Posts from 10 May 2024

and the good software development methodology is also laziness because i don't wanna deal with bug reports from broken releases

Want to take a vacation from open source maintenance? You should. Did you know that GitHub has a profile status feature to mark yourself as busy, mute notifications, and prompt folks who mention you that you're busy for a while? Before today the longest (optional) "automatically clear this status" preset was a week. Now the longest preset is a month. Because let's face it, a week is not always a long enough break from the demands of other people. #OpenSource #GitHub #OSS

I do wish I could tell recruiters that I’ll never apply to a company that reports record profits and also lays people off. Like why are we wasting each others time talking about corporate mottos and exciting projects? Your leadership treats people like disposable cups. That’s all I need to know. #tech #layoffs

Capitalism is an economic theory that posits that a relative handful of greedy fucks gorging themselves is how we provide adequate nutrition to the population at large.

There is no war that can be fought with a trapped civilian population. That is not war. If you destroy all infrastructure, bomb the hospitals, ban all media, disrupt the food supply and corral the remaining population into a tiny area and then go after them. That is not war.

I know have separate Mastodon lists of bridged #BlueSky accounts I follow here (thanks @snarfed.org@snarfed.org), Flipboard accounts I follow here (thanks @mike@flipboard.social), federated WordPress blogs I follow here (thanks @matthias@pfefferle.org ), federated Podcast feeds I follow here (thanks @dave@podcastindex.social ) and Threads accounts I follow here (thanks @jessel@universeodon.com & @pcottle@cyberplace.social ) ... and that fact that we can do this at all, and now feels like the new normal, should be an Internet history milestone of some kind.

SREs, dev ops, and other on-call folks, I am literally begging you to unionize

New: OpenAI—a company that has indiscriminately scraped vast amounts of human knowledge to build a company valued at roughly $80 billion—has made a copyright complaint against the ChatGPT subreddit because it used OpenAI’s logo. https://www.404media.co/openai-files-copyright-claim-against-chatgpt-subreddit/

Attached: 1 image Yikes, bailing on the platform you funded because they are worried about safety is quite the stand. https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana

Like many other technologists, I gave my time and expertise for free to #StackOverflow because the content was licensed CC-BY-SA - meaning that it was a public good. It brought me joy to help people figure out why their #ASR code wasn't working, or assist with a #CUDA bug. Now that a deal has been struck with #OpenAI to scrape all the questions and answers in Stack Overflow, to train #GenerativeAI models, like #LLMs, without attribution to authors (as required under the CC-BY-SA license under which Stack Overflow content is licensed), to be sold back to us (the SA clause requires derivative works to be shared under the same license), I have issued a Data Deletion request to Stack Overflow to disassociate my username from my Stack Overflow username, and am closing my account, just like I did with Reddit, Inc. https://policies.stackoverflow.co/data-request/ The data I helped create is going to be bundled in an #LLM and sold back to me. In a single move, Stack Overflow has alienated its community - which is also its main source of competitive advantage, in exchange for token lucre. Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow's former instantiation, used to fulfill a psychological contract - help others out when you can, for the expectation that others may in turn assist you in the future. Now it's not an exchange, it's #enshittification. Programmers now join artists and copywriters, whose works have been snaffled up to create #GenAI solutions. The silver lining I see is that once OpenAI creates LLMs that generate code - like Microsoft has done with Copilot on GitHub - where will they go to get help with the bugs that the generative AI models introduce, particularly, given the recent GitClear report, of the "downward pressure on code quality" caused by these tools? While this is just one more example of #enshittification, it's also a salient lesson for #DevRel folks - if your community is your source of advantage, don't upset them.

I'm a "full stack developer", in that my stack is full and if you try to push any more tasks on me I'm gonna overflow it and start corrupting my own memory

Devs: We've finally got the thing that's definitely not a Torment Nexus you and running. That's awesome! We're gonna make a ton of money from tormenting people. They keep asking for it for any reason. Devs: Speaking of money, I think I deserve a raise. Absolutely not? Did you even do any work? Also, this thing requires the power of a small country to do even a small amount of tormenting. It's costing us billions. We're gonna have to let you go.

nothing is apolitical. hope this helps