Formerly /u/Zalack on Reddit.e

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Interesting. I’m not sure what the exact path forward would be, but a couple observations. The first is that I do think the lack of transparency into things like peer review hurts the scientific community overall. Often when I don’t fully understand why a piece of code is the way it is, reading the comments of the original PR can be really illuminating. Being able to see what sort of issues were raised about a paper during review and how the author handled them could, I imagine, add a lot of valuable context to the paper itself.

    The next thing I’m noticing is something my academic friends complain about a lot: the vengeful, egotistic nature of many high-level academics. I don’t really know how to solve this problem when stuff isn’t anonymous, but I have to imagine that an author being able to see why their paper was recommended against and even being able to respond to it would be good for the author in the long run. In software you learn not to take someone deciding to reject your pull request personally, but also when someone rejects a good PR everyone else can also see that.

    Overall I think the process helps blunt egos a little, and also shines a light on those that can’t get past their egos in a way that is also healthy for the community. But yeah, I hear you and don’t have a 100% good solution to egotistic retribution beyond vague noises about that being a cultural issue that needs to be changed and a vague sense I can’t back up with data that opening up the communication lines to public scrutiny might actually help shine a light on that culture and change it.




  • IMO open review is the way to go. Having reviews public goes a long long way towards auditing how trustworthy a process is and one of the main sources of trust in Open Source software.

    It can be really nerve wracking having your work ventilated in public, but you get used to it. I also think it encourages more polite reviews in some people, as their interactions are also on public display.

    There are a few famous developers who used to completely brow-beat people that have publicly started talking about how they are taking feedback to heart about moderating that and I don’t think that would have happened if they had only been giving feedback in private.








  • This is mostly about normalizing “impeachment” so that Trump’s two impeachments don’t look as bad. This is a classic Republican tactic: when your guy gets caught doing “thing” start slinging “thing” around at your enemies until it loses all meaning.

    Similar tactic to co-opting “fake news”, “woke”, “feminism”, and “critical race theory”. All were terms that threatened to undermine the conservative ideology, and so were quickly hurled around as insults until their original meaning was completely distorted.


  • Why shouldn’t we, as engineers, be entitled to a small percentage of the profits that are generated by our code? Why are the shareholders entitled to it instead?

    I worked in Hollywood before becoming a programmer, and even as a low level worker, IATSE still got residuals from union shows that went to our healthcare and pension funds. My healthcare was 100% covered by that fund for a top-of-the-line plan, and I got contributions to both a pension AND a 401K that were ON TOP of my base pay rather than deducted from it.

    Lastly, we were paid hourly, which means overtime, but also had a weekly minimum. Mine was 50 hours. So if I was asked to work at all during a week I was entitled to 50 hours of pay unless I chose to take days off myself.

    Unions fucking rock and software engineers work in a field that is making historic profits off of our labor. We deserve a piece of that.