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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Is it possible to be a productive programmer with slow typing speed? Yes. I have met some.

    But…can fast typing speed be an advantage for most people? Yes!

    Like you said, once you come up with an idea it can be a huge advantage to be able to type out that idea quickly to try it out before your mind wanders.

    But also, I use typing for so many others things: writing Slack messages and emails. Writing responses to bug tickets. Writing new tickets. Documentation. Search queries.

    The faster I type, the faster I can do those things. Also, the more I’m incentivized to do it. It’s no big deal to file a big report for something I discovered along the way because I can type it up in 30 seconds. Someone else who’s slow at typing might not bother because it’d take too long.










  • Actually I’m going to disagree strongly with that statement.

    Small business are far, far worse at abusing workers. If a small business fires you, you’ve got absolutely no recourse. They can lay you off with no severance and then hire someone new a day layer, and who’s going to do anything about it? They don’t have that many employees so there’s no pattern and no class-action, and you can’t afford to hire a lawyer to spend years fighting them in court.

    In comparison, when you work at a big company, they have rules and an HR department to make sure they’re going everything legally. Your boss wants to fire you? First your boss has to give you a negative performance review detailing exactly what you’re doing wrong. Then they have to give you an opportunity to correct it. Only then can they fire you. At an absolute minimum, it gives you a chance to start looking for a new job. Often it gives you a chance to transfer within the company, if you were otherwise a well-liked and valuable employee.

    If a large company wants to let you go, they’re going to give you severance pay and extended benefits.

    Of course you hear about the occasional incident where Elon Musk fires someone on the spot or a Disney employee gets reprimanded for something silly. But those incidents are extremely rare, and most of the time they end up settling behind the scenes for a nice severance.

    Now, I know, I know. The HR department is there to protect the company, not you. But that’s exactly why the HR department ensures employees are treated well, even when they’re fired - because they don’t want a lawsuit later.


  • GNU gets credit for the GPL, and for being the first major project to start to create a free Unix operating system. So it’s true that when the Linux kernel was first released, the fact that you could boot a usable operating system on top of it was due to GNU.

    But…the success of what most of us just call “Linux” since then is due to thousands of individuals and organizations other than GNU. The vast majority of free software running on top of a Linux operating system has nothing to do with GNU and is not licensed under the GPL.

    Let’s say I’m running Linux on a server, for a small app running the MERN stack. Literally none of the MERN stack is GNU.

    Let’s say I’m running Linux on a desktop. I’m depending on Wayland, KDE, Chromium, VSCodium, and a dozen other tools, none of which are GNU.

    However, the fact that I can use the same OS to run a tiny embedded device or a superpowered server, that’s due to the Linux kernel and the thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies who have made it into the most efficient and versatile operating system kernel in the world, period.

    So to me, I have no problems at all calling the operating system “Linux”.






  • I’ve switched to Lemmy for random browsing of memes, pop culture, and tech news.

    I’m hoping Lemmy will soon be large enough that major world news events will pop up there, too.

    I still go to Reddit for just a couple of niche communities. Lemmy isn’t large enough for there to be active communities about every TV show and every hobby, yet. Looking forward to when we hit that size.

    Also: no rush. We’re early adopters. Lemmy has gotten a LOT better in the last month, so I’m glad that everyone didn’t rush to join it right away. I’d rather that when small communities consider migrating, they can do so and have a great experience.