CapriciousDay
@CapriciousDay@lemmy.ml
Software developer, intermittent indie game dev, formerly u/captainbland on reddit. Also kind of interested in medical imaging etc.
- Comment on Microsoft laying off about 6,000 people, or 3% of its workforce 3 days ago:
I’ve been saying for years the corporate world was getting ready to pull the rug from tech workers. Why do people think educational standards (and as it goes, engineering standards) for software development have been pushed down so much over the last decade? “What if you get hit by a bus??” A well strangely well backed to “stop gatekeeping” software development now revealed as a trojan horse to make developers fungible.
Well it might take 2TB of RAM for this buggy prod system to store and retrieve a JSON blob but at least anyone can work on it.
- Comment on Not difficult to understand 1 week ago:
I spent some time in a mountain cave replica in a Nepalese themed restaurant, diligently honing my programming skills without the noise of the outside world. No internet, no mains, no toilet. Just me, my laptop, an angry manager who called the police and 60 charged replacement batteries that fell off a truck.
There I created the art of meditative programming where I learned to program not just my machine, but myself. As a result of this resume gap I am now able to function as a 13.6% more productive employee and have finally met the benchmark of 1.0x engineer. At my former employer I delivered a project which brought them in revenue totaling at least $12, giving me priceless experience because of this training.
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 2 weeks ago:
In every other aspect of society, choice is heralded as a good thing, a fundamental aspect of freedom even. We were supposed to believe that having a range of different brands of toothpaste is fundamentally a good thing, and people happily choose which ones they want. We vote, it’s freedom.
Fundamentally federation is freedom as compared to centralised networks that lock you in. You can choose where to go and you never get locked in because you can choose to move instances later on - in particular Mastodon lets you take your followers with you.
If people can’t spend 15 minutes making a decision on something they’re going to spend probably hundreds of hours a year on, what does that say?
People figured out email, and that’s essentially the same set of choices - you get an email provider, you don’t go to “centralemail.com” where you can only communicate with people on that same locked in-platform.
The whole thing about people “not wanting to pick an instance” is just a bad meme. It’s all about marketing and the fact Bluesky and its predecessors like Twitter and Facebook had the money to chuck around to attract people to the platform by e.g. paying off influencers to join.
It’s also the case that BS aspires to be a federated platform (see: ATProto) - apparently it wants exactly the same “problems” that Mastodon has!
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 2 weeks ago:
Trump’s gaggle of tech bros loves this opinion
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 2 weeks ago:
Listen I just don’t have sympathy for it at this point. If people insist on maintaining iPad-only tech literacy then they can catch up with any average intelligence 4 year old.
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 2 weeks ago:
Kind of like how I’d be pessimistic about sticking my fingers in the closing boot of a cybertruck yeah.
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 2 weeks ago:
I think it’s more going to be more like twitter than they’re bargaining for.
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 2 weeks ago:
I mean I get it. And network effects are a thing. But these VC backed/owned firms (like bluesky) are cancer. Fascism promoting, lying, grifting, you name it. Can we please just try a little harder to support the community efforts?
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 2 weeks ago:
If you Google “sign up for mastodon” the first result you get is a sign-up page for mastodon.social which is the default instance. The sign up page is straight forward. I get we’re all coddled by iPads or whatever but this argument evades me.
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 2 weeks ago:
The much, much bigger issue is people just flocking to where there’s the capital for marketing. The feature sets/philosophy could be precisely 1:1 swapped and people would still end up on the platform with all of the money to throw around.
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 2 weeks ago:
What, the VC funded tech firm turns makes lots of noise about not being evil before eventually just becoming evil yet again pattern? Yeah I don’t like it either.
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 2 weeks ago:
They’re all going to bluesky because for some reason as soon as social media gets involved, the wonderful human ability to pattern match just gets switched off.
- Comment on Starmer told to accept Trump ‘free speech’ agenda to win trade deal 4 weeks ago:
Here’s some free speech for you: Trump and Starmer are both arseholes of the highest order so I fully expect Starmer to gape wide open and catch whatever rains down out of the US’s twitching sphincter. Labour needs to do a coup real bad.
- Comment on Sick notes to be overhauled in back-to-work drive, Liz Kendall reveals 5 weeks ago:
Yeah I think the main driver is neoliberal austerity doing what it does. The wing of the party in charge are basically Thatcherites. They want to the market to decide who gets access to basic necessities and bureaucracy to decide anything else.
In general I think neoliberals are becoming embarrassed by the fact that evidence based medicine is increasingly at odds with capitalistic ideals around how workforces should comply with the rich. So they want to introduce an apparently technocratic (which will inevitably be as low skilled tickbox bureaucratic as you like) body to replace actually qualified people - doctors- in this area.
I think it’s also a bit of a reaction to changes in the geopolitical scene. They’re hoping that in the event of further war in Europe that desperate but physically able people will be coerced into the military. By taking the ability to decide who is sick out of the hands of doctors and into the state they make this a lot easier. Similarly, more money for manpower and munitions by not paying out in benefits.
- Comment on Why does Britain feel so poor? 1 month ago:
A few thoughts: we’re not that poor, a lot of the current distribution of wealth and government spending aims are the result of neoliberal ideology first and foremost.
That said our nominal GDP growth has been harmed by neoliberal policies which have shifted the UK away from producing very much and towards playing many silly games with money. We measure how much we move abstract representations of currency around (which usually represents some probabilistic measure of value of money, which in itself is really just numbers with no intrinsic value) We saw the financial crisis in 2008 and apparently thought to ourselves “let’s have some more of that”.
So we’re in a situation where our overseers are seeing our GDP failing to grow as it should, panicking, and implementing more of the same policies that cause that situation in the first place. The UK isn’t poor yet but it will be soon. The young and the poor are the ones who are feeling the bleeding edge of this trend but it’s filtering through to the middle class now as well.
- Comment on Sick notes to be overhauled in back-to-work drive, Liz Kendall reveals 1 month ago:
Yeah it’s sort of shitty but by the looks of it she was talking directly.
- Comment on Keir Starmer offers US tech companies tax cuts in return for lower Trump tariffs 1 month ago:
I’d love to say Starmer was merely spineless, but he had plenty of spine standing up to left wing members of the Labour party. It’s pretty clear his allegiance is to the US and its idea of a global order, no matter what form that takes.
Starmer represents the insidious ingress of US fascism, paving the way for Reform.
- Submitted 1 month ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 6 comments
- Comment on Enshittification 1 month ago:
The main thing about the prevailing circumstances is that it showed idiocracy was way too optimistic. Their eugenics-ish narrative happened over way too long a period of time. We just needed a bunch of billionaires to poison the information supply.
- Comment on Too many young people find doing a day's work 'stressful', says Liz Kendall 2 months ago:
An opinion brought to you by somebody who’s never done a real day’s work in her life.
