Links for 2020-03-09

Generalists vs Specalists, Meds and Big Pharma Companies, Being Silly While Washing Your Hands, Licensing and Copyrights, Torture in Movies, Badly Anonymized Dataset Causes Melbourne Professor to Resign, Netlify Terms and Telemetry, Packaging in Guix, Functional C#, UUIDs, Python Context Manager.

On being a generalist

A more general explanation on the differences between generalists and specialists.

Personal take: Go for a generalist.

With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases

I guess this comes with no surprise.

Also, there is something really wrong with pharma companies or with the current business model.

Wash Your Lyrics

You know those posters about how to wash your hands? You know that some people are messing with them? Why not mess with your favourite song lyrics?

Please re-add original author to docs and license #1703

Short take: The author of Guake, a terminal emulator, found out his name was removed from the project.

It's weird that I'm, right now, working on a presentation about licenses and all of them say that Copyright can't be removed! On top of that, licenses and based on copyright and, thus, unless the author concedes the license of their copyright, no one can remove them from the copyright (well, maybe after 75 or so years, IIRC).

Torture Prevalent, Effective in Popular Movies, Study Finds

No, watching someone torture someone else won't make you a torturer, but will desensitize you about torture and normalize it. And you shouldn't.

Melbourne professor quits after health department pressures her over data breach

Once again, person gets "anonymized" data-set, manages to re-identify people. This part is so freaking common, companies (and government) that provide this kind of data should be sued, till we have some laws preventing companies to provide data in this way.

But, instead, what we are getting is people trying to criminalize people re-identifying people form those datasets. And that's stupid.

netlify still connects to telemetry server when user does not consent to telemetry! #739

An issue on the Netlify CLI tool, which was (allegedly) sending telemetry information even when the user requested to not send telemetry.

Now, while bugs are bugs and can happen, the discussion around it is quite interesting, as Netlify people basically claim that going with telemetry on is ok 'cause you accepted the terms of use of Netlify -- which, to me, sounds like one hell of an excuse to let telemetry on by default.

How to package software for Guix (3)

Not that I get the Guix system yet, but I'm going to keep this around when I jump into it.

Your C# is already functional, but only if you let it

Again, I'm not using C#, but I find it interesting that the language have all the tools to make a functional architecture in it.

Why your software should use UUIDs in 2020s

I'm already planning all my data to use UUIDs, but I guess a long post about why you should use can also convince you to start using them.

The Python "with" Statement by Example

Have I said how much I love the context manager in Python? 'Cause I love the context manager in Python so much.