SoyViking [he/him]

  • 2 Posts
  • 65 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: November 4th, 2020

help-circle

  • They are shitting themselves in Copenhagen over the Trump Greenland crisis. The Danish regime is increasingly paranoid that some leak, some unscripted comment could anger their transatlantic overlord. Initially the regime was projecting national unity, giving confidential briefings on the crisis to the leaders of all parties in parliament. However, since the infamous phone call the regime has retreated into its shell, sharing its secrets with only the leaders of a chosen few “government-bearing” centrist and right-wing parties, the ones deemed loyal to atlanticist orthodoxy and who can be trusted to keep their mouths shut.

    Leaders of business as well as unions has received confidential briefings as well, so they can brace for the coming storm of Trumpian tariffs. However, the regime has told the public very few details about the Trump phone call and only mentioned the American supreme leader’s tantrum by saying that he “can be very direct”.

    On her Facebook page (her preferred line of communication to the public) Danish leader Mette Frederiksen has posted that the regime “can’t tell everything or make statements as quick as other people”, telling the public that they will be kept in the dark until the crisis is resolved.

    There has been no official defiance of Trump. Instead, the regime is groveling, their fear palpable as they scramble to prove their loyalty to Washington even as Trump’s boot hovers over their necks. When a fascist Danish MEP told Trump to “fuck off”, voicing the feelings of most people in both Greenland and Denmark, the Danish regime scolded him for being irresponsible, afraid that he might poke the bear.

    Meanwhile, it has been hinted that the regime and the “government-bearing” parties has talked behind closed doors of giving Greenland a more equitable relationship to Denmark, of sweetening the deal to keep the colony loyal to Denmark. However, these efforts might end up being a day late and a dollar short as the uncomfortable truth about Trump’s claims that Denmark is being racist to Greenlanders and has failed to develop the island is that they are not exactly false.

    Greenlandic elections are coming up and independence is going to be a major issue. Committing to Danish overlordship is not something many Greenlanders desire. Meanwhile, the Danish regime’s attempts to woo Greenland are being further hamstrung by domestic reactionaries raging over economic grants to Greenland and boiling with white supremacist rage at the thought of Greenlanders having the audacity to desire freedom from Danish rule.

    Trump’s threats has triggered a profound ideological crisis in Denmark’s political elite. They are completely unprepared to deal with being in the crosshairs of American imperialism. For generations they have been telling themselves that “America is our closest ally!”. They believed America to be their protector, their friend and they turned Denmark into one of Washington’s most obedient puppets, a loyal lapdog by even the most sycophantic Western European standards. But now the protector has become the predator, and the Danish political elite is utterly unprepared to deal with it.




  • I’m the guy on that airplane at the moment.

    I get specs for an external API to use in a new major feature. I begin implementing, the specs doesn’t add up because nobody paid the eastern European gig programmers to document anything. Eventually I derive plausible specs from a frustrating process of emails and trial and error.

    I implement the major feature to the specs provided by the client. The client tests in staging and requests several adjustments. I implement those, client tests again and accepts.

    The feature is pushed to production. The client finds a ton of errors because of course the rudimentary specs I managed to wrestle out of the client and the big-shot corner-cutting third party API developer didn’t describe half of the ideosyncratic data structure they send. Stuff like sending completely empty posts and expecting empty rows to be inserted in the database, sending text comments in fields intended for storing numbers instead of in the dedicated comment field. That sort of bullshit. They want to pour garbage in an have garbage coming out.

    So I had to do a ton of hotfixes directly to production. Everything have to be fixed yesterday because it is a business critical feature. It sucks. It’s a clusterfuck of cherry picking and it becomes impossible to do any sort of quality control.

    A ton of errors got introduced because nobody explained to the Eastern Europeans what the API should do or gave them the time to do it properly. I am the lead engineer on the project and I have to rush to make emergency bug investigations all the time. Most of the things the bug is that the Eastern Europeans didn’t set up their system like they were asked to or that nobody told them how it should work and just assumed they would know. I wrote more emails than code. The client pays a ton of money for all of this and nothing gets done because they rushed into this feature without planning it properly.








  • The ship had been anchored in international waters for weeks, pending a diplomatic resolution. They didn’t have to do that, the ship had every right to continue it’s journey and Nordic authorities had no right to stop it. However, China decided to show good will and negotiate a resolution.

    The agreement between China and the Nordic countries was clear: Chinese authorities would inspect the ship and talk to crew with Nordic representatives being invited as inspectors but not allowed to take investigative steps. China didn’t have to do this but did it as a show of good will.

    And then the Swedes shows up with a prosecutor and think they can play cops and do as they please. And now they’re miffed about having to follow the terms they agreed to themselves mere hours before. The patience and restraint of China continues to amaze me.

    PS: That Guardian piece is some disingenuous shit if there ever was some. They make it sound like the Chinese ship is running from the cops when they’re doing the exact opposite and allowing the Swedes to do much more than they had the right to do in the first place. The Guardian makes Danish state media’s coverage of the affair seem reasonable in comparison.









  • So breaking things up aggressively into small components you can reason about in isolation tends to be the best way to write reliable code you can maintain over time.

    This is so true. Something that has really improved my coding has been having a linter that whines to me about assignment branch condition size. Compared with learning how to properly stub methods in tests it has helped me break tasks down into simple manageable chunks with little room for error.