"why does software require maintenance, it's not like it wears down"
Because software is not generally useful for any inherent good; what matters is its relationship with the surrounding context, and that context is in perpetual change.
What's going on over at Bluesky?
Oh they fundraised and got a whole bunch of money from a blockchain investor who has money in basically ever fucked up scam you have heard of.
Great.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a
I’m a software developer with a bunch of industry experience. I’m also a comp sci professor, and whenever a CS alum working in industry comes to talk to the students, I always like to ask, “What do you wish you’d taken more of in college?”
Almost without exception, they answer, “Writing.”
One of them said, “I do more writing at Google now than I did when I was in college.”
I am therefore begging, begging you to listen to @stephstephking@mstdn.social: https://mstdn.social/@stephstephking/113336270193370876
I should add:
If your employer doesn't increase your pay by at least 4% per year, the value of your pay is regressing, not keeping up with the average rate of inflation.
If your employer is aware and does this anyway, that's a pretty clear message that you should seek one that values you.
#jobs #employment #pay
Absolutely wild how many companies are adopting AI notetaking apps for meetings.
Y'all'er just chill sending your planning, product direction and revenue details to some random third party in exchange for them doing the low value task of halfassing note taking for you?
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the problem is I build things in a way that I don't need to baby sit them - which means they get reliability as side effect.
Slide from my "Cloud infrastructure for cloud infrastructure" talk
@www.jvt.me@www.jvt.me this is such an important topic. It’s 15 years since some colleagues let me know how much less than the men in my team I was being paid. The knowledge helped me to negotiate a bit, and I remain grateful for their consideration and openness.
The current chaos in Wordpress caused by Matt seems like a good time to remind folks that the Mastodon "community" websites and trademarks are 100% owned by one
Shared: Matt Mullenweg’s Bull(enweg) https://bullenweg.com/.
If you're having trouble keeping track of the current Wordpress/Matt Mullenweg drama (things are escalating so rapidly!), this website posts regular updates.
#wordpress
wp shows that the world would be so much duller if successful people could just to go therapy and chill counting their stacks or something. smh what a clusterfuck.
I don't like wordpress as a tech stack all that much, but... i really admire wordpress for how it democratizes access to self-hosting and allowed so many people and businesses to own their online presence.
Sad to see it take such a hit, and hopefully it'll recover.
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Don’t just tell everyone the open web is great, go on the open web and tell everyone *why* it is great @sil@mastodon.social at #OggCamp24
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Mark your calendars for October 15 for OpenUK London community meetup "Can open source even be a business?" OpenUK CEO Amanda Brock will share the findings of the OpenUK Economics of Open Source Report; followed by the panel including Liam Crilly of NGINX, Lee Wright, GTM Leader Data Infrastructure, Amanda Brock of OpenUK, Matt Barker of Venafi, and Paula Kennedy of Syntasso, moderated by Jennifer Riggins. Sign up here: https://www.meetup.com/openuk/events/301997818/?utm_medium=referral&utm #openuk #openukmeetup #opensource
Really enjoyed #oggcamp2024. It's great that a conference based entirely around Open Source software and Freedom exists.
Open source may have a reputation of being just for nerds, but it's about *so much more* than just tinkering with code.
You don't need to be a coder to benefit. When things are open source any bad behaviour (i.e. tracking, telemetry, privacy violations) hiding in our software has nowhere to hide.
This becomes more important as we become increasingly reliant on our devices.
People who attend a conference talk but who proceed to open their laptop and work: get the fuck out and do that elsewhere. You’re more annoying than herpes.
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At "Into the multiverse: a parallel universe where neurotypicals are the weird ones" with Parul Singh, in Cotton Theatre.
#OggCamp2024 #OggCamp24 #OggCamp
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I’m at @oggcamp@mastodon.social today, immersing myself in my FOSS community! The unconference is shaping up nicely and the schedule is on joind.in!
#oggcamp2024
Suspect a large part of the future will be "AIsbestos Removal".
Asbestos was a wonder material which was going to revolutionise the world. Only then we discovered just how carcinogenic it was.
And now, every day, we have to gently unpick it from the urban environment.
How many companies will belatedly discover that a load-bearing process is actually riddled with AI? Then they'll have to pay to carefully remove it without any further environmental damage.
Hence AIsbestos.
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Would you work for free? 🤯
For 33% of the respondents to our open source maintainer survey, this is reality: they are not paid or not paid enough to make a living.
With the new Fellowship program, we are investing directly in the people behind the code by paying maintainers of important open source components for their work. Applications are accepted until October 20th. Find more insights about the maintainer survey on our website.
Im in the UK later this week, talking at @oggcamp@mastodon.social! It’ll be a tasty intro to home automation and how to successfully irritate your loved ones with it.
Oggcamp is the bestest free software conference there is, mainly because it’s in The North and filled with Northeners. More conferences that aren’t in London pls.
#oggCamp #OggCamp2024 #HomeAutomation
mozilla withdrawing from mastodon due to a lack of funds but having enough money to finance shitty ai research is like finding out your local library closed because they spent all their money on an inflatable dinosaur exhibit
Them: Someone ought to do something!
Me: You're someone! What are you going to do?
Them: ₙₒ. ₙₒₜ ₗᵢₖₑ ₜₕₐₜ.
(Yes yes, structural inequality. Limited powers and knowledge. Access to tools. Etc.)
With OggCamp one week away, we thought we'd share some useful information you should know before next weekend!
https://ogg.camp/news/know-before-you-go/
#OggCamp2024
Start submitting your pull/merge requests, Hacktoberfest is here! If you haven't already, make sure you've registered for Hacktoberfest so that your PR/MRs created + accepted throughout October can be tracked. Get started: https://hacktoberfest.com/participation
"Substack CEO Chris Best said he didn't want to "engage in speculation" about statements like “all brown people are animals.""
Given another opportunity to answer correctly by the interviewer, “You know this is a very bad response to this question, right? You’re aware that you’ve blundered into this. You should just say no. And I’m wondering what’s keeping you from just saying no,"
He declined.
So, fuck him. And fuck his site.
I'll NEVER use Substack. #BlackMastodon
https://gizmodo.com/substack-ceo-doesnt-know-if-should-ban-overt-racism-1850337647
In light of the whole word press situation, I would like to reiterate that free software institutions should be giving the same kind of attention and support to project governance as they do to licenses.
It's badly overdue. I think we can say it's dereliction not to.
If the Kubernetes material was honest about "your team will need recurrent annual training to remain current with this tool," adoption would crater overnight.
That's not unique to Kubernetes, though it is fun to pick on them for it. _Nearly every_ significant infrastructure tool has this shape. Organizations that adopt these tools are unable to receive their value until their staff know how to use them, and that knowledge is deeply not self-sustaining.
In my experience as a manager and leader, I spend a lot of time trying to get engineers to care more about business outcomes than technical issues. Not because I think the technical issues don't matter. But because I know if that if you're not trying to understand business outcomes, your judgment about the technical issues is going to be much worse.
Many engineers fundamentally do not believe this to be true. And it's one of the things that sets them at odds with leadership.
The UK helped usher in the coal era — now it’s closing its last remaining plant
The Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire is slated to close on September 30th, marking the end of coal power in the UK. It’s turning the page on an era of dirty energy that the UK helped usher in globally and now has to leave behind to meet climate goals.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/23/24252195/last-coal-power-plant-close-climate-change-clean-energy
I left the Social Web working group because of the eagerness of allowing known endorsements of digital violence having a say in the development of it.
And now it's also a big sponsor of the new Foundation. Since ethics, for most, tends to be a sort of T-shirt you can get a conference and not something that's a lived value, as with it all, I do not trust anything coming out of it and those places.
https://www.jacky.wtf/essays/2024/pulling-from-fedi/
https://www.jacky.wtf/essays/2024/deinvest-open-web/
<p>Ok, I should be sleeping right now, but what's happening is SO FUCKING CRAZY.</p><p>Long story short: WPEngine is suing Matt Mullenweg, Automattic and the WordPress foundation for slandering them. In return, Matt is suing them for trademark violation.</p><p>But, BUT, WPEngine has fired their first shot. And what a shot it is, friends:</p><img src="https://goblin.band/files/ccae0c7e-bcad-4df8-833e-198c82647f14" alt /><p></p><p><a target="_blank" href="https://wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Cease-and-Desist-Letter-to-Automattic-and-Request-to-Preserve-Documents-Sent.pdf">Link to the full letter</a></p><p>Some extracts:</p><blockquote><p>Stunningly, Automattic’s CEO Matthew Mullenweg threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic – his for-profit entity – a very large sum of money before his September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, he was going to embark on a self-described “scorched earth nuclear approach” toward WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond. When his outrageous financial demands were not met, Mr. Mullenweg carried out his threats by making repeated false claims disparaging WP Engine to its employees, its customers, and the world. Mr. Mullenweg has carried out this wrongful campaign against WP Engine in multiple outlets, including via his keynote address, across several public platforms like X,YouTube, and even on the <a target="_blank" href="http://Wordpress.org">Wordpress.org</a> site, and through the WordPress Admin panel for all WordPress users, including directly targeting WP Engine customers in their own private WordPress instances used to run their online businesses</p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>During calls on September 17th and 19th, for instance, Automattic CFO Mark Davies told a WP Engine board member that Automattic would “go to war” if WP Engine did not agree to pay its competitor Automattic a significant percentage of its gross revenues – tens of millions of dollars in fact – on an ongoing basis. Mr. Davies suggested the payment ostensibly would be for a “license” to use certain trademarks like WordPress, even though WP Engine needs no such license. WP Engine’s uses of those marks to describe its services – as all companies in this space do – are fair uses under settled trademark law and consistent with WordPress’ own guidelines. Automattic’s CFO insisted that WP Engine provide its response to this demand immediately and later, on the day of the keynote, followed up with an email reiterating a claimed need for WP Engine to concede to the demands “before Matt makes his WCUS keynote at 3:45 p.m. PDT today.”</p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>In parallel and throughout September 19 and 20, Mr. Mullenweg embarked on a series of harassing text messages and calls to WP Engine’s board member and also its CEO, threatening that if WP Engine did not agree to pay up prior to the start of Mr. Mullenweg’s livestreamed keynote address at 3:45pm on September 20, he would go “nuclear” on WP Engine, including by smearing its name, disparaging its directors and corporate officers, and banning WP Engine from WordPress community events.</p></blockquote><p>They... they have text message captures. In the pdf. Matt Mullenweg was trying to extort them ... by text messages. They seem to have the entire thing in the writting.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>In the final minutes leading up to his keynote address, Mr. Mullenweg sent one last missive: a photo of the WordCamp audience waiting to hear his speech, with the message that he could shift gears and turn his talk into “just a Q&A” if WP Engine agreed to pay up</p></blockquote><p>They finish requesting Automattic to "preserve, and not destroy, any and all documents or information in their possession, custody, or control that may be relevant to any dispute between WP Engine and Automattic". They are going to war, big time.</p><p>All this crap is just because they refuse to pay his protection money. And the guy has been stupid enough to put everything in writting.</p><p></p><p>Holy. Fucking. Shit.</p><p>HOLY FUCKING SHIT.</p><p>They are going to toast him alive</p> 📎
AI, taking complex topics and fucking them up, giving people bad information that’ll get them killed, all for the low low price of more energy and water than we have to spare. This is such a waste of time. https://mastodon.social/@emanuelmaiberg/113192736734791060
If I’ve learned one thing from 15 years in tech it’s that men can be in the arena trying stuff and it ain’t matter how many times they fuck up but women have to land fully formed and perfect beyond reproach or they’re not serious people.
Jamie Tanna
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