I think this kind of thing is great. The policies and procedures that have been developed for the internet are going to have flaws. The internet was/is a new technology in the big picture. You can’t expect the first few drafts of how to run it to be perfect. There are going to be exceptions, edge cases and inconsistencies in any system designed to run indefinitely. This is a bug, IANA will turn it into a feature.

I guess people don’t know the stand-up comedian Blair Socci yet. She’s kind of funny but I have a feeling this was an idea for a joke that isn’t fully formed. A lot of comedians use social media to workshop their stuff…

I think there is some confusion here between copyright and patent, similar in concept but legally exclusive. A person can copyright the order and selection of words used to express a recipe, but the recipe itself is not copy, it can however fall under patent law if proven to be unique enough, which is difficult to prove.

So you can technically own the patent to a recipe keeping other companies from selling the product of a recipe, however anyone can make the recipe themselves, if you can acquire it and not resell it. However that recipe can be expressed in many different ways, each having their own copyright.

Tech companies are operated like any other company and have a wide range of employees. Also not every tech position is highly employable. I know from personal experience in tech middle management that many employees are very easy to replace and have very common skill sets that are oversaturated in the market. Many many tech workers are absolutely operating in survival mode in 2024.

Psychopath is being used in a colloquial way here and not an exact diagnosis. Even if they are actual psychopaths they are known for being very charismatic and there are a lot of sadomasochistic people in the world who are motivated by punishment.

Further the people who work directly for these people want to be them, so they see it as just part of the process.

Another factor is money, it’s a motivator. Those who work lower down the org chart can often be desperate, struggling to get by and get used to the punishment, convincing themselves that it would be worse elsewhere.

The Idea that life is short and work just isn’t worth it comes from a place of privilege and the luxury of time for self reflection. Something not everyone can afford when one lives in survival mode.

The smarter version of a dumb idea is still a dumb idea. No one is advocating seriously for any of this because of the obvious flaws.

The smarter version of this idea is the turn signal comes on automatically in the direction you turn.

I was curious if what I had been told had any reference online, a quick search did turn up this post which pretty much says the same:

I have this down the street from my house and I asked a lineman about it. He was saying they will never leave this on power lines, just on the telecom lines. The arborists work for the power company, because even thought the utility poles are jointly owned the power company has the highest risk so they are responsible for management.

They will always remove the wood from power lines because wood is somewhat conductive, especially when it still fresh because of the water content. Leaving it on a high voltage line can increase the potential for a short. They don’t bother to cut them completely off the telecom lines because there is no risk of shock but a big risk to line damage. If they damage the telecom line they have to pay high fees to the telecom company for repair and risk creating an outage. Also the lines are designed to bear a certain amount of weight, as engineer have accounted for natural burdens like trees, ice and animals.

Also the wood eventually rots after a few seasons and will eventually fall off on its own.

I see what you mean now. I should just ignore it. I shouldn’t have called him out. He did nothing wrong. In fact he made the post more entertaining and his references were really fun. I was demanding him to do things this whole time and that was wrong of me.

I was so mad he didn’t research his joke, because you know jokes don’t really need to make sense. I was being silly. You were right this whole time. Thanks for setting me straight over these last couple of days. I’m so stupid.

No, yet again, I am saying when he was corrected and down voted by multiple people he didn’t just acknowledge his mistake, he went on to try to pretend to be something he is not, and try to save face by exaggerating and deflecting. He is not concerned with anything but being right.

He is wasting peoples time who have voluntarily engaged with him. He is not contributing to the discussion and making flippant lazy comments.

I can spend my time how I choose and if I choose to have a discussion about his comments then that’s my decision. I have not bullied anyone, I just made two comments about this to him. Haven’t engaged with him since.

However you have said I am over reacting, being stupid and now bullying, because of my opinion of someone’s behavior. All the while you dismiss my opinion, disregard my points and apologize for his behavior like his mother. If it’s no big deal why are you still talking about this. You’re the only person still concerned. This ended two days ago for me.

You’re correct, it is very reasonable for someone not remember details about a language that was used in schools for education decades ago, that he himself said he played with as a kid, as I have done myself. AGAIN it’s not that he didn’t remember, it’s that anyone who has worked as a programmer for decades, and I mean without exception, would ever in any circumstance post that code from memory. Because anyone who has done any coding knows you only remember syntax when you have been practicing in it daily. No one remembers the syntax to BASIC, it isn’t a useful language. You would just search for “hello world” loop and you would find endless examples you could copy pasta. Which he himself says he likes to do with that creative commons nonsense he tags to every post.

Sure pop-ups suck. Sure interface design needs to be better, it’s not the point. The point is he claimed that the site was paywalled, he was wrong, that’s okay. He was told by multiple people he was wrong, including one person who went as far as to post a screenshot. Even after all that effort from the community he doesn’t just say “ah my mistake, I see it now”, he goes into an excuse of bad UI design, even though no one else had the problem. It simple, just say you made a mistake without making excuses. Really easy to do, and way less effort than this whole deflection thing he does.

He’s a shit poster, who bullshits people because he doesn’t want to be wrong. I am under no illusion anything will change with this guy. His shitty behavior continues today just as it has in the past. I just made the mistake of saying something about it.

He said he ran it through compiler and it didn’t complain (which he later claimed was sarcasm), then he said he couldn’t remember the syntax because of all the different languages he used over the past forty years “That’s how long I’ve been programming, so long that I can’t even remember the syntax anymore.” and then went on a long rant about all the computers he used as a kid.

He didn’t admit the mistake on the paywall he said “Young webpage developers designing UI for younger aged eyes, and not thinking that when people get older they increase the font size of everything on their device so they can see still, which affects the layout of everything being displayed.”

He never once said he was wrong in fact he double down on it with “I’m not going to change my original comment, and I still stand by it. If they obfuscate the way of closing the pop-ups by making the close button so small and insignificant compared to the other likewise texting around it, to me that still paywalling, as they’re trying to trick people into signing up for an account to read the article.”

Again, I am not worried about the mistakes. He also certainly doesn’t need to apologize. A simple acknowledgement without deflecting into some long excuse as to why it’s not his fault or he’s just so experienced that he got the details mixed up would be fine. Also again, if this was a one off example, I wouldn’t have said anything, it’s a trend I’ve seen him do a few times on a few different posts and it rubbed me the wrong way so I decided to call him out on it, like many others have also done.

Correct, people comment bad jokes all the time. This is completely irrelevant as I didn’t call him out for the bad joke. I made a bad joke in response to his bad joke.

I called him out when a number of people corrected his bad joke (including down voting him), and he tried to justify the bad joke with more bad jokes and deflections about how he just couldn’t remember syntax and he has all this experience. It’s a problem he has with admitting fault, not about his joke, but how in making the “joke” he tried to prove to people he didn’t really make a mistake.

He did this on another post the same day when he claimed a link was paywalled. It wasn’t, multiple people said it wasn’t, and he insisted it was for him, only to later, after multiple back and fourths say that he has bad eyes and that the site needs to be made better. I bring this up, because he even brought it up here.

So again, I have no issue with bad jokes, I have no issues with bad programming. I have an issue with people who want to pretend like they are perfect and it’s everyone else who is at fault.

Again, I am not calling him out for being bad at programming. It’s not bad to make a mistake in code, AT ALL. The very best programmer make syntax errors all the time. That’s just part of it. I am calling him out for trying to justify a comment that has no relevance to the post, that was only made to draw attention to himself, when multiple people called out the error he goes into a long deflection about how he has all this experience and makes excuses and tries to make it seem like he was victimized.

This is a small community and he does this often in other posts. It gets tiring seeing this nonsense, which I didn’t say anything about until after started with all the “back in my day” stuff. I don’t think it’s an over reaction to try to humble someone who struggles with admitting fault, (not about programming, but that he is capable of making a mistake, in any context). It’s a lesson we all should learn, especially someone who is over forty. If this makes me insane, then so be it.

My response to the syntax error was a joke. Which is why it’s formatted as a console log error. I didn’t think much of it, other than I didn’t understand why it was relevant to OPs post. Then he responded to my comment with some sillyness about running it through a compiler, which further didn’t make sense. But I was like whatever… It was when he started saying that he’s too old to remember syntax and how hes been programming for forty years and all this reference his experience with old tech. It smelled of some juvenile attempt to pretend to be something he’s not. Which is why I commented about this not being the place to do that because Lemmy has a large population of folks that could easily see through this. At this point I was still pretty passive and didn’t think much of it.

It’s when he wrote the whole I’m too old to remember syntax from all the programming hes been doing for 40 years since his days on blah blah. This is when I called him out.

So he responds about his tough day, and how it was just a shit post joke and I said fine, fair enough, we all have bad days. I was willing to put it to bed and call it.

Finally he writes this wall of text about, despite being on the internet since it inception, how people on Lemmy are being so mean to him and how I could just think more positively and on and on. Yeah I over reacted to improper syntax, that’s it…

Yikes, ok I can buy the shit posting. I think it’s fair to say it didn’t go over well. Most of the Lemmy user base is your age, who remember the dial-up days of the Internets. Most of us grew up with the Trash 80 and C64s and Apples in the classroom, which is why we are drawn to the Fediverse. So don’t be surprised when you get brigaded over a BASIC syntax error, because from our perspective it came across like a 22 year old who was pretending to know what the old days were like, and making an irrelevant comment on a post about a rather tragic part of computing history. Fair enough, we done.

Not sure why you’re digging this hole, but okay… You claim to have 40 years experience, a retired software dev… BASIC has little relevance to the article OP posted… It doesn’t make much sense to post a hello world loop, further you can search for this loop and find thousand of syntax accurate examples, which any engineer would do normally, due to the PTSD of posting on public forums and being ripped to shreds for the most minor of typo…

Why would you claim to run two lines through a compiler to check it? I mean there are endless interpreters and plenty of IDEs that would have caught the mistake as well.

BASIC is a high level educational language to promote CS in the 80s and 90s, What does posting this here, and then misusing semi-colons, do to give you any credibility. Why not Lisp, COBOL or Fortran? Is it because your trying to steal credibility like Microsoft did? Make it make sense!

And finally what in the world is this CC signature. Your on Lemmy, the not-for-profit decentralized forum. Creative Commons licensing is for scenarios that involve commerce. Everything anyone posts here is free to use because there really is no way to enforce copyright on content where the owner cannot be identified and no single entity owns the federation. Unless Cosmic Cleric is your legal name…

Lemmy isn’t the best place to make up stories about your programming pedigree… it’s kind of a thing here.

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