TheDoctor [they/them]

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  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 25th, 2024

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  • Technology is great to discuss because it’s just logic and facts and objective arguments. But bring in politics and it becomes a mess and that’s the problem with this divide in the privacy community.

    Good post in general, but I disagree with this in particular. All technology is political. Not in a Democrat/Republican way but in a “how do we distribute resources within society?” way. Not to mention a big selling point for privacy tools is that they can be used by political dissidents. I think a problem does arise when a community manages to fool itself into believing it’s apolitical when what it’s really done is develop an orthodoxy to shut down political discussion.


















  • I often use comments as ways to say, “I know this is cursed, but here’s why the obvious solution won’t work.” Like so:

    /**
     * The column on this table is badly named, but
     * renaming it is going to require an audit of our
     * db instances because we used to create them
     * by hand and there are some inconsistencies
     * that referential integrity breaks. This method
     * just does some basic checks and translates the
     * model’s property to be more understandable.
     * See [#27267] for more info.
     */
    

    Edit: to answer your question more directly, the “why not what” advice is more about the intent of whether to write a comment or not in the first place rather than rephrasing the existing “what” style comments. What code is doing should be clear based on names of variables and functions. Why it’s doing that may be unclear, which is why you would write a comment.