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There's a bunch of different UI frameworks, but WPF is pretty popular, and in WPF, my understanding is the normal control you'd use to just slap text on the screen is TextBlock. And a WPF TextBlock doesn't have any way to make the text selectable. And if text isn't selectable, you don't get the normal affordances of the window manager's copy functions.

I've used Avalonia, which is based on WPF. Its TextBlock control works the same way, which means the default way to put text on the screen is inaccessible. But if the programmer is thinking about it, they could use SelectableTextBlock instead, and then the text is available to the user for selecting and copying.


Semi-direct response from someone else: https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/


It’s an interesting analysis but I think the cause is less conscious and more of a side-effect of overstaffed tech companies giving too much importance and reward to tooling projects (i.e. tech marketing/reputation)


This is a fantastic post. You should share here on HN


There's a way to make your point without being rude and infantilizing.


I can't resist a rhetorical flourish :) The situation between defenders of the API and users of the API is extremely weird. If you were an alien from another planet and witnessed what was going on you would be shocked. People are being paid to prevent people from accessing an API and people are being paid to defeat these countermeasures. This is similar to people being paid to dig holes and other people are being paid to fill in the holes. I think the aliens would conclude there is something wrong with the economic system. I don't know what the solution is but seeing as I'm a digger I really don't want rock the boat :)


> People are being paid to prevent people from accessing an API and people are being paid to defeat these countermeasures. This is similar to people being paid to dig holes and other people are being paid to fill in the holes

Let me tell you about this little thing called tax accountants and the IRS...

> I think the aliens would conclude there is something wrong with the economic system.

These aliens are unfamiliar with adversarial systems?

Reminds me a a SciFi short story I read once where some aliens came to earth. Everyone thought they were amazingly smart, but it turned out they had just been working on their tech for a lot longer and were very dumb. The protagonist in the story figured this out, and sold them the Brooklyn Bridge...


> there is something wrong with the economic system. ... I'm a digger I really don't want rock the boat

My advice, based on experience: when you find yourself in this situation immediately start looking for a way off the boat. Urgently. It is rare for people on the boat to notice this before it sinks, and those few who do always seem to overestimate the supply of lifeboats.


I think that interpretation is more on you than anything -- "sweet summer child" is not literally referring to a child but someone whose innocence or blissful ignorance hasn't been ruined by the can of worms they just opened.


It means those things precisely because the person is a child. In A Song of Ice and Fire winter can last over a decade hence "summer child", a young one that has never experienced the hardship of winter https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sweet_summer_child

Regardless, starting out with any variation of "you're blissfully ignorant" isn't needed either. I get offense usually isn't intended but the use of that phrase has always stuck me as a very condescending way to respond.


that definition misplaces the origin of the phrase, "sweet summer's child" has been in use since the mid-19th century or earlier:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mGQSAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA52#v=o...


It may not be the first time the combination of words was ever written but it's certainly the first time it caught on and based on the timings where it caught on from (book then show) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sweet+summer+c...


It is simply a common phrase to refer to a naive and innocent person, it has nothing to do with Game of Thrones. Although I like how he used it, it immediately makes its meaning clear.



As a counterpoint, I take the phrase as a funny way of saying "you lucky person". I definitely see how it can come off as condescending, I just find the reference obscure enough that it's more funny than offensive to me.


> I get offense usually isn't intended but the use of that phrase has always stuck me as a very condescending way to respond.

You recognize it's not meant to be offensive, but you want to treat it as offensive? Wouldn't it feel better to assume good faith and not treat it as offensive?

The same phrase spoken from one individual to another can be interpreted as offensive or not. Tom might say "Fuck you!" to Bill, but Bill is best friends with Tom and knows he's kidding, and laughs. If they didn't know each other, Bill would get offended. But either way it's just words. Tom's intended meaning doesn't change despite what Bill wants to assume the meaning was. It's up to us to decide to get offended or not.


Even if that were so, it strikes me as odd to characterise the author — one of the world's more accomplished software professionals — as blissfully ignorant.


Probably the union proposals were not actually met. NPR uses the wording "According to the company".


Why isn't the union disputing it then?


Clearly, they are: the strike continues.


> Why isn't the union disputing it then?

> NPR was unable to reach union officials


Journalists got access to an early version of Gebru’s paper and reported on it: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...


>>"the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, for example, have tried to establish a new anti-sexist and anti-racist vocabulary. An AI model trained on vast swaths of the internet won’t be attuned to the nuances of this vocabulary and won’t produce or interpret language in line with these new cultural norms."

It's terrifying that these are the kind of views people in high places of major tech companies have. And that we are entrusting our tools of societal communication to those who see themselves as fighting in a culture war.


Yeah. That's the real story here and a very interesting one, but journalists would rather commit suicide than cover it.


I'm aware of that and, to my bafflement, the paper isn't even that bad! It looks like fairly bog-standard "huh, ok" work. I have no idea why it would be requested to be retracted completely with no ability to simply revise/resubmit or to allow the academic peer review procedure, a move that from what I understand from other googlers is completely out of line with the norm there.

This whole thing is a confusing mess.


i personally love partial staging/commits but haaate ’git add -p’. i use tig and a few other partial staging user interfaces. learning how to stage part of a line, in a favourite code tool, is a skill i appreciate for myself


I'd really like to know how you use tig for that. I am overwhelmed with the options and keystrokes that I can't remember.


This is maybe a time for you to listen and learn about the experiences of others. Not, as you've done, call a stranger financially incompetent or insinuate they're lying.


Kim Crayton has done great analysis of this type of code school on her podcast, including interviews with students:

https://hashtagcauseascene.com/podcast/?s=bootcamp

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fhashtagcausea...


i mostly use the git cli. i even like it; despite some ux problems! i've often been the one teaching git, and always make sure junior hires learn at least a little bit of git cli. but i do use a few extra interfaces.

1. complex staging operations. i do a lot of partial staging. staging by line or hunk is good enough most of the time. sometimes though i want a little more. maybe only part of a line, or parts of multiple lines. or even edit the staged content directly! i haven’t used eclipse in a few years, but its staging ui was great. side by side diff, working tree on one side, stage on the other. like resolving a merge conflict. full syntax highlighting, both sides editable. i haven’t found another tool like it. even primitive staging tools (like fork, tower, and tig) that don't do anything fancier than `git add -p` tend to be more useful to me, just because it's so quick to change your mind. no need to type out an unstage command then go through a bunch of screens. just drag and drop, or highlight and click.

2. studying history of a class or function. i use a jetbrains ide, and it makes it super easy to jump through the full history of a file. it's just git blame, but you don't have to copy and paste the ref to blame. very quickly you can see a bunch of versions all at once, and diff between them.

3. perusing git history. mostly, i use git-log and git-show. but sometimes, i want to see the git graph and quickly see the contents of individual nodes. a normal advanced scenario is, show me the full git graph, highlighting commits that touch a particular file, and let me quickly see the contents of those commits. i can do that with the cli, but it's way faster in other tools. if it's simple enough, i use tig right in my terminal. if my ide doesn't support the more complex cases, git-gui does.

4. interactive rebase. i don't know any tools where this doesn't suck. i'm rebasing against origin/master.. is it towards the top or towards the bottom? what files are in the commits i'm manipulating? what are the contents of those files? why can't i jump around between them without starting a new rebase session? i think there's potential for radically different tooling around interactive rebase, especially inside an ide. i'm used to the git cli. i interactive rebase constantly without any trouble. but my team mates don't, and it's not cause they're stupid or lazy. i just got really interested and put a ton of effort into learning it.


I also use CLI like 95% of the time. Last one I can think of (above the ones you mention) is complex merge conflicts. The CLI makes it kind of hard to read and visualize what is going on. I’ve actually gotten so used to the Jetbrains GUI for resolving conflicts that even if the language isn’t supported in whatever I’m trying to resolve I’ll open it in a Jetbrains software to resolve it.


not a typo :( search for "bicycle shaped object". huffy is one of those brands sold in big box stores to folks with little intention of serious use. riding these is so unpleasant there's actually a negative feedback loop.


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