He's completely right. The behavior of this Uncle Bob person on social media (or anywhere outside of the linked videos) has absolutely nothing to do with the linked videos. Please stop derailing these discussions by trying to insert drama where there is none.
Yeah, thinking that Uncle Bob’s extracurricular activities are off topic doesn’t excuse flaming your own fans about it. That will always make things worse, and lead a lot of people to reasonably believe that the real problem is that he agrees with Uncle Bob on these things. Especially when Kovarex ignored complaints about Uncle Bob’s programming advice to focus in on the culture war instead.
Not even close to what happened. Some dramaqueens came by and started whining about unrelated points about someone he referenced in his article. Understandably, he is annoyed that these people are now personally attacking both this person and Kovarex himself. American cancel culture is incredibly toxic.
Also note that kovarex tries to engage with the critics (or fans the flames) in the reddit thread, although most of his comments have been downvoted hard (hard for me to say whether he is being cancelled/brigaded - I don’t do reddit).
Wow. That's very dissapointing. Choosing to look the other way when someone uses sexist language is not a principled stand. We are all responsible for cultivating a culture in software development that is inclusive. That means holding prominent people within the field to a high standard of professionalism. Not because we want to be thought police, but because no one should feel unwelcome in this field because of their gender, sexual orientatien, or skin color.
No. I will personally do my best to make everyone feel _welcome_ whatever their gender, sexual orientation or skin colour, but stop forcing people to take a political side, to make everything about politics, and that we always need to discuss the person instead of the topic at hand.
No, I don't _have to_ "hold prominent people within the field to a high standard of professionalism." Don't force me to.
There is a time and place to be offended. kovarex wasn't endorsing the Uncle Bob persona and everything he stands for, guilt by association is definitely not the way to build a welcoming environment, when it's really just thin façade on a "with us or against us" dictatorship.
Everybody makes mistakes, but mobbing every unrelated thread isn't the solution to sexism. Calling him racist because he's not for defunding the police is even worse.
If we are all horrible by default then we have to hold each other accountable in relative terms. I think our association with murderers and shitty people makes us all horrible and we should accept that and try to become less so? It’s not that bad being bad, it’s just how it is.
Well, tbh you kinda of deserved it. Although uncle Bob's methodology can be highly suspect and not worth 1% of its hype the article you linked (https://techexplained.substack.com/p/tech-bullshit-explained...) was not a technical criticism , it was something which at best seems written by a tumblerina.
They "kind of deserved" being told to take their cancel culture and "shove it up their ass"? Yikes.
You can disagree about someone's comment without responding in such a crude, childish, and reputation damaging way. Even if you thought the original comment was bad, Kovarex is way out of line here, and doing a lot of damage to his reputation with his fans.
Fortunately a lot of people within the thread can defend my point better than I can.
I prefer to listen rather than to speak up, but in this instance and context I felt it was the right thing to speak up for once to raise awareness in a circle that otherwise might be oblivious to the issue.
And yes the article I linked was certainly not the best. It was simply one example out of many that makes a case of him being problematic as I couldn't find a more canonical piece on the spot.
I think you injected politics into something that is not the place for. Yes these issues are important but please understand that there are right times and settings for these discussions. To be honest, I was appalled at your comment and I completely understand Kovarex's reaction. He clearly did not word it tactfully, but I understand why he was upset.
As I tried to state in my initial post: giving a problematic person like Uncle Bob a platform is a political act. Irrespective of whether it was conscious or not. So I wanted to educate as I assumed no bad intentions.
And to summarize the point I'm trying to make: promoting toxic people will drive away lots of underrepresented people from our industry which to me is a massive net loss.
I originally didn't want to get pulled into this discussion, but I had to respond elsewhere, ergo alea iacta est.
> giving a problematic person like Uncle Bob a platform is a political act
If we are talking only about platforming UB's technical opinions, then it's not a political act. Unless you think that everything done in public should be, a priori, considered to be a political act.
I was born in the same country as Kovarex, about the same time ago, and at the time, we lived in a system where everything happening in public sphere was considered a political act. Even lack of participation - you didn't put up a flag or go to a march at certain state holidays, and people would say, he is suspicious, and "politically unreliable" (which would block things like promotions at your job or if your children could study).
It wasn't a society you would want to live in, I guarantee you that. So please, think twice before you call something like that a political act.
For what it's worth, and to try and balance the scales here, I'm of the opinion that:
1) you were 100% in the right to point out that Uncle Bob is a problematic figure
2) promoting his work while ignoring 1) is, in fact, a political act as you pointed out
3) you expressed these views very tactfully and clearly (to my eye as a native English speaker - I wouldn't have known it was a second language for you had you not mentioned it)
4) based on this thread and the post you made on Reddit, there was no call whatsoever for you to "shove it up your ass" or be called toxic or anything of the sort
From where I sit, you were in the right and you remain in the right.
> 2) promoting his work while ignoring 1) is, in fact, a political act as you pointed out
How can it be a political act? A political act is bringing something completely unrelated (like Robin's stance on funding police) to a technical discussion about TDD.
I to lived in oppressive (communist) regime like creator of Factorio, and political party (The Party) forced everything to be political. Going to church, not eating meat, not going to a rally, ot watching TV.
Now we want to just discuss a topic without dragging politics into this.
How is Robert C. Martin toxic? Reading the examples pointed above don't make him toxic (and making fun of "Uncle" makes the first article completely unreliable, not to mention the completely of the hook bit about police).
And even if he was toxic - mixing personality with articles should not take place ever. If you disagree with the articles write so, but don't attack personally.
yeah I have to be honest, I read that article and the citations to his bad behaviour and while he does seem to have a habit of making inappropriate jokes (about women "not being allowed" in 70s programming for example) he made a public apology about it and clearly realises it's a bad habit. People make mistakes, especially if they were raised in a different era but we should be grateful that he apologised for it.
I don't think "being a boomer" makes somebody a sexist and racist.
And now the fine folks at reddit are censoring the creator of Factorio on the game's own subreddit. This is absolutely ridiculous. Cancel culture is real, and Kovarex is right to worry about it.
No one is allowed to use language like "shove it up your ass" here on Hackernews, either. For good reason. Respectful discourse is most important precisely when debate touches on hot button issues.
It's worse. Many (most?) Landlords already established so called shadow rents months or years ago in case the rent cap wasn't legal.
This allows them to retroactively collect the difference of the past rents. So a lot of tenants will now have to pay massive sums to their landlords.
Thanks! Daniel here, the developer of Codecks.
While the majority of our customers are game studios, there's no reason why it doesn't work for other teams.
As long as you and your team are happy with a more playful appearance for a project management tool, I'd suggest to give it try :)
Maybe something to add to the website or FAQ? I searched the page for a long time for anything that would indicate it was a general tool, and since I didn't find anything I assumed it had some game-specific features or wording in the product that would make it a bad fit for any other type of development.
I've recently started to integrate a linter to all of my tool chains, and I don't want to live without one. So it's great to see such wide-spread support.
My tool of choice though is eslint and its react plugin [1]. Which seems to have some additional features like enforcing some best practises.
It's probably also worth posting this guide [2] from awesome Dan Abramov of how to setup linting for Sublime Text 3 and/or webpack.
I just found out about eslint and the react plugin last week and it's been a joy to use. At this point I can't imagine not having eslint run whenever I save a file.
Interestingly there is something like syntax highlighting in natural language too. One example is that all nouns in German are capitalised which helps a lot in the context of ambiguity. To give you an idea of a case in which it actually might help:
The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.
vs.
The Complex houses married and single Soldiers and their Families.
Other languages use different markers to indicate different parts of speech.
A point that could be made is that (written) language evolved for a long time and the concept of "syntax highlighting" is embedded in at least some of them. Probably because it has proven useful.
patience - full stack engineer with focus on front end
At patience we are building an adaptive learning platform to bring a fully personalised learning experience to the 7 billion different minds out there. We believe that everybody should benefit from personal tuition that adapts to his or her own needs, abilities and pace of learning. But since for most of us a private tutor is not an option, patience is developing a system that models the abilities of a tutor, accessible to all.
I think you need to reconsider your views regarding play. Version 2.0 has been a major improvement regarding a lot of issues. Asynchronous Requests are inbuilt as well as Websockets. (And Json serialization is as easy as Json.toJson())
I agree that static controllers are not always ideal considering that Java does not support inheritance of static methods, but the arguments of why static controllers are chosen can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/5193721/616974
Still I think that developing with the play framework is a very productive process and can be compared with the likes of ror/django etc with the benefits of type safety all the way (including the templates)
I did look at 2.0 when it came out, and I'm under the impression that you still need to write a custom binder. Just now I tried to look it up, but the documentation points to:
The one thing that bugs me about the Google AI Challenges is that they do not really encourage using modern AI techniques. It's all about intelligent _developers_ rather than writing intelligent _software_.
I really would like to see a challenge which is all about data: identifying patterns and learning to make predictions – rather than developing yet another heuristic for a minimax algorithm...
I like that these AI Challenges appeal to everyone and rope in large numbers by the reward factor of watching your code fight someone else's to the death.
You're right, though, it's definitely not about writing intelligent software. That type of competition would have a much smaller but probably more intensely academic.
The challenge does not offer disk space for your bot to save data so it has to start from scratch every match (unless you supply it with a lot of offline training data).
There has been talk among the developers of the challenge of offering disk space in on of the future challenges.
An alternative would be to allow bots to connect to an external server maintained by the bot author to get the latest strategy, and dump match history for analysis.
This would be neat to do, but it introduces a number of additional implications. For instance, the scheduler must be considerably more fair in match allocation as this then has a huge impact on bot performance. It might also mean that newbie bots get trounced by more experienced bots so quickly that they don't learn much from the experience.
Not an easy problem, but perhaps a worthwhile one.
If I remember correctly, the last competition there was a team who wrote a bot using genetic programming techniques. So you are definitely not prevented from using those more advanced techniques if you can pull them off.
Food for thought, maybe you could develop an ML program to calculate the optimal heuristic for the basic bot program.
And it's been a rather disappointing one... "Take the cancel culture mentaility and shove it up your ass."
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/o2ly6f/friday_fac...