shikitohno

@shikitohno@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Global VR headset shipments fell 12% YoY in 2024, with Meta's market share rising to 84%; Vision Pro shipments fell 43% QoQ in Q4, but its enterprise sales grew.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s seems like the 3d movies of the tech world. Every so often, they release a new iteration, tell us it’ll change everything, and while people get excited at first, they rapidly realize it’s not as useful as it was presented and often impractical. Start developing the next gen version, rinse and repeat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did sites end up making money from API restrictions?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly pretty sure not many people used 3rd party apps to begin with so I don’t think it was to do with any of that like the other strangely confident commenters seem to imply.

  I don’t think it was sheer numbers of users that made 3rd party apps a big deal, but who was using them. Someone would need to actually do some research to confirm or refute it, but my experience was that they were disproportionately favored by power users, i.e. the really prolific posters and commenters that you would come to know and recognize after spending a bit of time in certain subs. If enough of those people decided they couldn’t be convinced to use the mobile site or official app, you’d probably have some small amount of previous lurkers step up their posting a bit, and bots.

  From what everyone says when they mention the current state of the site, it mostly sounds like it’s bots just spamming reposts and arguing with each other with recycled comments originally posted by other users.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does it make sense to buy a lifetime supply of honey?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At least a few years of happiness, and perhaps making my ensuing case of diabetes mellitus more appropriately named than that of most peoples’.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech jobs are now white collar trades that need apprentices⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  they know that skills are portable and employees have no loyalty.

  In fairness, this is also down to companies having no loyalty to their employees. I would be more than happy to never have to go job hunting again, if career jobs, with appropriate incentives, were still a thing that actually exists. I am substantially less enthusiastic about the prospect of spending my entire working life dedicated to a single company that will not give me annual raises that beat inflation or any sort of pension as a reward for my loyalty, while my working conditions and benefits will likely deteriorate over time at the whims of a rotating group of petty tyrants in management, and the prospect of getting laid off because some dipshit in the C-suite implemented a terrible idea that anyone with the least amount of experience doing the actual work could have told them was doomed from the start and saved everyone suffering the consequences of their dumbass vanity project to pad their resume for when they pull the cord on their golden parachute and jump ship to sink another business.

  I suspect a lot of people would be quite content at having the stability of such a position, if only the trade-offs weren’t so terrible for them in pretty much every other way. The vague possibility of a farewell party at the end of 40+ years of work doesn’t cut it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  At lot of this strikes me as non-issues, or even bordering on entitlement.

  Well, for instance, if you’re contributing your own code, there is a high bar to clear. It often feels as if you need to surpass whatever the existing functionality is. Just to get accepted, you have to offer something better than some existing product that may have been around for decades.

  Well, no kidding, that’s how it works in most things. Why would a project accept a contribution that doesn’t add a previously missing feature or improve on the implementation of a current one? I would be pretty suspect of using a program that accepts a random commit so that a college kid can check the “Timmy’s first accepted pull request” box and let them pad their resume.

  Some would-be contributors are very familiar with programming, reading, and writing code, but they may never have opened an issue or sent a pull request. This is a scary first step. Others may have the necessary tech skills, but not the creativity. Where should they you begin? Also, if someone is scared, that can result in impostor syndrome. The fear that people all over the world will see your bad code is a powerful factor reducing the urge to share it.

  These are all things that the greybeards being maligned had to figure out at some point, I don’t really see the harm in new contributors being expected to do the same, especially when there is an abundance of documentation and tutorials available now, which simply didn’t exist in the past.

  For instance, there are a lot of folks doing mods for video games. This can be a very creative activity, there is lots of room for innovation, as well as outlets such as streaming to reach an audience. It applies to all sorts of games, such as Pokémon, Elder Scrolls, and Minecraft. Game modding is a great way in. It could even be a way to set up a company, or to make a living. But it’s not considered as FOSS. For novices getting interested, it could even be attracting people away from getting into FOSS development.

  Again, nothing new here. No, game mods weren’t nearly as prevalent in the past, but new devs have had the choice between contributing to FOSS software and contributing to/creating proprietary programs for as long as FOSS has been a thing.

  I don’t think the old guard should be dismissive or rude to newcomers when their contributions aren’t up to the standard expected to be accepted, but they also aren’t getting paid to be these peoples’ mentors. It kind of reminds me of posts I see in language learning communities, where people would get all upset, “I completed the Duolingo Spanish tree, but the cashiers at my local Mexican restaurant speak too fast for me to understand and they switch to English when I try to talk to them in Spanish.” Cool that you want to try and use the language, my friend, but these people aren’t being paid to be your tutor, and you may well be making their job more difficult and/or holding up other paying customers by trying to force random people to listen to your extremely basic, and likely incorrect, Spanish. They don’t have an obligation to put everything else in their work or life on hold to try and stroke your ego.

  Curiously, I don’t see any mention of what, in my view, is likely a much more serious issue to getting new generations of contributors involved, as well as having a more diverse set of contributors. Access to technology and relevant education is far from uniform. If little Timmy from Greenwich, CT has had a personal computer he was free to mess around with to his heart’s content from the moment he could read and attended a well-funded school with the possibility of studying computers, programming, and early exposure to things like Linux from grade school onwards, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that he’s more comfortable working with these concepts and more likely to wind up contributing successfully to FOSS projects than my friend Lucas, in Brazil, who only got a second-hand computer when he managed to get accepted to university, and had no real concept of Linux/FOSS until I explained to him why I couldn’t just install a random, Windows-only program he thought would be useful to me.

  To draw another language learning comparison, it’s like how in the US, most students will only study a second language for a couple of years in high school and two semesters at university, if they attend higher education, and then you periodically have people going, “How come so many Americans fail to speak a second language compared to students in Europe?” Then, you look at the curriculum in countries like Germany, and realize they begin teaching students English as early as grade-school, often adding another foreign language later on. Is it any surprise that, when they have nearly a decade of foreign language instruction, compared to the mere two years many Americans get, alongside a fair bit more exposure to and encouragement of engaging with foreign language media, that they wind up being more proficient at using said language on average?

  It’s hardly a perfect solution that will completely mitigate all of the issues with getting younger and more diverse groups of people to contribute to FOSS projects, but I don’t doubt that having access to computers in the home from a young age and access to more extensive education on computers and related fields from a much younger age would go a long way towards getting more people involved. Of course, even then, having the downtime to be able to dedicate to contributing to/maintaining FOSS projects is a factor that will disproportionately favor historically privileged groups. Even if she has the knowledge and ability to do so, a single mother working three jobs in the Bronx in order to keep a roof over her family’s head, food on the table, and the lights and heating on simply might choose not to spend what little free time she has writing a badass new MPD client in Rust that has plugins to integrate with Lidarr and automatically fix metadata with beets based on matching the hashes of files to releases on various trackers in order to scrape the release data from them, no matter how cool the concept might sound to her. And it’s not really something I could blame her for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla pulls out all the stops as Cybertruck sales grind to a halt⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Have they tried pulling out the “Make a vehicle that’s not a massive and shitty death trap,” or “Boot the Nazi from the company” stops? Because, I suspect doing those two might help it out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨38% Gen Z adults suffering from 'midlife crisis', stuck in 'vicious cycle' of financial, job stress⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  See, that’s the fun thing, advice won’t help at all. This is just the ruling class trying to shift the blame for the current situation onto a lack of paternal figures in Gen Z’s life, or broken families, or some other moral panic BS to make peoples’ suffering their own fault, rather than having to point out that this is the inevitable outcome of our chosen economic/political system.

  No amount of advice is going to convince a younger adult that they were mistaken when they looked around and accurately noted they’re stuck in a world that is quite rapidly going downhill, with no realistic prospect of it improving in the near future. They’re stuck with crap jobs that are constantly trying to overload them more and more, for ever less pay. Between ghouls of the older generation and those who failed to amass enough wealth in their younger years to be able to leave work, positions throughout the career ladder are still being occupied by people who ought to have retired long ago, meaning that there’s little prospect of any significant career growth. In other words, they can’t even push through all the shit for a light at the end of the tunnel, where they’ll get theirs and finally find some stability in later years if they just put their heads down and grind through it.

  Even if older relatives have some sage financial advice to give, most people and their families simply aren’t in the position to provide the sort of real, material support that is necessary to alleviate this, nor should they have to. These things should rightly fall to the government, either in the case of regulations to prevent companies from pushing so many into such precarious positions in the pursuit of making the line go up for another quarter, or as a social safety net to help the inevitable number of people who fall on hard times no matter what.

  Just more gaslighting nonsense from the powers that be to deflect from systemic failures of our society.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are 'micro-apartments' converted from offices the answer to the housing crisis?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Parks and libraries, sure, but the rest pretty much all cost money around me. Art spaces are largely monetized, outside of maybe a free night a week, for a limited amount of time before closing that doesn’t include access to all exhibits. Community/rec centers host events and charge money for most of them now, since I guess younger generations aren’t becoming members in large enough numbers to make things self-sustaining otherwise. Churches have the disadvantage of being churches. Sure, you can technically hang out in them for free, so long as you don’t mind constant religious services, which kind of comes with the territory on that one.