There is no alternative for Discord for bigger groups.

If there was, I still couldn’t move multiple social circles to it, no matter how much I evangelised.

The “just don’t use the less morally aligned platform” argument has always been valid only for those without a strong need for it, whether it’s X or Discord.

At its simplest, the point is that much of programming language design is done with a masculine perspective that values technical excellence and very little feminine perspective that focuses more on social impact. Most, including myself, have a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss this argument since at first glance it appears to trade off something known useful for something that's usually little else than a buzzword, but upon further reflection the argument is sensible.

The theme of forsaking technological perfectionism in favor of reaching whatever end goal you have set is widely circulated on this forum and generally agreed with. Those of us that work as software engineers know that impact of your work is always valued more than the implementation or technical details. It's thus reasonable that when building programming languages, the needs and experience of the users should be considered. Not override everything else, but be factored into the equation.

I know if I were to write a programming language I'd probably focus on pushing the boundaries of what's technologically possible, because I find it fun and interesting. But I would have to agree that even if I did succeed in doing so, the actual impact of my work would probably be lower than that of Hedy - the author's language. Hedy is not novel technologically, but the fact that it makes it meaningfully easier to learn programming for significant numbers of people is real, undeniable impact.

Lastly, I want to note that the author's argument for underrepresentation of women in PL cannot be reduced to "those nasty men are keeping us out". Humans are tribal and any group of humans is bound to form complex social structures. Those are going to affect different people in different ways, linked paper investigates the effect on those structures on specifically women because the topic is close to the author. Whether you care about low numbers of women in PL design or not, the dynamics that have led to that being the case are worth investigating and are quite interesting on their own.

Of course it does not matter for "a straightforward computer error message", in cases where the error is a simple type mismatch or a missed semicolon, but if those were the majority of the problems we encounter as programmers, our work would be trivial.

It's not difficult to imagine a situation where structuring a compiler in such a way that it keeps more state and perhaps has to perform more analysis is worthwhile, since a more useful error message saves the user time in understanding and fixing a problem.

An example that comes to mind is when in Rust I tried to create a dynamically dispatched trait, where the trait in question contained a function an argument of which was generic over a different, statically dispatched trait. Since the compiler did not know at compile time the exact object which would be instantiated, it was incapable of inferring the exact type of the second, statically dispatched trait at compile time, thus failing to compile.

The error was presented to me in a clear way that pointed out the problematic relationship between dispatch types of the two traits allowing me to understand and fix the problem quickly. If the error message was far simpler, such as "can't dynamically dispatch trait", I would have figured that out too, but it would have simply taken more valuable time. Most importantly, having to track down the issue from a minimal error message, would not have been an honorable test of my intelligence and emotional maturity, it simply would have been inefficient.

Even if it was just 1% of users, outright ignoring their issues is not acceptable. And far more than 1% travel abroad or do other suspicious activity (such as buying things at a place you’ve never purchased from before).

And there are services that handle this correctly. Starling bank (UK) is a fave of mine. Confirm in an app, enter full password in some cases, but that’s it. I had to make some sketchy looking transactions and no matter, they never block your account or make you jump through additional hoops.

This matches my own experience well: most of my friends do not care about various levels of compression, nor what headphones they use - that's fine, I'm glad they're enjoying art in their own way - but I, and some others, do in fact stand to benefit from less compressed audio.

I've personally done blind tests on myself using a python script that randomly plays compressed and uncompressed snippets of the same track and mp3@320 was not transparent to me (though opus@256 was).

Can I tell the difference when casually listening? I don't know, but when the cost of lossless is having my music collection take 60gb instead of 20gb on my 512+gb device, I have no reason not to go for lossless.

As long as you hide the details in the depths of documentation of the protocol, make up alternative terms to those that have been tainted by cryptobros and don't mention any relation to cryptocurrency-originated technology, you would probably successfully avoid having parallels drawn between your project and cryptocurrencies.

Sure, someone might cobble together an API and put your token on a cryptocurrency exchange against your best wishes, but I think the risk of that is low. It's easy enough to launch your own crypto and if I'm looking to run a pump and dump scheme, why attach myself to a project that openly distances itself from the crypto scene?

Yes, they were not necessary.

Please, before you call me ignorant and downvote, just let me elaborate. I have seen the issue first-hand, it is subtle and specific to large companies.

First, companies want their stock price to go up. This is more important to them than profit margins, because the people making decisions (as are most employees) are renumerated largely in stock. Simply keeping a business profitable and stable will not increase stock prices, you need to convince investors that you have great plans which will make the company stronger. Hiring more employees makes this look more convincing.

Secondly, the best way for managers on all levels to increase their standing and compensation is to manage more people. As a result, it doesn't matter if your team is running optimally with 20 people and there's no point in starting new big projects, you must come up with reasons to hire more people to progress your career. Therefore, every manager is adamant about having perpetually understaffed teams.

The result is that more projects will be started - regardless of whether they make sense - and more people will be hired to work on those projects. At all levels, perpetually.

It is debatable how bad this inflation is, but the case of twitter shows that even a horribly abrupt and mismanaged exodus of 75% of employees will have no discernible mid-term effects on the product.

At risk of sounding extreme, I'd say that if the layoffs happened in an organised fashion and none of Musks's ill-conceived ideas were implemented, such loss of workforce would not have affected income. I also believe that if most large, established tech companies were built with efficiency in mind rather than perpetual stock growth, they could be effectively ran with 10% of the workforce.

What makes me believe this is actually AI generated art is the hands. They're all fucked up, in every image. I don't know why, but all image generation AIs I've seen struggle with the human hand.