Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "euphemism"
-
Privacy & security violations piss me off. Not to the point that I'll write on devRant about it, but to the point that coworkers get afraid from the bloodthirsty look in my eyes.
I know all startups proclaim this, but the one I work at is kind of industry-disrupting. Think Uber vs taxi drivers... so we have real, malicious enemies.
Yet there's still this mindset of "it won't happen to us" when it comes to data leaks or corporate spying.
Me: "I noticed we are tracking our end users without their consent, and store not just the color of their balls, but also their favorite soup flavor and how often they've cheated on their partner, as plain text in the system for every employee to read"
Various C-randomletter-Os: "Oh wow indubitably most serious indeed! Let's put 2 scrumbag masters on the issue, we will tackle this in a most agile manner! We shall use AI blockchains in the elastic cloud to encrypt those ball-colors!"
NO WHAT I MEANT WAS WHY THE FUCK DO WE EVEN STORE THAT INFORMATION. IT DOES IN NO WAY RELATE TO OUR BUSINESS!
"No reason, just future requirements for our data scientists"
I'M GRABBING A HARDDRIVE SHREDDER, THE DB SERVER GOES FIRST AND YOUR PENIS RIGHT AFTER THAT!
(if it's unclear, ball color was an optimistic euphemism for what boiled down to an analytics value which might as well have been "nigger: yes/no")12 -
Something I've noticed over my many jobs. "Professional" means entirely different things at different jobs, and doesn't follow fields either. That is, "Professional" in one field is understandably different from another, but businesses inside the same field also have different definitions of it.
It's almost as if "Professional" is just a euphemism for saying "we expect you to act a certain way, but are being passive aggressive about it so we can't be called out for it".3 -
An anti-rant: I just made some code and out of nowhere it suddenly had an awesome feature that I didn't even program. No, not a euphemism for "bug", an actual feature.
Here's the story: A few months ago I made a shortcut for "System.out.println(…)" called "print(…)". Then I developed it further to also print arrays as "[1,2,3]", lists as "{1,2,3}", work with nested arrays and lists and accept multiple arguments.
Today I wanted to expand the list printing feature, which previously only worked for ArrayLists, to all types of List. That caused a few problems, but eventually I got it to work. Then I also wanted to expand it to all instances of Collection. As a first step, I replaced the two references to "List" with "Collection" and magically, no error message. So I tested it with this code:
HashMap<Integer, String> map = new HashMap<>();
map.put(1, "1");
map.put(2, "");
map.put(3, "a");
print(map);
And magic happened! The output was:
{1=1, 2=, 3=a}
That's awesome! I didn't even think yet about how I wanted to display key-value pairs, but Java already gave me the perfect solution. Now the next puzzle is where the space after the comma comes from, because I didn't program that in either.
I feel a bit like a character in "The subtle knife", who writes a barebones program to communicate with sentient elementary particles (believe me, it makes sense in context) and suddenly there's text alignment on the left and right, without that character having programmed any alignment.4 -
In my opinion, russian nation's chronic inability to fight oppressive regimes is partly attributed to one interesting quirk the russian language has.
When talking about injustice committed against someone, or making threats to commit said injustice, the actor is completely omitted.
Here's an example:
“Надо будет — найдут”, roughly translated to “they could find you if they wanted to”, is a common phrase to use when talking about proxies, VPNs and other online privacy measures. But the word “they” in English translation is nowhere to be found in the original text! Let's examine the literal translation:
- “надо будет” — “the need will arise”
- “найдут” — “will find you”
The English phrase “they could find you if they wanted to” can be easily challenged with a simple question: “Who's they?” The government? The corporates? The regime? The CIA? Who exactly?
English language can mimic that with passive voice: “you are being watched”, “you are an easy target”, etc. But in active voice, you can't avoid using “they” or some other actor.
In russian, you can. And you will. Indeed, this is how russian people converse. It's a very specific, very common pattern that never really changed.
It's a very powerful thought-terminating cliché built straight into the language. You can't fight an enemy that has no name and no word to describe it, not even a euphemism. The very language you THINK in prevents you from analyzing the entities that oppress you.
In a Tom Scott Plus video where he tried tightrope walking, he learned that they don't say the “F-word” — “fall”. You can't say “I'm afraid I'll fall”. You have to find more specific alternatives like “I'm afraid I'll lose balance”. The word “fall” in this context is a thought-terminating cliché. There is no going back after you “fall”. But if you “lose balance”, you can “regain balance” — the lack of a thought-terminating cliché promotes problem-solving.
Russian language is the same, but in soviet russia, language terminates you, I guess.1 -
I just found out my headphones become noise cancelling if I gently push them a bit through my ears. I can finally focus with noise around me, yay!
This is not an euphemism for sticking something up my butt.
I'm compensating for @rutee_07 absence, is this good enough @oreru?3 -
The leader in a dev team should be the BEST DEVELOPER
Not the one with "leadership" or "strong ownership" skills and "team player" or "go getter" attitudes. This is euphemism for promoting someone just because you like them, or because of their charisma.
There are many other industries where charisma can play a role in leadership but software is not one of them. To build good software we need to be objective thinkers, not influencers.15 -
So anxious about my job interview with Google on the morning and that I've been up all night brushing up on my Python. And no, that's not a euphemism --but I did take some breaks };-)