Kind reposts

“He don’t miss!” — me, about myself, while reading my blog

Retired old people who aren't just ... busy being sick and dying give back to their communities in HUGE ways. We had someone's grandpa come to our robotics competition to cheer the team on. The old people in my building do all the serious political organizing and man the polls. I'm too busy working being in my 40s and all that. Raising retirement ages takes away more than just "retirement" ... it makes everything harder. Far as I'm concerned it should be 59.

Attached: 1 image Join us tomorrow afternoon at State of Open Con for a meetup of the Women of Open Source community! 2pm at the back of the delegate experience area, near the job board. See you there! #WomenOfOpenSource #WOOS #SOOCon #SOOCon24 #StateOfOpenCon

Attached: 1 image Hey! Look who it is! @www.jvt.me@www.jvt.me talking about dependence management at #soocon24 https://dmd.tanna.dev/

This isn't a subtoot of anyone, I'm just responding to something I read earlier and immediately forgot the source of: The reason that queer and trans people are so afraid right now is not because it's necessarily *worse* for us than it was in the 1990s. For me, it's worse now because it represents such an incredible backslide from the very recent past. It's also worse now because of how violent, specific, and individual the threats are. There is a sense that the gloves are off, and hurting us is overtly the point - the veneer of civility is gone. The fact that most people (off the Fediverse, largely) are not responding uniquely to this unique level of hostility is worrying, to me! There's also a demographic problem happening right now that was never present before: As we come out, and as we choose to be visible, our true number becomes more apparent. The other side doesn't seem very chill about the fact that like three queer or trans people could simultaneously citizen's-arrest every cop in the US! The transphobes are responding to the actuality of trans people now, not the fictional idea that someone, somewhere, was transgender. That is new, and I think it's dangerous. #trans #queer

It's truly an astounding failure of our society to let large companies just openly steal all information they can and then sell it on as if it's something they're making and the whole thing is totally normal and ethical. The wonders of the tech industry never cease.

I want to ask prospective employers what their technical debt management work flow looks like but I don't know if I'm ready to watch a stranger cry.

Here is a Fediwall set up to track #SOOCon24 #StateOfOpen https://andypiper.url.lol/soocon24

Framed this way, I feel like any team that has had layoffs needs to be very deliberate about not performing heroics to keep things running. **Let things fail** if they require going above and beyond. Otherwise the floor will be raised and it will no longer be “above and beyond”, just the expecta

The same people who say it’s too hard to write alt text are now suddenly “prompt engineers” who literally write alt text to generate images

David Tennant implies the existence of Goliath Landlord

Attached: 1 image You're not lazy

Shared this privately, but it's worth repeating it publicly: As a platform showing advertisements, you MUST have controls in place to allow people to opt out of certain categories of ads, e.g., those featuring violence, casinos/gambling, weight loss/AI body tuning, or alcohol/drug consumption. Not having that makes your platform unsafe and promotes an unhealthy society.

asking for a friend— can anyone hook me up with someone who knows about #techunions (#unionizing at a #tech company)? she and some of her colleagues just got screwed out of a raise based on sales and workflow metrics they had no control over and they’re ready to revolt

It's hard to see why "clean" Git commits are useful if you've never done a good `git blame` or `git bisect`. It's also hard to see how useful `git blame` and `git bisect` can be if your Git commits are a mess. Not sure where I'm going with this. #git

We didn't even get out of January before we collectively trauma dumped so hard on Elmo that Sesame Street had to tweet mental health resources

i'm being asked to "develop a career plan", why can't people just be as surprised as i am that i'm still alive and leave it at that

github tip: you can use "redirect.github.com" when referencing an issue/PR from another repo inside an issue/PR in your repo this will avoid your issue getting backlinked into the other repo's issue, reducing noise. example: "github.com/nodejs/node/6969" becomes: "redirect.github.com/nodejs/node/6969"

Attached: 1 image How it feels if you work in tech right now.

@BlackAzizAnansi@mas.to Companies will lay off half their staff before they admit that spending billions on real estate was a mistake

The plenary speakers for #StateOfOpenCon are up on the website - and, the whole schedule is packed with fantastic expertise. Exciting to be a liaison for all of these speakers! Some community tickets are available. https://stateofopencon.com

Even if you ignore everything else, all the theft and fraud and exploitation, all the waste, all the manipulation, all of it. Generative AI is still unreliable. I don't understand why people are so eager to use an unreliable tool. Like, yeah, I love those wobbly hammers! It makes no sense.

LinkedIn loves to tell me that my post has received a bunch of impressions, but I haven't gotten a single conversion from it, so I guess that tells me everything I need to know about that platform.

I don't put projects on the back burner. I put them under the floorboards, where the ever-louder beating of their hearts drives me slowly to madness. #ADHD #neurodivergent #neurodiversity #neurodiverse #neurodivergence #ADHDmemes

not sure who to attribute this to - there is NO reason any of us should have to "thrive in a fast paced environment" or "work well under pressure." most of our daily work is not an emergency and our culture of fake urgency and immediacy just to make more profit for people in the c-suite is burning people out. stop sending people into fight or flight and expecting them to bend over backward because you dont know how plan or manage resources properly

The thing about #tech #layoffs that people who haven’t been through it often don’t understand is that morale never recovers. The employees who remain will never have the same relationship with that company, bosses or peers. Watching people you respect pack their stuff and crying on the phone with their spouses is something that never goes away. When I survived a layoff in my 20s I became a “do exactly what the ticket says” person. I stopped suggesting ideas, providing feedback, believing anything a manager told me. If you are a company considering layoffs, especially a profitable company, you should approach it as “this department will have 100% turnover”. The second I got another job offer I left that company and six months later nobody who had been there at the time of layoffs remained. I’ve seen that pattern play out multiple times.

Oof, just heard about a massive dick move scenario for corporations that somehow hadn't occurred to me before: 1) Mandatory Return to Office 2) Employee moves to be near office 3) Employee is laid off Like, seriously, fuck these companies into the sun

It *really* grosses me out when I see/hear YouTubers and Podcasters promoting BetterHelp. They should have gone out of business when this happened. https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/2023169-betterhelp-inc-matter https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/ftc-ban-betterhelp-revealing-consumers-data-including-sensitive-mental-health-information-facebook

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Talking to people about your big rewrite/re-architecture project feels a bit like talking to people about your imaginary friend — people are really polite about it but keeping giving you that “are you serious?” look

Please, don't force me to log in. One aspect of software enshittification that really grinds my gears is that more and more apps require you to create accounts and login. https://hamatti.org/posts/please-dont-force-me-to-log-in/

gaze not into the abyss, for they shall make you the editor of the international standard of abyssal management

If you've ever wondered why some Wi-Fi is free (like in hotels), it's because typically data about your browsing is sold to countless ad companies that will happily buy it. Had to use the hotel WiFi recently on a trip, and after clicking "agree" to their terms of service, the Little Snitch firewall on my Mac went bonkers. I must have denied 20-30 outbound requests to advertising networks. It still worked, though, so I'm guessing I didn't manage to block all of it.

Attached: 1 image Kudos to the one person on Hacker News who is actually funny.

Hey, you! You are beautiful, you are valid, and you are loved.

Attached: 1 image From Atlassian’s remote work study: Team gatherings increase sense of belonging for 4-5 months, but sporadic office attendance does not https://atlassianblog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/lessonslearned.pdf

Random thought I had earlier that I'd like to run by some #FLOSS software people or FLOSS lawyers: Could we start a "union" of FLOSS software developers that would support us legally and help us bargain for better terms when negotiating license exceptions, support contracts, etc.? 🧵

The product team is too busy with incidents to prioritize work to prevent incidents 🤷

Attached: 1 image Is ... is that ...

What? Forcing people to return to office was never about productivity and was always about power? https://fortune.com/2024/01/13/managers-scapegoating-workers-return-to-office/

Ouch. A large OpenStreetMap group has been using a proprietary chat platform as a community space for ~10 yrs. Now they gotta pay a $80k/yr (or $10k??) for usage. 🤯😱😢 Slack (now Salesforce) now wants to charge @OpenStreetMapUS for all ~6k users on their server. 😢😢 Ouch. This sort of bait & switch is why open, community owned platforms (like this!) are vital! read more on the slack (while you still can??!): https://osmus.slack.com/archives/C029HV951/p1705438543546349 #OpenStreetMap #OSM #FreeSoftware #Cassandra

In the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced, caused by overuse of energy, our Tech Bro magicians continue to invent technologies that not alone are not energy conserving, they are massively, massively energy consumptive. From bitcoin to AI, tech becomes greedier and greedier for energy.

Recently I've seen a few people comment on the air quality readings inside large art galleries; the results were far better than on trains, in planes and airports, in movie theatres and so on, due to the need for conservation of the artwork. It's just so strange thinking about how we apparently care more about protecting art than we do about protecting our own lives.

The secret to software engineering is to focus all of your energy as a team (and a company) on learning how to share information between each other better. Build that understanding. Build that ability to uplift and teach each other. For fuck's sake, stop worrying about over engineering and worry about under understanding the problem. The over engineering goes away the second you start putting humans first and start prioritizing understanding over an artificial roadmap built without context

Pro-tip: before setting your three security questions to 36 random alphanumerics, be aware that you might have to recite them to a customer service rep instead of just copy/pasting them into the website.

Attached: 1 image I'm doing my part!

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Part of why tech workers at huge orgs like this need a union: Being compelled to relocate to a forced birthing state is violent as hell So much more to collective power than just getting paid https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/14/24037904/apple-san-diego-siri-ai-team-relocating

I am GDPR compliant (If you tell me personal info I will forget)

Instead of a game jam, how about a "play jam" where everyone plays an unplayed game from their library and writes up the session(s)?