Michał Michalski

Staff Software Eng at Whatnot. Scala and FP enthusiast. Data Eng, Platforms, Big Data, Cloud, distributed systems, put-your-own-buzzword-here.

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

Impossible at 0-30% with a 10% mean, and more likely than "rare"?!

Who did they interview?
Preschoolers?
Politicians?
Salespeople?

[Acre @Acre108]

There is no word in English that means someone is 30% sure something will happen

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

Is there a word for when you want to search for something online, that you're currently slightly curious about, but not generally interested in (e.g. some celebrity stuff), but you decide not to, because you're afraid it will make the algorithms serve this to you until you puke?

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

@hmemcpy I met a petrolhead once and this moron couldn't grasp that petrol is a liquid and his head clearly is not, jokes on him!

[Jon Pretty @propensive]

A Statement
I am a Scala developer and speaker who was cancelled three years ago. Yesterday I attended the High Court in London to hear an apology from several prominent members of the Scala community for making untrue claims about me on 27 April 2021. I sued them for libel, and they admitted fault and settled, paying me costs and damages.

Their allegations were sensational and squalid, but unfounded. Their source was the resentment of one woman following a relationship in 2018, which I ended against her wishes. She fabricated or was offered an alternative narrative, which developed into claims of a pattern of behaviour, and culminated in the defendants’ publication of an open letter, which they now agree is defamatory.

In two years of legal action, the defendants never presented any evidence to support their allegations, and admitted in court that they had no proper reason to make them. They have given undertakings to the court not to publish further or similar defamatory statements, or have anyone else do so on their behalf.

No signatory contacted me about the allegations before publication. I received no warning, and had no knowledge of the claims’ substance. I only discovered what I was accused of at the same time as I learned of my indefinite exclusion from the community; at the same time everyone else found out. I had no opportunity to defend myself. It is no coincidence that the absence of due process led to an abject injustice.

The experience of cancellation and enduring the online hysteria was traumatic. I responded by withdrawing from the life I knew. Its consequences hurt me and people close to me, and have been immiserating.

My employment opportunities were obliterated. My charitable and educational projects, and my small business, could not continue. Despite my transferable skills, the allegations were a transferrable red flag recognised across programming communities and industries, and I have barely earned a living since. It has taken two years of legal action to receive fair scrutiny in a forum reliant on facts. This outcome finally vindicates me.

Many familiar with the open letter will be surprised by this outcome, given the certainty expressed by some of the letter’s supporters. But they should question why no defence of my libel claim was ever offered. They should seek answers for how so many people became so convinced without evidence. And the defendants’ co-signatories should reassess the credibility of everything that compelled them to support the open letter.

Nonetheless, I believe the open letter’s authors were convinced it was the right thing to do. I believe that they wished to show their kindness in response to a story which shocked them. Many of them I have known for years, and know to be good, moral people who were mistaken, and would not wish to be mistaken.

Good people can make mistakes, without becoming bad people. So, I offer them the respect and compassion I believe they deserve. I recognise their good intent, and I interpret its consequences charitably. We owe each other civility in ceding the time and space necessary to reflect upon this in open enquiry, without coercion or urgency, so everyone can reach a better understanding of this outcome, and of one another.

I have avoided naming any third parties here, and I urge others to do the same. I know too well how it feels to be the subject of online harassment, and I do not wish it upon anyone. I reject the culture of blame and escalation.

I have not been idle since 2021. I’ve spent much of my time writing Scala 3, which I believe is an exceptional platform for software development, and deserves far greater success. I am motivated to be part of that success, and I will start sharing my work again soon.

https://t.co/MKp5qukWh8

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

@imduffy15 @AliExpress_EN I'd have done exactly that or a photo of myself pretending to hold an invisible box just to see what they reply.

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

POV: You ask your kids to go to the bakery across the street first thing in the morning and they're back just in time for lunch.

[Ryan Rzepecki @Ryanrz]

The original sin of the project was designing insanely wide streets, which according to the architect, was a mandate from the City. The most egregious example is the southwest corner of the project's marquee Central Park, which features an intersection of 9 lanes by 12 lanes.

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

@brndnbnnr That's what I'm thinking too, but I'm not going to click and let them achieve their goal 😅 Very annoying...

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

I've been muting these fu#@ers for the last couple of days whenever I see them, but they keep coming in new shapes and forms... 😤

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

@FlameMiniatures Destroying all these absolutely prefect gradients only to make the mini look... *checks notes *... even better? Wait, what?

[Robert Graham @robertgraham]

You can't live debate crazy, they will always win.

Live debate is just performance art. Somebody will make some new claim nobody has heard of before, and it'll be impossible to refute without having the time to go research what they just said. "Samuelsson's study from late 2021 proves you wrong". What study? I dunno, I just made it up.

The only rational debate is via the written word. One side writes something, somebody else rebuts point by point, and so on. But for the most part, podcasts are for people who can't (or don't) read, so it's not going to happen for that audience.

RFK and Rogan start with rejecting science, so there's really no way their points can be rebutted. If you only speak Japanese, you can't talk to somebody who only speaks French. This is especially a problem when the audience doesn't understand the basics of science, who'll believe that science is what RFK and Rogan claim it is.

No, no, I don't mean you should believe scientists or a consensus (they've proven untrustworthy). I mean the science itself.

In the end, the winner of the live debate isn't the one who is best at facts, but the one most willing to misrepresent facts. And that's RFK and Rogan. They will win any live debate.

Serious debate is written, live debates is for fools (Rogan's audience).

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

@FabrizioRomano Wait, was it the release clause that lets him leave for 17.5M after 1500 mins OR was it something else in the clause (him meeting performance goals or the club not meeting them?) that activated this clause only after 1500 mins? The former sounds like a very dumb clause 🤔

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

Poland has just passed an unconstitutional measure that violates basic principles of the rule of law. It empowers an unconstrained extrajudicial commission (a bit like a Stalinist troika) to remove the opposition from participation in public life.

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

[A neutral statement, statistic or truism introducing a topic]

[A more catchy or controversial statement or prediction about this topic]

Here's N [things related to this topic] that [a very bold promise] 🧵 /👇

/Now you press the like button./

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

I clicked on a SINGLE tweet about bespoke vs. made-to-measure suits from @dieworkwear and now my "Tech Twitter" became "Tech and Manswear Twitter".

Twitter feed algo is really broken. It was so good at serving the right content in the past!

That tweet was interesting though.

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

Still more valuable than 97.3% of LinkedIn posts.

[Alex Cohen @anothercohen]

Wake up babe, new career advice on LinkedIn just dropped

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

There is a story unfolding in Poland now so awful I can hardly write it. It concerns a young boy who was the victim of a pedophile. The pedophile was convicted; the boy's name was kept anonymous, as the law requires. Unfortunately, the boy's mother is an opposition politician.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

There are few projects more humbling than a multi-year migration. Eg breaking a monolith using one language to smaller services using another language/framework.

These are both thankless projects, challenging, and risky if not done properly.

And it rarely starts as multi-year…

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Skype went all-in on Scrum 2011-12 right as WhatsApp overtook it in market share.

I asked the WhatsApp founder Jan Koum if they used it at all. His response:

“To be honest i have no idea what this Scrum garbage is and we never uttered the word Scrum when i was at WhatsApp.”

[Michał Michalski @_michalm]

@imduffy15 True, although I've done my interviews in mid December (IMO a bit similar "downtime" period to what you describe) and the end-to-end time was between 2 and 3 weeks with 2 - 4 interviews in it. I think a month is already quite a lot, 6 weeks would rarely be acceptable to me.