From a read of that issue, it looks like it never was.

I keep seeing Zulip tossed around as an alternative, but I don’t know what’s up with their licencing. There’s also Framateam, but I think that might just be Mattermost as a service.

Matrix would be great if it wasnt so user-hostile, but it is :-(

Hooray! I actually bought a legit CD on eBay and couldn’t get it to work some years ago. I shall try again with Heroic. Thanks!

Hooray!

Has anyone managed to play “Black & White” this way? Ive tried so many ways I’m not sure I have it in me to do it again.

I’ll have a look once I’ve had a little sleep! I generally like GIS projects and am pretty solid on the Python front so maybe I can be useful.

That’s both rude and inaccurate:

“Only release every two weeks.”

No. Nowhere did I say that. In fact, the team I wrote this about worked on a 1 week sprint. And as I said, I generally prefer kanban these days, but note the date on the post: this was essentially before continuous deployment was in common use, so sprints were very common and deploys were often a manual process that had to be greenlit by management. Many companies still do something similar. It is far from “insane”.

“This includes bugfixes”

This is true. It’s is primarily because deviating from the commitment you made with the company to have x jobs done by the end of the sprint necessarily means being unable to meet that commitment. If the bug is catastrophic, you obviously have to fix it right away (this isn’t religion, use your brain), but doing so busts the sprint and that has a real cost so yes, bug fixes should be delayed when possible. What I said was to show discipline in keeping “can you just fix this?” out of the sprint because it can introduce unexpected behaviour (new bugs!) and undermine your relationship with the client and sow frustration and discontent with the team as they’re driven to context switch.

It’s much easier to say:

“We found this bug on Thursday, and a fix in the works to have it patched for the next sprint due out next week”

…than it is to say:

“We failed to have bugfix/feature/whatever done by the end of the sprint as promised because our developers were taken off-task, catering to the latest freak out session by the COO”.

“Emergencies can be dealt with immediately, but any root cause analysis or deeper work on underlying issues must wait for the next sprint.”

Absolutely. Are we here to get work done, or throw everything out the window to sit around and talk through a 6-person meeting whenever something goes wrong? You can, for example schedule a post-mortem for the next sprint when something breaks, but (a) more often than not, this can be handled in retro, and (b) if you need something bigger, then there’s no way you know everything right away anyway.

“If it can’t be done in 4 hours, it can’t be done at all.”

That’s a gross misrepresentation. What I said was that a job must be limited to roughly 4 hours of work. If that job is going to be more, then you should break it up to allow the work to be spread around.

“Don’t document things.”

I didn’t say that. What I said was that much of the time, people waste time/energy on writing documentation that is shortly out of date. What I didn’t say however is that I meant “commenting your code” here rather than “documentation”. I will die on the hill that most code comments are a waste at best, and a dangerous lie at worst, while obviously user documentation is very different and obviously important. It should however be listed as a ticketed job and therefore added to the sprint.

“Don’t write bad code. (Also: You must use classes and methods, and variable names must be words.)”

Yeah I stand by this.

“Rigid adherence to the “agile process” is required”

Yes. That’s the whole point. You be as rigid as possible (within reason, again, use your brain). Rigidity provides structure and manages expectations on both sides. Being flexible leads to a mess. I know this because I’ve been doing this for 27 years and it has been my experience everywhere.

“The job of a software developer is to crank out code and nothing else, especially not design, testing, or documentation”

It should not be a surprise that one would expect software developers to develop software. If you want design, you hire a designer. Testing is part of the process though, and I never said otherwise. Don’t be shitty. I’ve noted documentation above.

“Don’t even think about ethics.”

FUCK THIS. Don’t you dare suggest to me that I wouldn’t demand ethics of everyone I work with. You know nothing about me, or my career, or what I’ve sacrificed to stay on the right side of the moral line. Engineers have a responsibility to do right by the world they live in, and nothing I’ve mentioned in that post would suggest otherwise. This was a post about building an efficient team capable of building great things quickly and well, while keeping the client happy with the progress. Of course you should refuse to do evil on the job. That should go without saying. Your decision to pretend that I care nothing about ethics says more about you than it does me.

Very cool. It’s a pity there’s no option to highlight transit over roads or something though.

As someone who worked in an actually agile team years before the project managers co-opted the idea and contorted it into “Scrum” I feel this comic in my bones.

It is absolutely maddening how these people have perverted a system that worked so beautifully into the concentration-breaking wasteland we have now just to make themselves feel relevant.

While I’m presently a fan of Kanban, my happy agile experience was under sprints. If anyone is curious what that looked like, I’ve written about it here.

That can come with its own problem that’s worth looking into. I’ve got 2 USB3 SSDs attached to mine, and the minute I add another one, I get complaints in the logs about insufficient voltage… even with a powered USB hub.

It seems that there’s a limitation in there somewhere, though I’m not clear on what it is. To be safe, I’d make sure that each drive is independently powered rather than relying on getting enough juice from the device or hub.

The Pi should be able to handle torrenting no problem, but, note that you’ll want to use a separate hard drive as the Pi uses an SD card as its primary disk and those things aren’t known for dependability under the load of constant IO from the torrents.

Croc can be especially good for this.

Weirdly, I do have a “special permissions” section in my phone (Fairphone 4, which basically runs stock Android 15), but there’s nothing about adding links to the homescreen in there, just:

• device admin apps
• Display over other apps
• Do not disturb access
• Media management apps
• Modify system settings
• Notification read, reply, and control
• Change media output
• Picture-in-picture
• Premium SMS
• Unrestricted mobile data
• Install unknown apps (Firefox has this permission now, still no joy)
• Alarms and reminders
• Usage access
• VR helper services
• Wi-Fi control
• Screen turn-on control
• Full-screen notifications
• Launch via NFC

I actually went through all of these, enabling Firefox’s permissions wherever it came up, but still nothing. I’m starting to think that this might be an Android (b)locking rather than a Firefox shortcoming.

It doesn’t appear on any site. Note that I’m not looking for an “Open with the app” button, but rather one that creates an “app” that just opens Firefox at a particular URL. This used to exist, but doesn’t seem to happen for me anymore.

Well it’s good to know it hasn’t been removed, but I don’t have that. Did you install from the Play store or from F-Droid, or somewhere else?

Here’s my build info:

146.0.1 (Build #2016132551), 86bb7f6af6312ba3c0161085f854bcdff68f1a91
GV: 146.0.1-20251217121356
AS: 146.0.2
OS: Android 15

The dominance of MIT and Apache over FSF licences like the GPL is really disheartening…

Ooh! Has anyone managed to do this with Majel Barrett’s (the Enterprise computer) voice yet?

It sounds like they’re trying to be as transparent as possible while leaving lots of flexibility and freedom for users. I honestly don’t understand all the butthurt and hate.

You get a whole browser for Free (in both senses of the word) FFS. All this contempt is unjustified.

It’s been roughly a decade since Firefox began shipping with DRM available. The kill switch is still there.