Doesn't that broadly seem like a problem? Given the preferred pronouns here are "they/them", which is what people ought to be using if they don't know, the problem stems from people inherently assuming "he/him" for any technical work. That's a problem beyond just trans/gnc issues.
Given that for non-city dwellers, interactions with transgenders are rarer than rare. Given that the assumption that anything non explicitly female is male is still very common. I suspect foone will be dealing with this issue for longer than they’d like.
Wow, this sounds eerily similar to my situation, though I was only there about 3 years.
I left to join an AV startup and it's amazing how much more I've learned and accomplished in a few months versus the time at Google. Things at Google move slowly, and the amount of work per person is relatively limited. Also, all the complicated infrastructure or codebase decisions were already made for you, or is being handled by someone L+2 at least and outside of your purview.
Edmond Lau's The Effective Engineer talks about this, except to the extreme that he wanted to do and learn everything at Google, and even then he left after ~2 years after he felt his growth was slowing.
I think for many, being at Google for a few years will give you invaluable experience, but then severely diminishing returns on growth and practical experience unless you're one of the lucky ones who gets promo'd every year or two.
For your actual question, though:
>Now that I'm thinking of jumping ship to other interesting companies, I'm having serious doubts that I really learned what I should have learned during all those years.
Having Google on your resume always helps get people interested. Having experience working on big teams with big codebases is also something not everyone in this industry has, and there's value to it, even if you'll initially scratch your head at how to build without Blaze.
>Especially since I'm considering companies with a higher hiring bar than Google.
Curious why you're confident in that statement. I've found that Google has a much higher hiring bar to the actual required skill -- they basically seem to hire as though everyone will work on GWS, when in reality many are just copy-pasting CSS and BUILD rules from another project.
On the flip side, many more interesting companies have lower hiring bars relative to the job requirement. It's harder to hire good talent when you're not FAANG with a pipeline right out of the Ivy League.
>How can I keep myself accountable while I'm still at the company to deeply learn the FE/BE technologies to be better prepared for other companies? Should I start by preparing a checklist of technologies and dive into each of them for a month and continue from there?
Well, I would focus LeetCode, tbqh. That's still the standard. But whatever you want to do, focus in on technologies used in that industry/job role. Do some side projects. Maybe take some online classes. I think you'll find the practical experience requirement to be lower than you think. People can generally learn the right technologies, and companies know this. It won't be a big deal unless you're a frontend-only SWE who suddenly wants a ML role or something.
Lastly -- feel free to DM me, I use this handle on twitter and gmail, happy to help, especially if you're curious about where I ended up.
It also wasn't in isolation; he made very similar remarks in 2006 on his blog that he got flak for, but people mostly brushed aside as 'oh, Stallman..'
Comments here seem to mostly equate this situation to a Cancel Culture outcry over an isolated remark. That's not what happened here. rms has had decades of inexcusable behavior for any individual, much less someone affiliated with MIT and heading something as large as FSF. He had to answer for this eventually.
I sincerely appreciate his contributions to this world. But I also sincerely feel that we can't give people free passes for their behavior (see: courtesy cards at conferences) just because they've done well in other respects. We need to end the acceptance of Brilliant Jerks.
I think I mostly agree with you, but what should happen to people with "inexcusable behavior?" should they be fired once? Should they be unemployable for all time? Is justice served after decades of living in a gutter? When we react with outrage mob justice we make people toxic to all future employers. It's extremely hard to ever rebuild your life, especially now where everything on the internet lives forever. I agree that we need to turn around acceptance of "brilliant jerks" but the Law of Unintended Consequence here in many cases seems way worse than the original problem we were trying to solve.
RMS is not going to have a problem finding employment in six months or so. He's just going to have to spend some time demonstrating he's not a sexist liability before he can take leadership positions again.
That seems reasonable and fair.
> I agree that we need to turn around acceptance of "brilliant jerks" but the Law of Unintended Consequence here in many cases seems way worse than the original problem we were trying to solve.
Which is... what exactly? You're appealing to a slippery slope but from my perspective we climbed UP said slope to get to holding RMS to account for years of bad behavior, and even now reprehensible folks are using awful excuses like, "They're just on the spectrum" as ammo in the "Yes but he's a powerful man" argument they've been winning for a long time.
There are speech rights that are not protected legally, rather based on culture, tradition, and so on. I don’t know what these are like at MIT, but they are fairly broad in a lot of western educational institutions.
Those aren't "rights", those are "norms." When you engage in exceptional behavior (like suggesting a child sex slave's docile appearance excuses Minksy'd responsibility to not rape kids) then your norms may find themselves superceded.
But ultimately RMS's positon was one of political, not technical, leadership. With no more supporters, the FSF rejected him. Without the FSF, what purpose could he serve at his job?
His expertise is software development and the open source world. he can make contributions as long as he is able to swing a patch against a git repository.
That doesn't imply any institution of higher learning or software advocacy organization needs to grant him their imprimatur to do it.
RMS hasn’t had a paid job as a programmer for 40 years as far as I know. People say he was homeless and living in his office at MIT while working on GNU in the 80s.
Isn’t he basically a speaker and advocate nowadays? That career is unlikely to be very successful now that all major organizations dumped him and he has fake news headlines saying he defended Epstein following him everywhere (backed up by apparently two decades of known antisocial personal behavior).
He doesn’t exactly sound like the kind of person you’d hire to work as a normal developer nor would that comport with his strange ethics of refusing to use any non-Free software.
He was in a leadership position for a long time while also having very poor soft skills. His value was primarily symbolic, and that symbolism has been pretty much destroyed at this point.
He could try to rebuild his career, but he is 66 so unlikely he will try.
This is the sad truth of the times we live in. You garner an audience, and then you exhibit an opinion that is controversial then well, you shall be promptly destroyed. And these things need not happen now. You garner an audience at any point in the future and your online presence will be decompiled, diagnosed for bugs, and all errors will be promptly ostracized by the armchair armada of online experts. This is the age that the internet lurker is now the commentator, the internet commentator is now the journalist, and the journalist is now the lawyer. Your livelihood now at the mercy of any and all denizens, including bots, though they only give 3/5s the upvote.
What should happen is that he should either find an employer who will tolerate his inexcusable behavior, go into business for himself, or learn to shut the hell up at work.
We don’t need to worry about his entire life. That’s his job. We can say “this person clearly should not be leading an advocacy group” without figuring out a whole future career path for him.
Of course they should still be able to live a good life, but they should certainly not be able to hold a position of power over the people who their opinions are offensive towards and still be allowed to express those opinions.
I don't think it's terribly controversial to say that someone who has a history of making inappropriate comments about women would make it less likely that women would be interested in participating in an organization where that person is in leadership. Do you disagree?
Definitely RMS should be unemployable in any position which would involve public prominence, leadership, or significant influence. After a decent amount of time if he makes a believable atonement perhaps some return would be possible.
His Behavior being commenting or having opinions on things we don’t agree with? I think he should be able to say whatever he wants, and further that in this instance his comments have been taken wildly out of context.
I hate this morality police sweeping in saying that he simply can’t talk about this because it is forbidden, wrong, etc. The majority should not decide what is ok speech or thought, we should judge him by what he has actually done, and challenge his thoughts directly with reasoned argument rather than immediately dismiss and denounce anything that isn’t in the moral majority.
Yeah, you can’t excuse pedophilia in decent society because it puts kids at risk. Legally you can say whatever you want, but legally no one has to employ you when you do.
Freedom of association is just as important at freedom of speech.
To be somewhat pedantic here (though not really, because this is an important distinction and its important not to mislabel people or their actions in these kinds of matters)... pedophilia is a sexual attraction oriented at pre-pubescent children (think Michael Jackson).
All acts of pedophilia would be statutory rape, but not all statutory rape would be acts of pedophilia. If the minor isn't a pre-pubescent child, it really isn't pedophilia.
Except he didn’t excuse it, he said rape transcends age of consent laws which are dependent entirely on jurisdiction. Do you disagree with that? He may have phrased it in an unfortunate way, but that is how I parsed it.
Can you be a bit more clear about what "defending statutory rape" means to you?
All i'm seeing is people pointing out that statutes are different around the globe, and that it was rms' point that the variety of these rules is the exact reason not to refer to minsky's behavior (whatever it was) as "assault".
I agree regarding freedom of association and its importance.
But, are you ok then condemning people to homelessness and poverty? It sure seems to me like you are viewing that as a perfectly acceptable punishment for saying something unacceptable.
That is a straw man argument. I don’t have a cushy gig at MIT, but that doesn’t mean I am condemned to homelessness and poverty.
He was in two roles that were largely about PR and put him in positions of power over young women. I certainly am willing to condemn people to no longer holding positions of power they have demonstrated they will abuse, and if your job is as a figurehead a big part of that job is not being so gross people avoid the institution. He got fired because a significant part of his job was ensuring the fsf could raise funds and he was being bad at his job.
> He was in two roles that were largely about PR and put him in positions of power over young women.
1st, you're assuming his relative power based on claims in an article by a young woman who didn't know about him, and still hasn't met him.
2nd, the least old of these claims was written 13 years ago.
3rd, for god's sake... he wasn't defending pedophilia. there's no reason to say that! why on earth do people keep repeating it? it's clearly inaccurate.
As a society, we should ensure there are processes to ensure nobody is condemned to homelessness and poverty. As individuals, none of us have to interact with people we don't want to. We could, for example, build reasonable welfare systems and pay people to administer them - or any number of other mechanisms.
There is no rule that states that a person should be free to say anything without any consequences.
He made a choice to say some words and based on those words people felt they would be better off without him in their workplace. Seems fair to me, people have been fired for much less.
For better or worse, that's how societies work. They're composed of individuals who do things based on their own values.
Suppose you're an employer. Would you want to hire a neo-Nazi who has visible swastika and Hitler tattoos? Would you put this guy in front of your customers? Probably not; your business wouldn't do too well. So when you decline to hire such a person, you're exercising your freedom of association, but also helping to condemn the neo-Nazi to homelessness and poverty. In some countries, he might be able to get some social assistance so he doesn't turn to crime, but it'll probably still be poverty-level.
Societies aren't just a bunch of people all doing and saying whatever the heck they want. There's consequences to your actions and your speech. If people like you more, you get better jobs and do better socially. If people don't like you, then you become an outcast. This can be good or bad: if the overall attitude is something awful, such as the idea that some people should be enslaved, then you get a society where lots of people are horribly oppressed. If the overall attitude however is that oppression is bad, then people who promote oppression (like neo-Nazis) are punished by being ostracized, and ideas like that are made unpopular and kept from spreading too much.
Being fired or pressured to resign from a prominent, public position because of something you say is not a free speech issue. You can say whatever you want as a private citizen, but as an employee of an organization you are held to different standards.
Would you be saying that if an advocate for gay marriage, abortion, trans-gender rights etc were being forced to resign from a leadership position at Chic-Fil-A ?
An advocate for gay marriage, abortion, trans-gender rights etc would never have a leadership position at Chic-Fil-A and would be fired in a heartbeat if they came out with such opinions. A anti-gun advocate would not be allowed to sweep the floors at the NRA. A vegan would never be allowed to do PR for a meat plant.
The point is taken, but in this case we're not even talking about something that is a partisan issue. We're talking about excusing or justifying sexual predation.
This Guardian article makes me think that he has been unfairly treated. Even though I think that he is completely wrong to assume that an elderly man could reasonably expect that a very young person is having sex with them for any reason other than either direct coercion (violence, mental-abuse/gaslighting) or the indirect violence of capitalism (need to support self or family [1]).
I think it is quite clear that he was explicitly NOT claiming that the accusor was willing, but that she was coerced into appearing willing. I think it is quite clear that he also calls for more care and clarity in the language around this and the post on Medium gets it completely wrong, as does your last phrase.
1. This can include drug dependency, can also include the need to pay for "luxuries" like going to college: it's pretty much all the same to me -- these things are withheld due to force in our society. The picture is even clearer in the extreme case of "voluntary" sex work by people in developing countries.
There are a lot of similarly coerced situations in our capitalist societies. You want to eat? Go down the mine.
It’s an innocent typo, but nevertheless I am amused by imagining Chic-Fil-A as a super upscale, urban, on-trend, exclusive version of Chick-Fil-A where models instragram themselves pretending to eat
There's a difference between holding diverging opinions, and defending someone who had sex with a sex trafficed minor, right? If we don't uphold at least that as a society, what are we?
Who was accused of having sex with a sex trafficked minor. Stallman only pointed out that the Minsky may have not known about the trafficking angle, but apparently there's witness testimony saying the act of sex never happened.
I get that the concept of assumption of innocence is something long-forgotten on the Internet, but can we at least discern between correcting the language to ensure that mob accusations are accurate, and wholesale defense of a (presumed) act?
> There's a difference between holding diverging opinions, and defending someone who had sex with a sex trafficed minor, right? If we don't uphold at least that as a society, what are we?
Is your problem with the person who had the sex, or the person defending them? The former I agree is a huge problem, the latter seems highly dangerous and I very much disagree with you. It would be impossible to get any sort of due process or fair trial if even defending you makes you toxic, unemployable, and evil. What if you are innocent? Imagine trying to find a lawyer...
What about me? I'm not defending RMS' behavior, but I could see how someone would think I was. Do I deserve to be able to work? Do my kids deserve a home and food on the table?
In whose mind does this comment even start to make any sense? Are people supposed to only point out facts that contradict what a righteous Twitter mob is inventing if they are in the presence of a judge?
Adversarial justice systems require that people have a right to be defended by a lawyer when tried by the state in a court of law.
This is because court procedures are complicated and idiosyncratic and most people would not be expected to have the skills to defend themselves. The state is trying to take away a person's freedom so part of the social contract is that it has an obligation to provide them with independent help to navigate the process.
As far as I'm aware, Minsky had no legal case to answer and Stallman was not his defence lawyer. So while Stallman certainly has the right to defend him, in doing so he was risking his own reputation in a way that a criminal defence advocate (even when their client is found guilty of the most heinous crime imaginable) does not.
Allegedly? I think it's fine to try to defend people against allegations. Though they are better and worse ways to do it.
Some people like Greg Benford claimed the sex didn't happen. I think that's a better way to go about it. Say you were present at the time and provide counter-claim.
Then why attack him now and try to force him out of the organisation that he founded over something people misunderstood? They could just call to fire him over actual abusive behaviour instead.
Stallman's accomplishments and legacy aren't what they are "in spite of" his personality. They're a direct consequence of it.
You're happy to benefit from the freedoms he fought for, the free GNU, built by GCC, and GPL licensed software that runs on your computer, your car, your phone, and your TV, and all the platforms you use on the internet (including this one). But you won't accept any Brilliant Jerks! I'm sure you'll put your money where your mouth is, and boycott all of these.
And while you're at it, why don't you list your numerous noteworthy accomplishments in life, and pinky-swear that you've never said anything in public that you regretted.
If you read through Autonomy by Lawrence Burns, the author states that Levandowski felt the project was losing focus & getting too bloated, and wanted to disrupt it with a Team Macintosh style parallel project that he would head.
It could've just been part of the big ego'd power struggle that occurred on the project and saw the exit of many early stage employees, but I also wonder if he had a point, looking back today at the stages the project went through. It's hard not to feel like they thought they were close to launch, only to hit some roadblocks and need to rebuild major chunks of it. Speculation. But they're a huge company with a product that is at risk of getting usurped at this point.
Read the license on this thing. "open data set" is a stretch here. It's against the license terms to publish a trained model, or its weights, or even use the dataset for models that are run on a physical vehicle (supposedly even if that's just a research vehicle).
If I make project Foo, which leverages #Script, and make Foo MIT-licensed, by your statement #Script is now also MIT licensed in this project. So then Company Blah wants to use Foo, which happens to just be thin wrapper/modification around #Script, and is now permitted to take it and fork it into closed-source repos, yes? That is what this statement implies.
Regardless, this is why getting clever with software licenses, and giving guarantees in the form of comments instead of actual license legalese, is problematic. The intention might be clear, but the governance is only by law, and this appears to be in conflict with your statements.
More broadly, "clever" software licenses really hamper adoption. Even if it's not exactly AGPL and it has lots of exceptions, the mere mention is enough to scare off many developers and companies.
Then forget this OSS license option even exists, which you're never going to use unless you build a custom distribution of ServiceStack without a commercial license. The AGPL/FLOSS license exists to allow free usage in OSS projects without needing to pay for a commercial license.
Regardless #Script is unrestricted and free under the commercial license, which is what all official ServiceStack NuGet packages are released under.
i.e. It can be used as AGPL as-is, in addition it can be used in OSS projects under that license (to enable compatibility with the project) provided that the OSS Software remains OSS and provides complete source code for any additions. Although this AGPL/FLOSS Exception License only applies when you're creating your own distributions of ServiceStack from source code (i.e. very rare). This dual license option was added to allow OSS projects to use ServiceStack for free without paying for a commercial license, if that's not you, you can ignore this license option even exists.
All ServiceStack packages on NuGet are released under the commercial license [1] of which only requires a developer license when it exceeds the free usage quotas [2] which are only in ServiceStack commercial products namely the ServiceStack Web Service Framework, OrmLite [3], ServiceStack.Redis [4] and PocoDynamo [5]. All other ServiceStack Software inc. all client libraries, inc. Serialization and ServiceStack.Common (containing #Script) are unrestricted libraries which can be used for free without a commercial Developers license in both commercial/non-commercial projects.
Even on a lighter note, I'm getting more and more frustrated at cloud device providers changing features on a whim. For example, I own Nest products that I bought to integrated into my 'smart home'. Now Google is ripping out the API for Nest products and making us use Google Assistant. Google Assistant is repeatedly changing behaviors and breaking my workflow.
I understand I'm a tiny segment of the market, but it's hard not to want to switch over to fully owned, open source alternatives. Any suggestions?
Got the skills to build your own stuff (sensors, etc)?
Plenty of examples out there - plenty of instructables and other tutorial-like information to build these items.
For a camera - cheapest kit that I know of currently is what is called an "ESP32 Camera Module" (you can find them on Amazon, Ali Express, Ebay, etc) - something like a 5MP camera connected to an ESP32. Code, etc done up using (usually) Python.
Next cheapest - and easiest to implement and use - is a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a cheap RasPi camera module, and a copy of MotionEyeOS - note that'll make you a single IP camera. You can run MotionEyeOS on a more powerful system and have it monitor multiple cameras if you want. But the best system for that would by to build those same cameras using either the ESP32 solution, or MotionEyeOS, then turn on streaming mpeg for the camera, and use ZoneMinder on a powerful machine to monitor a larger number of cameras.
There are open source solutions (hardware and software) for controlling your thermostat (including zone-based AC), switching outlets on/off, watering your lawn, monitoring indoor/outdoor temperatures, plus tones of other possibilities.
A quick google search will bring up anything you want, but again, you will usually need to have some hardware and software chops to make it all work. The MotionEyeOS is probably the easiest thing to put together, as you are just taking a bunch of off-the-shelf components and assembling them, flashing the software and plugging it in.
During a snow storm/PABT outage this past winter, I observed a jitney line from 8th ave down halfway to 10th. It's pretty crazy to see the mishmash of alternative transit modes people will piece together when their main route (NJT, PATH, NJ bus, etc) goes offline.
Same. Basically anyone with a newer Veriphone system (which everyone seemed to roll out back when we switched to chip) seems to support it. I use Google Pay, so it's not Apple-specific anyhow. But it's so much faster to process than the chip cards, even if I already had both my phone and card in my hand.
