otl

@otl@lemmy.sdf.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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 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?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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 retarded 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).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How I reduced the size of my very first published docker image by 40% - A lesson in dockerizing shell scripts⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Article suggests that 1 million ML specialists will be needed in 2027. What do you think of that?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s the article’s source: www3.weforum.org/…/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?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Federation is broken again - in a slightly different, more subtle way this time⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hm. Some views from other Lemmy instances…

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

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

  • Big ol’ lemmy.world: 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): hachyderm.io/…/111866487723645951

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New South Wales independent journalist FriendlyJordies takes down "Coronation" video after death threats persist since arrest of suspect who firebombed his home a year ago.⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ex NSW premier John Barilaro was an executive director of a western Sydney property development company. That development company is closely tied to organised and gang crime - murders etc. - and so far its kingpins has evaded any serious prosecution. The video insinuates that this is a result of corruption of the NSW government.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proposal for GitLab to support ActivityPub⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder whether they are aware of the ForgeFed project?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Proposal for GitLab to support ActivityPub⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thought that’s already supported? e.g. gitlab.com/diasporg/diaspora.atom

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy through SDF is basically read-only now. Read interesting stuff, but open an account elsewhere if you want to reply.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If I remember rightly, the backend update takes a long time as the database needs to do a particularly slow schema update.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy through SDF is basically read-only now. Read interesting stuff, but open an account elsewhere if you want to reply.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks like there’s a fix incoming: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4288#issuecommen…

  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 (github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4330) so now I guess we’re waiting for a release to be cut. Fingers crossed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mercedes-Benz is using Qt framework to build new operating system for its cars⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Even with (more) UX engineers, it was incredibly difficult to get any development done. When I was in this space, management and contractors were incredibly entrenched playing political games to grow teams even bigger to get more funding. There was nobody with any authority using the thing end-to-end saying “this sucks”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mercedes-Benz is using Qt framework to build new operating system for its cars⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I worked for a German car company for a little bit, in a team responsible for a similar system: www.srcbeat.com/2023/08/sbt/

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I would like some advice on where to go after university⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  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?
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨QLD Digital Licence Now Available⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  so the server and bandwidth will be the cheapest tier possible and the app developed by the lowest bidder

  But billed at the rate of the most expensive tier of infrastructure and charged at the highest bidder’s price but outsourced to the lowest bidder, of course!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨John Howard says he ‘always had trouble’ with the concept of multiculturalism⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This made me realise that the article is not about the quote or any sociology; it’s about politics and John Howard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which language you wish would really grow and reach mainstream adoption?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Would you say Go is popular enough to be called mainstream?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which language you wish would really grow and reach mainstream adoption?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Zig is what I thought Rust would be like when I first heard of Rust. I’d love to try Zig for some hobby things but can’t get it running on OpenBSD (yet!).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨QLD Digital Licence Now Available⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I’m missing something. Don’t the police or whoever check the license number, name etc. against a central record? Is this just about the convenience of not carrying around a plastic card? I feel like there’s more to it but I don’t know what.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Verge Takes on Self-Hosting for the Masses⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Devil’s advocate: what about the posts and comments I’ve made via Lemmy? They could be presented as files (like email). I could read, write and remove them. I could edit my comments with Microsoft Word or ed. I could run some machine learning processing on all my comments in a Docker container using just a bind mount like you mentioned. I could back them up to Backblaze B2 or a USB drive with the same tools.

  But I can’t. They’re in a PostgreSQL database (which I can’t query), accessible via a HTTP API. I’ve actually written a Lemmy API client, then used that to make a read-only file system interface to Lemmy (pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Using that file system I’ve written an app to access Lemmy from a weird text editing environment I use (developed at least 30 years before Lemmy was even written!): lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382

  More ideas if you’re interested at upspin.io

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Verge Takes on Self-Hosting for the Masses⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.

  This touches on something that I’ve been struggling to put into words. I feel like some of the ideas that led to the separation of files and applications to manipulate them have been forgotten.

  There’s also a common misunderstanding that files only exist in blocks on physical devices. But files are more of an interface to data than an actual “thing”. I want to present my files - wherever they may be - to all sorts of different applications which let me interact with them in different ways.

  Only some self-hosted software grants us this portability.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What got you into coding ? (aside from money)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for sharing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What got you into coding ? (aside from money)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This sounds similar in spirit to me, but I did make a career out of it. If you don’t mind me asking, what is your career? You can also email me; see “Contact” at www.olowe.co

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What got you into coding ? (aside from money)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Getting old, “broken” computers running Linux was the first thing when I was about 11 or 12 years old. Then:

  1. needing a way to keep them running
  2. wanting ways to make running them easier
  3. wanting those ways to be easier/simpler

  Often this involved programming. Eventually I found out that companies pay money for this kind of thing.

  But now I’m finding it difficult to find work which aligns with those original values. Getting paid means delivering what people will pay for, not necessarily solving problems. What got me into programming is probably what will get me out of it (profesionally, anyway).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What got you into coding ? (aside from money)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Now I do convoluted shit by hand and not knowing I’m gonna fuck it up ;)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Japan’s automakers are keeping sports cars alive in the EV era⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  how can a writer be so ignorant.

  They probably know exactly what they’re doing. Singling out Japan makes for a “better” headline to a mostly North American audience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Australian producers to keep prosecco, feta and parmesan as European Union trade deal doomed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  What products are the sides really wanting to trade? Are they after our dirt?

  Seems so. I found this article from DFAT much more informative: dfat.gov.au/…/australia-european-union-fta-fact-s…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The German government is working on an OSS "Sovereign Workplace"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  […] and this is a huge project.

  This makes me skeptical too. I’d be interested to hear about smaller projects to replace some creaky system relying on the output of some long-gone contractor’s overengineered software being faxed around.

  Those projects have no cool name and are probably really hard to get funding for. But sometimes I can’t help but feel that might be more effective than these “big bang” projects.