than a persuasive essay. Unless, of course, you really do want to try to tell people what to do, in which case, good luck. ;-)

I will add one more perspective to this that turns this topic a bit on its head. Instead of doing what you love, one can, indeed, love what they do. The latter may require some serious perspective taking though!

Primarily that it is a mechanism for investors to become wealthy at the expensive of employees, even more parasitically than in traditional capitalism. Startups don’t IPO anymore, and ordinary employees may become fully vested without any liquidity (although always with the promise of liquidity and the dangling carrot of being part of the next unicorn).

It’s yet piece of economic machinery funneling money from those lower down to those higher up on the wealth charts. But I have to pay my bills too, for now at least.