Daily Tech News 6 December 2021

• Tech companies should pay their engineers more. (Medium)
  
  Yes.
  
  ...
  
  After a few lean years the small company where I work found itself in the right place at the right time and customers have been pounding on the doors and shoving money through the mailbox. Which resulted in some crazy work hours but also a couple of substantial pay rises, which you might have noted when I went from discussing the latest new laptops to discussing the latest new laptops which I have personally bought. (Actually not that exciting because they're all Dell.)
  
  It's a good analysis. Finding or training the right people for high-level engineering roles is hard and expensive. Losing good people is even more expensive. Paying your best staff more doesn't solve all the problems, but it's simple, obvious, and works better than not doing so.
  
  
  

• Control your NPM dependencies. (Medium)
  
  Rule One of NPM Dependency Club is Don't use NPM.
  
  NPM is a shitstorm in a dumpster fire in a toxic waste factory that is also on fire.
  
  PHP is justly criticised, but the entire programming language with all its built-in functionality uses just 79 external libraries.
  
  Creating a single, empty React app using NPM installs close to 2000.

  is-even has 160k weekly downloads and itself depends on is-odd, which has 430k weekly downloads. Both of these packages are single line functions. At one point, babel was using the is-odd package.

  Don't use NPM. Don't let anyone else use it. Don't use software that uses it. If you see it installed on a server, shut that server down, set it on fire, and sow the rack with salt so that nothing can be provisioned there ever again.
  
  
  
• Don't share NFTs on the blockchain. Share function pointers. (Stephen Diehl)
  
  No on second thought, let's not go to the blockchain. It is a silly place.
  
  
  
• You wouldn't download a Mac would you? (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you're planning to download a Mac, the article recommends downloading it with Catalina, since that's the most compatible with the emulator.
  
  
  
• How to opt out of sharing your WhatsApp data with Facebook. (WhatsApp)
  
  Oh.
  
  
  
• Hackers are sending phishing emails to Twitter bluechecks telling them to log in and update their accounts or risk losing their sacred azure splots. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which is not at all believable because why would Twitter go around removing the blue splots from accounts they had already-
  

  So @Twitter has removed my blue tick verification because they can’t be sure I’m me. Fair enough, some days I’m not entirely sure myself…

  — Jamie Theakston (@JamieTheakston) December 2, 2021

  
  Play stupid games, get stupid prizes taken away.
  
  
  
• May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits. (ZDNet)
  
  Voting in Australia is compulsory.
  
  New South Wales (where I live) instituted optional on-line voting for local council elections that everyone ignores anyway.
  
  It didn't work.

  However NSWEC said any eligible voter who "applied to use iVote" but was unable to cast their ballot would be excused from paying the AU$55 penalty.

  So generous. You stole my vote - well, not mine, because I'm not going to use an i-anything - and now in your glorious munificence you will excuse me from paying for your failure? And that's the least of it:

  "Every serious investigation of iVote found serious problems," Teague tweeted on Saturday. That even includes a review commissioned by NSWEC itself as recently as July.
  
  "What happened today should surprise nobody," Teague said.
  
  "[NSWEC] apologises to voters not able to vote as a result of the outage; no apology to candidates who may or may not have failed to get elected as a consequence of their supporters being excluded."

  Experts are not impressed:

  Justin Warren, chief analyst at PivotNine, continues to be amused by this resistance -- not only in electoral matters but right across government.

  "We keep trying to help governments to be good at computers, but they are remarkably resistant to being helped," Warren told ZDNet.

  "One thing I've learned from consulting is that sometimes people insist on shoving beans up their nose and there's nothing you can do to stop them. You have to wait patiently until they ask for help getting them out."

  Sometimes when dealing with government the best you can hope for is that they will occupy themselves shoving beans up their nose, because they could very easily be shoving something else up somewhere else.
  
  

• Apple's solution to developers being able to move payments off-platform appears to involve a combination of extortion and burglary. (9to5Mac)
  
  Tim Apple appears to have grown bored with antitrust suits and is now inviting RICO charges.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:37 AM

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