shikitohno

@shikitohno@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech jobs are now white collar trades that need apprentices⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lebanon’s health minister says 8 killed, 2,750 wounded by exploding pagers⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It just says he was injured, which could happen if you were in close proximity to someone wearing one of the pagers. News here showed one of the explosions occurring in a grocery store, with plenty of people nearby, for example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TSMC Arizona struggles to overcome vast differences between Taiwanese and US work culture⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s also just completely failing to account for callouts in planning, which I saw a lot of when I was a manufacturing supervisor. Upper management breathes down operations’ neck to only have people doing the most high cost function they’re being paid for as much of the time as possible. If someone has been trained to run a line, they don’t want to see them doing 5S upkeep or sweeping, they want them running that line the whole shift. Unfortunately, this extends from the most senior positions down to the new hires, so they schedule the fewest people for each role they possibly could safely operate with when they come up with their production plan. Quite predictably, with humans not being robots, this throws the whole thing into chaos the moment one person calls out. Upper management gets into a tizzy about schedule attainment numbers while demanding to know how this could possibly happen, only to sit down with planning and pull the same bullshit with the following week’s schedule.

  If you have a couple of redundancies in your scheduling, you can just postpone lower priority tasks and roll with it. If everyone shows up, you can have people work on stuff like training, preventative maintenance, house keeping, and a million other things.

  For reasons apparently only getting an MBA will lower your IQ enough to seem reasonable, upper management in manufacturing loves doing those skeleton crews where a single absence means mandatory OT and 6-7 dry work weeks to try and salvage what can be of the production schedule, while demanding to know why we struggle to get and maintain staff for these roles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-powered network of Russia-based websites masquerading as local American newspapers is pumping out fake stories targeting the US election, investigation finds⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but many people seem to suffer when it comes to distinguishing facts from opinion and interpretation.

  For example, it’s a fact that Biden had a very poor performance in the debate. No one is really disputing that, though there have been various justifications offered for it. All good up to this point, but it falls apart when it comes to interpreting what that means for the Democratic campaign. Some are of the view that it’s too late to change the candidate and have Biden stand down, and that to do so would tank our chances of beating Trump. Others, myself included, feel like the hit he has taken is likely terminal, and that our best chance is to have him bow out and spin up a new campaign as soon as possible, in order to have the best shot at viability. Personally, I think the longer the delay on doing so, the more it becomes a situation of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

  Either way, absent someone with a functional crystal ball or some time travelers that can give us a definitive answer, both stances are subjective and fallible interpretations of what the best course of action would be, based on facts. Yet, in the couple of hours I browsed Lemmy after my post-work nap today, I easily saw a dozen people accusing posters who stated Biden should step down of being trolls, Russian agents, useful idiots, and/or arguing in bad faith for merely stating an opinion. I’ve seen people who think Biden is the best shot get called stupid for holding that view, but it rarely seems to have the same power to kill a conversation dead in its tracks as, “You disagree with me, ergo you must be a Russian shill.”

  To deny these disinformation campaigns, both foreign and domestic, are real is to be deluded, yet so is dismissing any and all criticism of the party or views that don’t hew to the party orthodoxy as being pure propaganda. Heck, even for people who have fallen wholeheartedly for such propaganda, you ignore them and dismiss them at your peril. If you don’t successfully reengage with them and manage to bring those individuals back into the fold, they could quite easily make up the margin that ultimately could swing the election. According to this NPR article, the last two elections were essentially decided by less than 80,000 votes each in a few swing states. Unless Democratic strategists have a surefire method that’s guaranteed to juice their votes by millions in those states, they really can’t afford to be leaving anything on the table if they want to win.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Child care costs more than a mortgage payment or rent almost everywhere in the U.S.: ‘There is no escaping it’⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, unfortunately, it just isn’t a possibility for most people in the US, and even in the areas where programs do exist, they tend to be severely underfunded and means-tested like crazy, so only the poorest of the poor will qualify. I’m not interested in having kids, but for those who do want them, it’s just insane the expenses they will have to go through to be able to just keep their jobs and have their kids being watched by someone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Winamp has announced that it is opening up its source code to enable collaborative development of its legendary player for Windows⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe I would try an Android version, but Linux would be a pass, nothing they would come up with could displace MPD+ncmpc++ for me at this point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Child care costs more than a mortgage payment or rent almost everywhere in the U.S.: ‘There is no escaping it’⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It doesn’t really seem too sustainable to have to be so expensive if you actually want people to have kids, especially when the US is so famously allergic to the very notion of social safety nets. Median household income in my county is just under $50,000/year, so lets call it $50,000 to make things easy. Median rent for a one bedroom apartment is $1,588/month, so housing alone leaves you with $30,944. Average cost of child care for my city is $16,250/year for kids 2 or younger, so now we’re down to $14,694 to cover all other expenses for the rest of the year for our average household, ignoring the fact that we ignored taxes on that $50,000 income to begin with. That’s $282.58/week to feed a potential family of 3, clothe them, pay utilities, etc. which isn’t a whole lot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wouldn’t really say it’s anything beyond normal consumption, just like I wouldn’t say someone who buys a hat or jersey once every few years when they see a sporting event live has a sports memorabilia collection. Sure, technically, any quantity of something united can count as a collection, but I think plenty of purchasing just falls within the normal bounds of average consumption and doesn’t rise to the level of meriting a special term for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think curation implies more depth and selectivity to the collection and perhaps a certain amount of active effort to obtain and maintain it. You’re talking about hearing a song you like on the radio and clicking “buy,” where the sort of person who would talk about their curated library would spend their weekends digging through crates looking for the final LP released on some random record label in 1985 they need to complete their collection of what is, to them, the pinnacle of early house music as released in Yugoslavia prior to the fall of the USSR. Even if it’s not as hyper-specific as that example, I would expect them to at least have things meticulously tagged and organized.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but the barrier to entry is significant enough to still deter most people. Even assuming they aren’t bothering with port forwarding and seeding, most people seem like they can’t be bothered with any pattern of consumption more complicated than finding content on major streaming platforms, and the music streaming services haven’t yet gotten annoying enough for most people. They’ll take a peek, go “Do I want FLAC, V0 or 320? WTF is an APE?” and bail again.

  We can disagree as to whether it should be that way or not, but I’d wager that the reach of streaming services for a new band far exceeds that of uploading a torrent to a random tracker and hoping it takes off. Unless people already know of you to look for your music, you need to hope a huge number of them are just auto-snatching anything new. On private trackers, sure, you’ll get a bunch of people who auto-snatch any FLAC upload from the current year, but you’re talking about <50,000 users in those cases, and a good chunk of the auto-snatchers are just people looking to build buffer who won’t even listen to most of what they snatch. On the other hand, nobody is auto-snatching all the torrents going up on public trackers, they’d run out of space in no time at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And the artists put their shit on spotify because people believe that spending 15 dollars a month on a service that doesnt pay artists, apparently pays artists.

  It’s probably more a case of artists acknowledging the fact that streaming services are one of, if not the, primary sources of music discovery and consumption for many these days. Even if they won’t make money off it, by not being available on these platforms, they may as well not exist for most people. That’s something that only huge, already established names can pull without feeling it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty sure they are saying that if you have 10 days PTO and you use one of them when sick, you no longer get a full two weeks’ vacation as you’ll have an uncovered day. With a full 10 days, I could clock out Friday evening, get on a flight to my vacation destination, catch a return flight the afternoon of the 19th and be back to work on the 20th. With only 9, I either need to work until next Monday and get on the plane that night, or cut my vacation short to fly back in the 16th and work the 17th. You effectively lose up to 3 whole days of downtime on vacation for being unable to work due to illness once a year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google layoffs: Sundar Pichai-led company fires entire Python team for ‘cheaper labour’⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  True, but you also need to get enough people with the right skills/knowledge who want to live in West Virginia or Oklahoma when those same skills and knowledge likely make them highly employable in markets with more amenities and greater job opportunities without needing to uproot their life and move to a new town/city when the time comes to get a job with a new company.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Japanese police create fake support scam payment cards to warn victims⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty sure staff at places that handle Western Union payments are already trained to warn people when they try to send money for similar reasons, and I’ve read that plenty of people just refuse to believe it and act like the lady working the desk at Walmart is trying to keep them from getting the big payout the nice prince from Nigeria is going to give them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re going to say Hamas’ attack was an attempt to draw the US into a war, I think that falls a bit flat. When was the last time the US did anything beyond provide the same sort of aid it currently gives Israel? Especially in light of Iran not giving into Israel’s provocation to attempt kick up a regional conflict that would draw the US in, I think this accusations is lacking.

  If they wanted to draw the US into the conflict, why would they just push for one large attack and then just let Israel steamroll Palestinian territories while demonstrating they can get on with things just fine without the US doing anything but provide the same sort of weapons aid they always have? Why not take the bait with the most recent provocation?

  Besides, even Israeli publications admit that it has been Israeli policy to prop up Hamas, so this smacks even more of propaganda efforts to distract from Israel’s culpability in creating this situation.

  Yes, Iran has provided backing to many of these sorts of groups, but they’re hardly unique in this in the region. Why is trying to kick up a regional conflict when Iran does this, but Israel gets a pass on buying oil from ISIS and aggravating the situation there? Heck, Israel’s past actions in Lebanon helped kick off the founding of Hezbollah when they overstepped what they could get away with under the pretense of chasing Palestinian forces over the border.

  The truth is necessary to arrive at a sound opinion, and Iran are no angels, but there’s far too much handwaving away of Israel’s role in creating the current situation while demonizing Iran with exaggerated capabilities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨salmon⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably not photoshopped, more likely just different species and the one on the bottom has been butterflied and laid with the meat touching the ground so it looks much larger. Neither one has really started to change that much at the point these pictures were taken. Towards the end of the season, at least for west coast salmon, they’ll often get a lot leaner and their scales turn a super vivid red. As they lose their fat reserves, the meat also becomes much more delicate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Which Iranian attack is this that’s supposed to have started a war to drag in the US? Their most recent attack on Israeli targets was in response to Israel attacking them in a third country, and Israel has been trying to provoke them into a response that would kick off a war the US would get involved with to draw attention from their ongoing genocide in Gaza.