Sounds like you may enjoy being a QA engineer. Good QA engineers are a really really good value add to a software team and can really save our ass. Technical QA engineers understand why things break, and are easy to coordinate with when preparing a larger release.
At my previous employer, the head QA engineer was the one pushing back at the PM when they were too ambitious. They basically owned the current "Is the next release still a buggy mess?" state.
My uneducated take here is based my my friend's experience, who is an electrician. He's happy to be more flexible than the law allows him to. Work more hours, longer shifts, worse times of the day. Whatever gets the job done as good as possible. But there's an expectation of mutual respect here. If the boss starts not compensating him sufficiently for the work he is asked to do, not giving him time off and periods of calm, and listening to him when he thinks he's nearing his limits, the system doesn't work.
Just like laws in reality are the to protect the average Joe from an abusive employer, unions are similarly a strength in numbers approach to being treated better.
It seems unionisation is one way people slam the breaks on companies that don't treat them fairly for the effort they are expected to put in. Your evidence seems to indicate the companies had plenty of chances to ask "why are people unhappy" before their employees unionised
When it first released I correctly predicted that the game was overhyped and destined to flop, making fun of friends who bought the game and ending up being disappointed.
The internet historian video made me buy it, thinking it was maybe worth it now.
I think I got like 5 hours in before feeling like I was just doing an endless grind. I felt like I had fallen for the hype, which I think was deserved ;)
Maybe the game doesn't get good until you grind past the first N hours, but I just don't have the time any more.
Japanese websites still do this. If you buy shinkansen tickets between 23:00-05:00 you get:
* JR central - you can buy, but not reserve seats, as the system actually registers your ticket at 5am
* Jr east - you cannot buy.
Some banks/government sites also simply don't want to work at night.
Very frustrating. To me it spells incompetence, but maybe there's some non-technical stakeholder who made a stupid rule once. For JR its probably some nightly accounting system - not 100% sure but I assume all the modern systems are just plugged on top of the ancient ones just like the airline industry does it.
> I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.
My favorite part about this is that since names are largely a social construct, given the right situation, we could just nullify all the paid names and start again.
Sure, whoever does this will lose a lot of credibility. But say a disliked president signs an order forcing his country to stop accepting names that were paid, it only takes nobody reinstating it. And the rest of the world also giving up on the names, of course.
So you can totally fund space exploration this way, and then society can decide that it sucked and nullify it after the buyer is dead and unable to protest. I guess the family could, but...
When bedrock was announced I was sure Microsoft had won the os arms race and had everything they needed to make an impenetrable monopoly:
* They could make bedrock moddable using .net, and make it so basically every kid interested in programming learned .net
* They could then drop the Java version and get more control over the game with it being harder to mod in un-sanctioned ways while still enabling the content most people want from mods
* And gain a powerful platform they can use to treat Windows/Xbox players better.
* With everyone writing .net it makes more sense to use Windows to develop, effectively reducing the number of fresh developers with posix experience. Stopping the mass exodus to posix since the 2010s MacBook air sublime text nodejs days.
But alas. Microsoft are incompetent. Minecraft was THE tool to turn the future in their favour and they completely overlooked it.
Bedrock exists to make more money. They don't like the Java free modding. They want a marketplace. They want to make money off all content in the game. They want to sell DLC. Make no mistake, they aren't platforming modders to make money because they are charitable. It is because they want to profit, and they can profit at scale by outsourcing the work.
That is in my opinion why most people are against bedrock, including myself. Bedrock is capitalist Minecraft. Enshittified Minecraft, with much more enshittification potential not yet realized. Java version is the only thing protecting bedrock from not being milked further, because it is competition.
They know most people prefer Java. Content creators mostly use Java. But it sells bedrock, and bedrock makes money. And if they can get enough people over, they can kill Java and finally milk bedrock
Java edition is also proprietary, and I don't see what stops them from milking it. They did DCMA-takedown Bukkit and lock a ton of paid accounts out of the game, but nothing further. Like they could drop Mac/Linux support, and I'm surprised/relieved they didn't. Despite it being mostly Java, it does rely on some natives, but even if it didn't...
Its proprietary, but trivially decompileable. Sure, maybe if the game was released today they would try obfuscating better, but the thing is that modding culture had already basically torn the game apart by the time Microsoft came around. I don't think they had a choice but to accept the status quo.
There are mods to disable unwanted Microsoft-pushed features like chat signing, for example. Microsoft doesn't want this, but it is so trivial to do with the Java edition they don't really have a choice but to either accept it or legal it.
I am also surprised they didn't drop mac/linux support, but as long as maintaining it is free I don't think they will. They have lost a lot of market share to mac after all - that's a lot of customers to miss out on.
Ok I had to look this up because last time I did MC modding was when I was in high school... It used to be obfuscated. Someone used to manually map those to human-readable names (didn't know this back then and thought the names were somehow hidden in the bytecode). But recently MS has started deliberately shipping unobfuscated builds.
So I'm getting the feeling they actually want JE to be moddable. Which makes sense because they're already successfully pushing Bedrock on a majority who don't care about modding, especially on locked down platforms, and the remaining JE players are a different segment. But that could change just as easily as their leadership changes.
But also just realized, if this changed, rather than locking down JE, they'd probably just kill it and maaybe release Bedrock for Mac/Linux to keep those players. Possibly not.
Sorry for the long wait, I wasn't ignoring you, just busy.
Yes, symbols were obfuscated, but Java software with obfuscated symbols is trivial to reverse, at least compared to its native counterparts. My understanding is that the biggest change when releasing symbols was that the MCP team no longer had to manually update symbols for every update. Java also has great reflection features that make it a lot easier to make mods - you don't need to patch binaries like you do with native code.
I think you are right in that Bedrock and JE players are different segments. I think the main goal of Bedrock is to target the casual market, maybe not by intention but by the fact that the community itself is mostly stuck on JE. I still think the long term wish is to get everyone over and kill Java, as Java inherently is less suited for the microtransaction model I am sure they want.
Then again with the rise of LLM-based RE, I guess the largest hurdle for modding bedrock is somewhat lower now, as you can automate a lot of the skill-heavy but not difficult work required.
> But also just realized, if this changed, rather than locking down JE, they'd probably just kill it and maaybe release Bedrock for Mac/Linux to keep those players. Possibly not.
For anyone confused about timelines, they started releasing un-obfuscated builds in 2025.
In 2019 they started releasing Obfuscation mappings.
Before that it was all Minecraft wizards with excellent tooling.
I'm sure it'll be fine. As long as you have the latest 90-class card you'll probably continue have nearly full functionality from the HF libraries. (Upgrade to enterprise gear for full functionality)
The fit is theoretically good (nvidia is model agnostic) but I can see then pushing the ecosystem increasingly towards cuda and some custom nvidia software packages for inference etc etc
I'm not a fan of big-tech acquisition results either, but one benefit can be that a product continues to exist when it would otherwise become insolvent.
That specific example might be relevant to the case "I don't see any acquisition being good for the users", but not for the specific case of the HuggingFace buyout.
Workflow was already operating within the bounds of the closed Apple ecosystem. Huggingface is providing models not only for Nvidia chips but for their competitors hardware (Apple Silicon, AMD GPUs, ...).
I was not making a point. I was trying to clarify the example.
But after the answers, I do think his example is poor. Models available at HF have many purposes and will run on many platforms. Commenters here are suggesting this will no longer be the case.
Whereas the example Workflow (iOS only) -> Shortcuts (iOS only), there was no change in that regard.
The unlimited private repos for free tier would have happened anyways. You have to remember that this was around the time people were jumping ship from GitHub exactly because they didn't offer private repos for free. It was something many wanted, and they were actively seeking out other places that would give it to them.
I'm not convinced that's the case. GitHub was like that forever, they were well established and the change happened not long after Microsoft bought them. There was no global shift to gitlab instances or Atlassian as far as I am aware.
You can dislike an entity or an action and still acknowledge it also had some positive effects.
I only ever used GitHub for private (and a few public) repos, so for me personally it got significantly better, being able to have private repos for free.
Pretty bad tradeoff of course, improving the situation for non paying people while making it bad for paying customers.
It was unreliable post acq. and before the slop-tsunami, the latter has just multiplied the underlying issue of their ipv4 only half assed azure migration.
The whole fable thing really did the company a number. Their filters are incredibly sensitive now and I got banned for bootstrapping a react app. 13 days and still no response, and they haven't even refunded the subscription as the FAQ says they should have. Their support system is designed around using your account to contact support, and if you are banned you cannot. How are you supposed to build trust around that. The last half year has been more and more haphazard.
At my previous employer, the head QA engineer was the one pushing back at the PM when they were too ambitious. They basically owned the current "Is the next release still a buggy mess?" state.
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