@lukas@indieweb.social @lornajane@indieweb.social @Philsturgeon@mastodon.green How about a swear jar for API conferences. Every time a speaker says Swagger, they have to pay Phil to plant another tree.
PLEASE stop calling them "soft skills" unless you're talking about the ability to whisper or properly fluff pillows. They're "core skills", the skills we need to communicate with, mentor, inspire, and manage others.
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💧️ ppl with ADHD are not in a hurry because they're impatient. they're in a hurry because they know if they don't do this now they're just gonna forget about it
I've been asked to comment on what I think the biggest tech trend in 2024 will be?
Short answer: Slavery
and let me tell you why. Data is the lifeblood that allows any machine learning model to perform its task. It’s not magic. It’s not the so-called “AI” being intelligent or intuitive. It’s statistics. And as the tech sector delves into rapid developments of specialised LLMs that they can further commoditise, they will require vast amounts of diverse data to train—leading to what some have called as data hunting.
And unfortunately, all of us who have posted even a single piece of content online are all part of this—whether we like it or not. We are now part of a universal digital sweatshop that transcends international borders. Our labour is ignored and uncompensated based on the capitalist belief that since we shared content freely, companies have the right to monetise it whenever they want. Time and time again, as we have seen in recent news, companies have collected our data without explicit consent. And when they do ask for ‘consent’, they give us word salad in the user agreements or just ask us to opt our way out of the inferno that they manufactured. The aggressive collection of data paves the way for a future where a few corporations will have disproportionate control over vast datasets, which they can exploit for unwarranted targeted advertising, surveillance and practices that would reinforce biases or unfairly influence individual choices and behaviours.
And let’s not forget the second step in the process where people (they call as taskers), mostly from the Global South, are hired for 2 USD a day to classify images, videos and texts so that your LLMs will not spew out gibberish. This is the reality behind your glamorous “AI” models. While “AI” companies in the developed world reap huge profits, the groundwork is outsourced to workers in Bangladesh, Kenya, the Philippines and India. But it is fine, isn’t it? As long as we don’t see them. Out of sight, out of mind.
Workers: DO NOT OVERWORK YOURSELF to avoid getting laid off.
- You’re damaging your life and health.
- Your employer doesn’t actually notice (no, really, they don’t.)
- Your behavior enables future mismanagement of resources.
- When layoffs come, you’re gonna get laid off anyway.
Remember that a company’s job is to extract maximum work from you for minimum pay, so your job is to extract maximum pay for minimum work. Somewhere in the middle, both parties find an equilibrium that they agree on. Do not voluntarily modify your side of the bargain to your detriment.
#FridayDevAdvice
Normalize talking about about income, menstruation, mental health, and everything.
Shameful , aka “taboo”, topics are a form of control; a way to keep people in their place.
Shame benefits the patriarchy and the predator class. That’s why calling it what it is — the white supremacacist capitalist patriarchy— is proscribed as well.
Normalize it all
Wealth of Elon Musk
2012: $2,000,000,000
2023: $248,800,000,000
Wealth of Jeff Bezos
2012: $18,400,000,000
2023: $160,900,000,000
Wealth of Mark Zuckerberg
2012: $17,500,000,000
2023: $105,200,000,000
Federal Minimum Wage
2012: $7.25
2023: $7.25
Three words: tax the rich.
PSA: until you've experienced burnout, you are likely to underestimate how long it takes to recover. It's not a couple of months, it's 6-18 months for partial recovery, and maybe 3 years for full recovery (all depending on how bad it gets). The company burning you out will almost never support your recovery, mostly they'll drop you when you stop being productive.
Nobody in business cares about your health but you, so be your own advocate, or suffer the consequences.
Techbros: self driving cars are inevitable!
Also techbros: prove you are human by performing a task that computers can’t do, like identifying traffic lights.
Given that my entire wardrobe consists of #hacktoberfest t-shirts, I'm a little upset by this news.
https://hacktoberfest.com/about/#digital-rewards
I get the challenges (and the annoyance of drive-by contributors) but I'll miss the fun of getting a random prize in the post.
Twitter's new privacy policy takes effect 09/29/23, giving them the right to use your posts & all of your data to train musk's "AI."
Elon Musk's. "AI."
If you're still over there, now is the time to request your archived data, delete your posts, and stop using that site.
view-source:https://twitter.com/en/privacy
why does everyone want to own the libs
as an open source developer i own multiple libs
i would happily pay people to take them from me
you do not want to own libs. its so much work
I have not slept well at all. Instead of working on negotiating layoffs, leadership is taking this extended break to congratulate themselves for what they've done. Meanwhile, workers of all disciplines and levels are either scrambling to find work or understanding what next steps they can take.
I truly don't understand how people who run layoffs sleep well at night - knowing that you've signed off on the destabilizing action of so many.
Myself, along with almost 40 other workers (a large amount of @cfaworkers@union.place), were laid off from Code for America. Instead of working with workers to get a union contract, they gutted our stances. AFAIK, we will be getting COBRA covered until November 2023 and one month of severance.
The workers wrote the following: https://cfaworkersunited.com/stories/2023/08/31/code-for-america-lays-off-35-colleagues
If you work in tech and haven't heard about "being glue", I would say that it's vital to read about it:
https://noidea.dog/glue by @whereistanya@hachyderm.io
You'll either feel extremely heard, or it will open your eyes to what some of your (disproportionately female) coworkers struggle with on a regular basis.
Zoomers & boomers: «IDGAF. It doesn’t affect me; everyone already has all my data—»
Me: No. No, they do not.
You *generate* data every time you touch that service, visit that site, patronise that business. Your data isn’t just your PII, and it isn’t finite. You are a living, breathing fountain of data that can be and is used in ways that harm the vulnerable and marginalised, even if it’s never used to harm *you*
It’s not zero-sum. Limiting use & reducing dependence still counts as a good
Was thinking of making a horror movie. For one day every year all repos are public and there’s no checks on pull requests. No tests are allowed and CI/CD won’t block you.
The Merge.
A little professional story:
Please be kind when "correcting" co-workers about something you feel they've misunderstood or are just wrong about.
One of the really weird things in my life is that I seem to encounter -or trigger- edge cases.
For non-technical folks: an "edge case" is a generally rare bug that only occurs under a very particular set of circumstances, usually quite obscure.
Someone might report a bug that no-one can reproduce, and it turns out that the bug only occurs on the last Friday of the month, if the device is used between 9pm and 10pm. We refer to something like that as an "edge case".
A few years ago I found a *really* weird bug in one of our products, and I mentioned it to one of our senior developers.
That person then proceeded to loudly, and in front of an entire group of co-workers, lambast me for something that was OBVIOUSLY end-user error, and was "fundamentally impossible" to be anything else.
It was one of the most humiliating professional experiences of my life.
It made me incredibly wary of raising Jira tickets, unless I could fully reproduce and document a bug.
A couple of years after this incident, I was chatting with another dev who'd started working with our company, and was in QA, and he mentioned this edge case he'd recently encountered.
If condition A, and condition B, and condition C, AND condition D were all met, it would trigger this really weird bug.
...the same one I'd mentioned to one of our senior devs a couple of years earlier. It wasn't end-user error. It was an edge case.
[sigh]
Yesterday during our weekly technical meeting, I asked a question as to whether an underlying software process had been significantly & quietly changed recently.
I explained that I'd encountered a number of weird incidents over the past couple of months, but nothing I could log or document, just that I had a gut feel that there's a intermittent bug in play, and that after my 15-hour day on Wednesday, I was now almost certain that changes might have occurred in that particular process.
Turns out that entire process had been rewritten.
I was asked why I hadn't raised any Jira tickets for it.
Our dev team could have had a couple of months headstart on this issue, and documented occurrences of it, if a deeply frustrated and under-pressure dev hadn't publicly ripped me a new arsehole five years ago.
Everything is copacetic. No-one is upset with me, the dev who asked me why I hadn't raised the ticket was the QA dev, and all I had to say was "Bug X", and we both laughed, and the dev team gets more of my "gut feel" bug reports moving forward.
The other dev and I are on excellent terms these days as well. I went to the mat with them three years ago, and they apologised, and we talked out our differences, and we have a great working relationship now.
How you treat people matters, even in a moment of deep frustration, and can have long-term consequences in ways that you may not expect.
Be kind. Always.
Remember that your relatives are only your starting party.
You can add and remove people to create the party which works for you.
It's 100% up to you who you keep in your party as your adventure progresses.
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❓ How reliant are you on Open Source software?
🤔 In this lightning talk, Jamie Tanna will describe how having a clearer picture & understanding of his team's OS dependencies is helping them to make better decisions on how to support, upgrade & migrate their projects.
🎟️ Tickets are available: https://ti.to/devopsdays-london/2023
#DevOps #DevOpsDays
Remember that free software licenses are irrevocable - even if a vendor changes a project to a non-free license, the older versions continue to exist as free software. So while we should absolutely criticise vendors who take the work of others and make it non-free, we should also bear in mind that they gifted us the earlier versions in the first place, and cannot take that away again.
Alt text isn't just helpful for the sight-impaired. By reading alt text I can identify what the OP is calling attention to in the pic, helping me get the joke or social commentary that would otherwise be illegible to me. (Without this I'm like, I see a thousand details and I don't know which one matters to you.) #ActuallyAutistic
instead of “cocktail hour” events at conferences can we instead have “kitten hour” where we go to a cat cafe and speak quietly about nerd stuff over soothing tea?
🦊
I wrote a new book, called YOU DESERVE A TECH UNION. It’s coming out *real* soon. (I’m freaking out a little tbh!!) If you’d like to support the book ~slash~ get the word out, here’s how you can help!
https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/street-team/
#YDATUbook #unions #TechUnions #1u #publishing #books #bookstodon
#Zoom just changed their terms and conditions to include using anyone's video and audio for training #AI with no option for opting out. You too can help train #deepfake s!
Living with a disabled spouse, I used Zoom a lot to get through the ongoing global pandemic.
What alternatives are out there for remote teaching/meetings?
#BoycottZoom
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@TechnicallyRon@Twitter.com:
"I took 1 star reviews of #Barbie from furious men on letterboxd and put them on the posters because it makes the film seem ever cooler."
That last one has to be a guy who doesn't understand why he is so attracted to the Kens.
#Feminist #PinkAcidTrip #Gay #AlienatingDangerousAndPerverse
https://twitter.com/TechnicallyRon/status/1683058689224179712
I don't know how to convince more workers in tech that we need unions. We sorely do and I'm hoping that the strikes are showing why. That's why I can't wait for @beep@follow.ethanmarcotte.com's book about tech unions at https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union to come out. It's cheaper than an O'Reilly subscription and will put you into what will make the industry and the industries we touch so much better.
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Today I discovered that not only is July #Disability Pride Month but also that we have a flag. It is so well done and extremely meaningful. It was created by Ann Magill, a disabled writer.
The entire thing will not fit into the thumbnail but if you open the image, it will tell you what each color and flag feature stands for. It is also in the alt text if you are unable to open it.
#disabled #accessibility #cerebralpalsy #adhd #autism #OCD #PTSD #bipolar #depression #invisibleillness (& more!)
People seem to really have bought into the capitalist version of open source where software is still a product that requires support and marketing and a roadmap and exists to serve a user community separate and apart from the project.
But a whole lot of open source is really just a sharing economy. It’s devs doing something they found useful and deciding to share it rather than hoard it. Those devs don’t owe anyone extra labor just because they chose to share.
Why aren’t the “godfathers” of AI talking about the massive data theft from artists & their lawsuits eg? Because that discourse is too beneath their genius brains to cover? They have to talk about grand endeavors like SAVING HUMANITY? Because their practices would be implicated?
you don't lose your engineers because they're solving dumb technical problems, but because leadership is bad. if leadership makes some sense then people do the work they need to do.
We spend roughly 10x as much time reading code as we do writing it. A tool or technique that makes you twice as "productive" at writing code *at best* makes you 5% more productive over all. Making your code easier to understand will have 10x the impact. But that doesn't sell tools or put developers out of work, so you won't be reading about it in Forbes.
Jamie Tanna
.
#swagger
#openapi.
