of course!

I feel this is a bit of a moot point from the White House. Memory-safe languages have been around for decades. I feel like the amount of C/C++ out there isn't so much that people think having dangerous stuff around is good, but more that nobody really wants to pay to change it.

Depends how you look at it! Here’s me accessing Mastodon and the fediverse via email: https://lemmy.world/post/11020167 I’ve written a a couple more prototypes to connect one to the other. If anyone is interested I could write up more about how it works or do a more public demo

Not included in the above, but handy is also an alternative web UI for Reuters news: https://neuters.de

Link to the YAML spec, for the (very) brave: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/

no you didn't Mr. Simpson, no one can

took me a couple but worth it

The other fun one is that the continental US (AKA everything except Alaska) is just about the same size as Australia. Then when you consider that there's 49 states versus Australia's 7, you can see how the numbers come about.

well there was probably awareness of ideas of sacrifice, punishment, right/wrong. Old ideas...

Good question! Sorry if this answer is weird :)

For me, I don't actually interact from Mastodon per se. I wrote a couple of read-only Lemmy & Mastodon clients. One for a weird text editing environment I use (https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382) and via email (https://gts.olowe.co/@o/statuses/01HMQ9N4HQ2ETGZWJS49K5NG5Y). To reply to or create posts, I use a write-only Mastodon client I wrote.

My idea is to exercise the fediverse. In principal I don't think I should need separate accounts for Lemmy, PeerTube, Mastodon, Kbin, Akkoma, etc.

Right now I'm replying from an account on lemmy.sdf.org as I can't reply from GoToSocial (Lemmy and GoToSocial don't work well together right now) and my Mastodon server (hachyderm.io) has a post limit of 500 characters.

Ah ha makes sense now! The "Replying to comments" section of that article explains exactly what's happening. If I understand correctly the community itself (!privacy@lemmy.ml in my above example) is not notified of my reply from Mastodon. If the community did know, then it would broadcast a notification of the activity to whoever else is subscribed to !privacy@lemmy.ml.

I honestly find it worrying that someone would think it's some sort of deeply ingrained human trait when it's clearly not culturally universal (eg. small hunter-gatherer tribes wouldn't exist otherwise) and not present through all of history.

I think "growth" is a strong signal for people to put faith and trust into something. And that these emotions have influenced our behaviour for a long time.

Why did the Roman empire keep expanding? What made them want more? I'm not a historian nor an anthropologist (far from either!). But this feels like "line go up" behaviour. What would it mean for those in power to communicate that some part of the empire was receding? Even if, overall, the empire was objectivetly huge relative to other organised groups?

One thing I think about is there could be eroding confidence and trust of those in power by colleagues and the general population. If people lose faith, the powerful lose power; they lose ability to influence behaviour. Growth is obsessed over because it's a means to capture influence over the means of production (and capture profit).

The line has to go up because the current economic system demands it has to go up

What about outside of economics? Even metrics on https://fedidb.org: shrinking numbers are coloured red. Growing numbers green. Green = good, red = bad.

Another thought. The other day I was at a cricket match. Grand final. Because the home team was losing, the stadium started to empty. It wasn't about enjoying the individual balls/plays. Supporters were not satisfied with coming second (an amazing achievement, much "profit"!), it needed to be more.

To stretch this shitty metaphor further, when the supporters (investors?) lost confidence in their ability to deliver more, they just abandoned the entire match (enterprise?) altogether!

Again: I'm not stating anything here as fact. I'm just absolutely dumbfounded as to why "line go up" is, as you say, such an obsession. I hear you when you say that it's a consequence of how the modern economy works. That makes sense. I guess I wonder what would happen if we snapped our fingers and we could start again. I wonder what the economy system would look like. Would we still be obsessed with growth?

Gotcha. I had a feeling something around how Mastodon doesn't support ActivityPub Groups (yet?) would be where things are going on. Congrats on piefed, by the way. I'll start studying the codebase now as I'm keen to understand how server-to-server communication works more deeply than I do now. Sending Announce(?) and fetching stuff from other servers...

When I look at the ActivityPub Note object (via curl -H 'Accept: application/activity+json https://hachyderm.io/@otl/111887721960075860) I see:

{
    "@context": [
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
        {
            "ostatus": "http://ostatus.org#",
            "atomUri": "ostatus:atomUri",
            "inReplyToAtomUri": "ostatus:inReplyToAtomUri",
            "conversation": "ostatus:conversation",
            "sensitive": "as:sensitive",
            "toot": "http://joinmastodon.org/ns#",
            "votersCount": "toot:votersCount"
        }
    ],
    "id": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860",
    "type": "Note",
    "summary": null,
    "inReplyTo": "https://ttrpg.network/comment/4965852",
    "published": "2024-02-07T01:59:08Z",
    "url": "https://hachyderm.io/@otl/111887721960075860",
    "attributedTo": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl",
    "to": [
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
    ],
    "cc": [
        "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/followers",
        "https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato",
        "https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux"
    ],
    "sensitive": false,
    "atomUri": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860",
    "inReplyToAtomUri": "https://ttrpg.network/comment/4965852",
    "conversation": "tag:hachyderm.io,2024-02-06:objectId=123754186:objectType=Conversation",
    "content": "<p><span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>Neato</span></a></span> <span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>ForgottenFlux</span></a></span>  I totally get how you feel. One use-case I think of is machine-generated image alt-text. These are often not added to images. But with image-to-text ML models, visually-impaired people could hear a descriptions of images that before were never annotated.</p>",
    "contentMap": {
        "en": "<p><span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>Neato</span></a></span> <span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>ForgottenFlux</span></a></span>  I totally get how you feel. One use-case I think of is machine-generated image alt-text. These are often not added to images. But with image-to-text ML models, visually-impaired people could hear a descriptions of images that before were never annotated.</p>"
    },
    "attachment": [],
    "tag": [
        {
            "type": "Mention",
            "href": "https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato",
            "name": "@Neato@ttrpg.network"
        },
        {
            "type": "Mention",
            "href": "https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux",
            "name": "@ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world"
        }
    ],
    "replies": {
        "id": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies",
        "type": "Collection",
        "first": {
            "type": "CollectionPage",
            "next": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies?only_other_accounts=true&page=true",
            "partOf": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies",
            "items": []
        }
    }
}

So I'm assuming an Announce was posted to the shared inboxes at lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and ttrpg.network... hmm... I better start reading!

Ah! Interesting.

Which instances? Do you mean hachyderm.io with, say, lemmy.one?

Thanks for helping me reframe my thoughts.

Haha don't worry it's for framing my thoughts too! ;)

To that end, I'd want topics to be problems or shout outs. Something like "how do we test credit cards" might be a sign of "our documentation isn't great and it slows me down" but it's talked about as a discreet item.

Devil's advocate: what are those good practices? What constitutes improvement? One way to focus discussion is to try and pick some specific team values/objectives. Let's go with the example about Jira.

Similarly "I haven't seen Jira used this way before" isn't a problem; maybe the underlying issue is "I don't understand how we use Jira" or "what we're doing causes a lot of paperwork"

The statement "I haven't seen Jira used this way before" is not ideal starting point for discussion - agreed! But with a value in mind I think we can work with it. Let's say, for argument's sake, the goal is stronger shared understanding of project management.

You mentioned other team members asked "what's the problem you're hoping to solve?". I think that's a very pragmatic, specific question (I'm a software engineer, too, I get it!) but it's not really in the service of the goal of the discussion: a stronger understanding of project management.

So how can discussion help with that? What about a Q&A session? The interactive, conversational exchange is a natural way for people to learn (I hear ChatGPT is pretty popular!), and it's likely others will learn a bunch of stuff too about why things are done the way they are.

Another technique is to use the free-flowing discussion format for what its best at: exploration of ideas, not necessarily solving problems. Solving problems usually takes code, data, testing, experimentation... things that require time at the keyboard.

Taking the credit card example:

Something like "how do we test credit cards" might be a sign of "our documentation isn't great and it slows me down" but it's talked about as a discreet item.

Use the conversational format to its advantage. Respond to the question with another question: "why do you ask how we test credit cards?" From there they might reply with something about documentation, or maybe the tests aren't clear, or they're not run often enough. Maybe they want ways to run credit card tests on their own workstation as unit tests? From there we identify a whole bunch of ways to improve the code/project/workflow/better align with best practices.

Anyway, I'm not a manager :) I'm just thinking out loud so next time I start speaking to a team to join maybe I understand the dynamics a bit more.

Hm. Interesting. This is something that gets me too...

Taking a step back: what are you hoping to achieve with the retrospective?

I find that the items people are bringing up aren't really important or could just be a question in Slack.

What criteria would make something important? Conversely: what makes something minor?

Once we nail these it might be easier to focus the discussion.

Growth might be impossible, but a steady and "boring" amount of profit should still be possible selling plain-ole-dishwashers. Yet ... for some reason, we don't see that.

God yes this bothers and fascinates me.

Instead companies throw everything into growth and we get the removed bluetooth enabled dishwasher problem everywhere, and I'd like toknow more about why.

I think it's alluded to in the article:

They found a way to make consumers spend more money on dishwashing. The line goes up, for one more year. But it's not enough. It has to go up every year.

Digging deeper: why must the line go up? Pesonally I see it as a deeply emotional, human thing.

When you read those annual financial reports from big companies, they will do anything to make sure things look rosy. Bullshit terms like "negative growth" are used because "loss" or "shrink" sound bad. So what if it sounds bad?

Confidence. Trust. It's emotional. These are deep in our psyche. It's how governments get elected, contracts are won, and investments are made. It's what makes us human. If that line goes down... will it go back up? What's going to happen? Alarm bells! Uncertaintly. Anxiety. People abandon you. Money, power, influence fades. You could find yourself replaced by the up-and-coming who "show promise".

Our social emotional species has hundreds of thousands of years (millions?) of years of this stuff hardwired into us. Trust let us cooperate beyond our own individual or family interests. Would we be human otherwise? (I found the article Behavioural Modernity interesting).

Not sure it’s capitalism per se. Perhaps rampant waste. Criticism of capitalism could include monopoly formation; massive tech companies buy small ones (obtain more capital = more control over production = more profit).

There’s despair over everyone, big & small, resolving the same recreated problems. Kelley doesn’t talk about breaking Microsoft up (i.e. redistributing their capital). He implies he’d be ok for Microsoft to maintain its market position if it just fixed some damn bugs.

The art of turning a 500-line text file into a 50MB tarball. Welcome to the future :(

Here’s the article’s source: https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf

That report’s data is a survey they sent out to companies. Quantising “so… what do you think is gonna happen?” seems… shonky?

Hm. Some views from other Lemmy instances...

• some Australian one: https://aussie.zone/post/6544997

• some Dutch one: https://feddit.nl/post/10144806

• Big ol' lemmy.world: https://lemmy.world/post/11512187

• Mastodon:

Seems... OK...? Apart from lemmy.world (but that's running a previous release of Lemmy).

PS from Mastodon (hachyderm.io): https://hachyderm.io/@ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org/111866487723645951

No replies or anything because nobody subscribed to mechkeyboards from hachyderm.io. I just subscribed, though :)

I wonder whether they are aware of the ForgeFed project?

Thought that's already supported? e.g. https://gitlab.com/diasporg/diaspora.atom

Fantastic story - thanks for sharing!

So you went 5 years without any programming? What got you back into it?

Oh wow thanks! :) One program syncs my home Mastodon timeline, with all replies, to a Maildir. Dovecot serves that over IMAP. Sending involves a custom SMTP server which reads the mail message and creates a post from it.

For Mastodon it was all about converting statuses (toots? Posts?) into RFC 5322 messages. Using the status’ ID as Message-Id in the message header is handy. Mail clients do the heavy lifting of rendering threads thankfully!

Ha good eyes! :) I have basic receive-only working with Lemmy using a virtual file system interface I wrote (https://pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Just realised we actually spoke about this a while ago haha (https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382 )

But synchronising to disk is super inefficient: too many API calls. Should subscribe using ActivityPub proper and store updates received as RFC 5322 messages.

From there we could serve the messages via NNTP. Then, finally, we could use nntpfs(4)

AM radio paywall? Where?

I suppose there’s positive, then there’s “totally changed how I work”. It’s a big call. Maybe a real-world example would make it sound more believable: “before ChatGPT, I would have to sift through stacks of outdated VB6 documentation on $task. This took up most of the day. Yesterday I used a LLM to get a basic implementation of $task then I tidied it up and installed it within an hour.”

If I remember rightly, the backend update takes a long time as the database needs to do a particularly slow schema update. https://old.lemmy.sdf.org seems to still be ok.

Looks like there’s a fix incoming: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4288#issuecomment-1878442186

FYI, on lemm.ee I have been testing 0.19.1 patched with the #4330 changes by @phiresky for the past week and have noticed no further issues with outgoing federation, so I think this issue will be resolved with the next release

That patch has been applied (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4330) so now I guess we’re waiting for a release to be cut. Fingers crossed.

For me it’s the bloody “video essay” format. Hyper narrated, spoken straight to the camera. Waste of traffic, waste of storage, waste of attention. People think the argument carries more weight, or is just more persuasive, when someone is speaking at you with some vaguely related visual in the background. But really a written piece could be pulled apart so much more quickly.

Unfortunately OpenAI’s Whisper doesn’t do written transcriptions fast enough on my workstation yet for me to use it full time.

You can report the message so that future messages from the spammer won’t send. Unfortunately no direct way to mark the message as junk automatically like email, but Signal does have Message Requests which may help? https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007459591-Signal-Profiles-and-Message-Requests

BYD employ about 570,000 people and by some measures are the largest carmaker in the world. I’d never heard of them either until a couple years ago. They’ve definitely got the cash to put into PR like this. Past couple years Australia started importing their electric cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Company

I use it for my very basic static site generator: https://www.olowe.co/2021/01/site-build.html

Unfortunately for those who have those values, not all paid positions involve acting on those values.

Random brain dump incoming...

Most businesses pay money to solve problems so they can make more money. You can solve their problems - but not in the way that you may be thinking.

This is a generalisation that is not strictly true, but I say it to illustrate a different way of thinking: Businesses do not undertake penetration testing because they want more secure software. They do pentesting so they can stay in business in the face of compliance and bad actors.

To find a job, you want to start learning what people pay for. People pay contractors to come in and fix things, then leave again (politically easier, sometimes cheaper). People pay sotfware developers to develop features (to sell more stuff).

Start looking up job titles and see which ones interest you (DevOps, frontend dev, backend dev, embedded...). Don't get too stuck on the titles themselves. It's just to narrow down what kinds of business problems you find interesting.

Other random questions:

• What specific projects are you interested in?
• What types of problems do you like solving?
• Do you like digging in and finding those tricky bugs that have been bothering people for years?
• Do you like trying out new frameworks which let you think about the system differently?
• Would you rather implement a database or GUI toolbox?

Once you're deep in the belly of the beast, you'll find ways to exercise those values. It's hard to know in advance what this will look like.

Ah yes! That is a great trick that kept me going doing software dev professionally.

Instead of trying to get the system I was working with to interact correctly with some shit enterprise system, I would find common protocols (or related protocols) and implement that well. Then I would discover more specifically where the shit enterprise system was behaving badly, and point to something politically neutral (like an IETF RFC) to help get us out of a rut.

It made debugging so much easier. Those specifications and open-source implementations have had much more engineering talent put in them than what I was usually dealing with.

Ah come on, we all know as software people we can never stop the spreadsheets from being the real data interchange format ;)

I'm not so surprised anymore. I'm self-taught using open-source software projects for guidance. But not everyone learns like that. For example in the commercial software dev world, having patches easy to apply with minimum tooling isn't usually a priority (for better or worse).

This is actually a little story I had half written down; your comment prompted me to finish it. Thanks! https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/11/git-email/

Honestly, DNT as it's implemented in browsers today is not a sufficient solution

I've come to the same conclusion (blogged about it here https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/11/linkedin-do-not-track/) after updating myself on where it's all at.

I also think about pop-ups back in the 90s/00s. Imagine if browsers sent a "No-Popups" header (or something) back then. I doubt we would have seen any change in company behaviour. Instead, it took something like Firefox to implement pop-up blocking by default (https://lwn.net/Articles/130792/).