Monday, December 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 December 2021

Hark The Herald Tribune Sings Edition

Top Story

  • Tech companies should pay their engineers more. (Medium)

    Yes.

    ...

    After a few lean years the small company where I work found itself in the right place at the right time and customers have been pounding on the doors and shoving money through the mailbox. Which resulted in some crazy work hours but also a couple of substantial pay rises, which you might have noted when I went from discussing the latest new laptops to discussing the latest new laptops which I have personally bought. (Actually not that exciting because they're all Dell.)

    It's a good analysis. Finding or training the right people for high-level engineering roles is hard and expensive. Losing good people is even more expensive. Paying your best staff more doesn't solve all the problems, but it's simple, obvious, and works better than not doing so.


Tech News

  • Control your NPM dependencies. (Medium)

    Rule One of NPM Dependency Club is Don't use NPM.

    NPM is a shitstorm in a dumpster fire in a toxic waste factory that is also on fire.

    PHP is justly criticised, but the entire programming language with all its built-in functionality uses just 79 external libraries.

    Creating a single, empty React app using NPM installs close to 2000.
    is-even has 160k weekly downloads and itself depends on is-odd, which has 430k weekly downloads. Both of these packages are single line functions. At one point, babel was using the is-odd package.
    Don't use NPM. Don't let anyone else use it. Don't use software that uses it. If you see it installed on a server, shut that server down, set it on fire, and sow the rack with salt so that nothing can be provisioned there ever again.


  • Don't share NFTs on the blockchain. Share function pointers. (Stephen Diehl)

    No on second thought, let's not go to the blockchain. It is a silly place.


  • You wouldn't download a Mac would you? (Tom's Hardware)

    If you're planning to download a Mac, the article recommends downloading it with Catalina, since that's the most compatible with the emulator.


  • How to opt out of sharing your WhatsApp data with Facebook. (WhatsApp)

    Oh.


  • Hackers are sending phishing emails to Twitter bluechecks telling them to log in and update their accounts or risk losing their sacred azure splots. (Bleeping Computer)

    Which is not at all believable because why would Twitter go around removing the blue splots from accounts they had already-

    Play stupid games, get stupid prizes taken away.


  • May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits. (ZDNet)

    Voting in Australia is compulsory.

    New South Wales (where I live) instituted optional on-line voting for local council elections that everyone ignores anyway.

    It didn't work.
    However NSWEC said any eligible voter who "applied to use iVote" but was unable to cast their ballot would be excused from paying the AU$55 penalty.
    So generous. You stole my vote - well, not mine, because I'm not going to use an i-anything - and now in your glorious munificence you will excuse me from paying for your failure? And that's the least of it:
    "Every serious investigation of iVote found serious problems," Teague tweeted on Saturday. That even includes a review [PDF] commissioned by NSWEC itself as recently as July.

    "What happened today should surprise nobody," Teague said.

    "[NSWEC] apologises to voters not able to vote as a result of the outage; no apology to candidates who may or may not have failed to get elected as a consequence of their supporters being excluded."
    Experts are not impressed:
    Justin Warren, chief analyst at PivotNine, continues to be amused by this resistance -- not only in electoral matters but right across government.

    "We keep trying to help governments to be good at computers, but they are remarkably resistant to being helped," Warren told ZDNet.

    "One thing I've learned from consulting is that sometimes people insist on shoving beans up their nose and there's nothing you can do to stop them. You have to wait patiently until they ask for help getting them out."

    Sometimes when dealing with government the best you can hope for is that they will occupy themselves shoving beans up their nose, because they could very easily be shoving something else up somewhere else.

  • Apple's solution to developers being able to move payments off-platform appears to involve a combination of extortion and burglary. (9to5Mac)

    Tim Apple appears to have grown bored with antitrust suits and is now inviting RICO charges.


Party Like It's Hololololive Video of the Day



I didn't know Fifth Gen - all of Fifth Gen - had done this song. EN, your time is now.


Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day



I'm not used to Chris Rea looking that young.


That's more like it.



Disclaimer: Not that there's anything wrong with - get off my lawn, Chris!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:24 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 807 words, total size 7 kb.

1 "Don't use NPM"
A mildly-crazy person on The Daily WTF forums wrote a forum chatbot in Node precisely because of how stupid Node is. (He took it as a challenge.)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 07 2021 12:34 AM (Z0GF0)

2 "is-even . . . depends on is-odd"

Math is hard.  Let's go shopping!

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, December 07 2021 02:54 AM (LADmw)

3 In the case of is-even and is-odd, it was probably just advanced laziness.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 07 2021 03:03 AM (Z0GF0)

4 Hello to the denizens of the outside world. Mr Pixy, dear sir, I am afraid to bring up the Case of the Missing Years again, but here I be.
I know how busy you are doing computer stuff all day and everything, but... well, there's some REALLY bad writing in there that woild be "fun" to reaf again.
Thank you for all you've done over the two decades I've been a munuvian!

Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, December 07 2021 07:12 AM (bHHXR)

5 Hi Wonderduck!

Yes, I have to get those returned from hiding  I might be able to look at that today

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 07 2021 07:35 AM (PiXy!)

6 I used to work for a company in Boulder, Colorado, whose stated position on salaries was that they paid under prevailing market rates because Colorado in general, and Boulder in particular, were just such wonderful places to live that quality of life made up for the lower pay.
They paid new college graduates better than people with a few years of experience, because they had "more up-to-date skills." I suspect that was because several of the senior engineering staff were also professors at CU Boulder.
The company would also pay off large creditors and stiff the smaller ones until threatened with lawyers. I didn't stay there all that long, but it was almost certainly longer than I should have.

Posted by: wheels at Wednesday, December 08 2021 12:00 PM (RM7ch)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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