Here on break

  • 6 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Vetinari IRL. From Soul Music by Terry Pratchett:

    Besides, Lord Vetinari, the supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, rather liked music.

    People wondered what sort of music would appeal to such a man. Highly formalized chamber music, possibly, or thunder-and-lightning opera scores.

    In fact the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skins, bits of dead cat, and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots and crotchets all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink. Having it played by sweaty fat men and people with hair in their ears and spit dribbling out of the end of their oboe… well, the idea made him shudder. Although not much, because he never did anything to extremes.



  • Yeah it’s relative… and it depends on your seniority a bit. I do feel like everyone has the capacity to at least question an unethical practice if they see it. Often that’s enough to trigger a tickle of shame in the person putting forward the idea, or at least shift the culture incrementally forward.

    For instance when I was working on marketing integrations, I eventually insisted that we track explicit consent, and provide an unsubscribe option on all emails and text messages going out. If I’d just “hacked it out” like the harried director of marketing expected, well, who knows

    Eventually that same director took great pride in his “clean lists,” so it was clear that he internalized some of the ethics.


  • The title’s meaning and weight can vary. So can the responsibilities and impact of an individual engineer’s decisions. But there is a longstanding tradition of engineers as gatekeepers for quality and the ethical application of their skills.

    For instance, licensed engineers in Canada have a duty to the following code of ethics. To quote the header:

    Registrants shall conduct themselves with integrity, in an honourable and ethical manner. Registrants shall uphold the values of truth, honesty and trustworthiness and safeguard human life and welfare and the environment. In keeping with these basic tenets, registrants shall: […]









  • Not aware of any of these, which is nice, but iddqd caught my eye since that’s a Doom reference! Overall I always thought the Doom community was pretty positive (at least going by Doomworld forums, and various Doom streamers, as I remember them). I thought surely it must be some misunderstanding! Oh maybe they didn’t reply quickly enough to take down some drive-by hate speech, but that was it.

    Anyway, holy shit, do not go to that lemmy instance. It’s rotten to the core. I’m going to go take a shower and play through Episode 1 to cleanse myself now.






  • photorealistic … realistic … real-time … more realistic …

    We had a tool for that: it was called IMAGINATION

    The graphical fidelity fetish has complete ruined gamers’ ability to immerse themselves in make believe worlds without the game doing all the work for us

    My tone is /s, but despite my hypocrisy I do believe this is half true