Over the years I went from making fun of Windows Admins rebooting to fix everything, to, say, 12 years ago rebooting my unix boxes any time I made a change.
Virtually by definition if I was changing something, it wasn't in production at the moment, and I just learned my life was so much easier if I made sure my changes were really committed to state at the moment I made the change rather than learning it the hard way at 2am 6 months down the road, and desperately trying to remember what I had "fixed" and why.
Granted, these were still pets, but at least they were well-trained pets.
For some domains, But certainly not all, Windows was arguably a better choice, but even then it was more Windows NT vs Novell than Unix.
I don’t recall Microsoft ever getting much traction in the racks of ISPs or in “big iron” installations, not until the late 90s... and even then it was tenuous.
Microsoft was a terrible choice for IP networking, for example. Changing the IP address of a server would require a reboot.
The majority of the work I did in the 90s was on HPUX and DGUX, but also a bunch of others. There was a lot more OS diversity back in the day.
Did you have the information necessary to make the correct decision? Most problems or failures I've encountered in software come to missing information much more often than any other reason. Having justifications for the decisions you reach given the information you had available should lead you to feeling confident in the actions you take. No one has all the pertinent information available at all times, and anyone who acts that way is disingenuous.
I believe it is human nature to put more emphasis on failure than success, but I also believe that people set themselves up for failure by assuming that their decisions are somehow flawed compared to others. Most decisions we make are based on incomplete information, so the only recourse is to build stating your justifications with your decisions so that others's may review them in the light of the information you had available.
I had stopped attempting to answer or ask anything on the site due to the behavior I observed. It was pure gamesmanship for people trying to rack up their SO score and then summarily abuse it with enforcement of opaque, draconian rules. My favorite was when a question would be marked as a duplicate incorrectly, so what was the takeaway? That solution was barred from discussion on the site?
Since then I simply look at SO when it happens to come up in a search. I'm not ever logged into the site anymore. If I want to describe how I fixed something, I do it in my own space, and only reference answer when linking to SO.
There's no reason we have to interact with gmail at all. The time has come for a lightweight, client-side layer on top of email+pgp providing a new social network.
The fact that so many people who otherwise care about things like privacy, freedom, and competition all flocked to gmail anyway always seemed completely bananas to me. It's like a case study in how principle (or even long term self-interest) always loses to convenience.
I'm guilty as charged. I even sought out a Gmail Beta* invite back in the day. At the time I was naive and believed Google's "don't be evil" marketing.
*I later also sought out a Google+ Beta invite. That one is harder to justify with just naïveté.
In order to avoid interacting with it at all, you'd have to check the MX records of the domains behind the e-mail addresses of every one of your contacts, and then stop e-mailing the ones who use gmail.
They've gone out of their way to become impossible to reasonably avoid.
Regulatory action is the only thing that will stop them from completely destroying the concept of decentralization on the internet.
I refuse to use Discord because I don't know how or to whom they are going to sell my data yet. It's possible they go to a subscription model but I doubt it, it seems more likely they'll be acquired by one of the big data brokers at some point.
Hopefully they won't provide chat data or metrics to others. If Discord were acquired or partnered with anyone shady, they are certainly in a position to Big-Data-AI (and other bs bing words) everyone. They brag about storing all messages. [1]
How do you think they provide a FREE service...in there TOS it says they mine all data you put on discord and essentially resell it...It's been shitcords way since Day 1....If you don't see that IDK what to tell you cause people just don't HAND out free services unless they are getting something in return
Good point, I remember the game storefront being announced but had not heard about their subscriptions.
I still wouldn't recommend using it for anything because of the potential gold mine they have with the user data. I can imagine Tencent or someone similar coming in for the data alone.
I felt similarly until I re-framed my expectations. I think of it as speaking in public -- even if I'm in a direct message with a single other user, I imagine it's like sitting next to them in a coffee shop. Probably nobody is listening to me speak, but I won't be surprised if I'm overheard by people. Not a perfect analogy but eh.
For hanging out with people and just having casual conversations I think it's fine. Don't say anything you want kept private. I do think it's unfortunate that people don't consider where their data is going or how it's used on a broader scale, but for those of us who use technology more intimately I think we can afford to make these sorts of decisions. I'm happy with the convenience and the interface and I'm okay knowing that the communications are likely going to end up in the hands of some big marketing company some day.
"Probably nobody is listening to me speak, but I won't be surprised if I'm overheard by people. Not a perfect analogy but eh."
Which is fine, except the analogy in this case is someone who is always sitting next to you and has access to all your conversational history - which may be public in isolation but private in aggregate.
I doubt that's a viable business model for Discord. It feels like something to go after in order to reassure reactions like the one you were replying to. (Plus any money never hurt anyone, but it doesn't seem viable at all).
