After watching execs talk about the #GoogleLayoffs, all I can really say is this:
If you are in tech you need a strong union.
If you are in tech you need a strong union.
If you are in tech you need a strong #union.
After seeing what happened at #twitter, after seeing yet another round of nonsense layoffs across so many good people at so many companies, we need unions and we need them yesterday.
If you are in a union already, build strength. We are going to need it.
#AWU #CodeCWA #CWA
We need unions.
And we also need employee-owned collectives that reject eternal growth, increased production, and shareholder profit as the goals of our labor.
The infinite growth model is destroying our world. We can build alternatives.
So one of my first conference trips after focusing my research on software teams, I'd worked really hard & shared innovative science in a talk that was widely acclaimed. But what I remember most is I was crossing the street with a bunch of men in tech and a car pulled up on us really close to me and I jumped and they all laughed and mocked me for the next block and said it revealed my "real personality"
Anyway that DID perfectly describe every day as a queer woman in tech 10/10 no notes
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Presenting: Regexle, a wordle-like game for nerds 🤓
Guess the secret regular expression by testing strings against it!
@piko and I might be two years late with this project, but here we go!
:yayblob: https://regexle.ithea.de :yayblob:
Tired: Closing issues with "won't fix"
Wired: Closing issues with "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT."
Anyone working for BigCorp and have 15-27k they wanna use to sponsor an event in two weeks, to make it as accessible as it has been in previous years?
To a sexy hunky luscious BigCorp like you, it’s a forgettable line item and you probably spent 10x more on useless crap this year.
Go on, give it to me.
😬
https://www.emfcamp.org/
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Join the first OpenUK Digital Meetup celebrating GitHub's Maintainer Month on May 22nd (Wednesday) — 12 to 1 PM.
Hosts @lornajane of Redocly and @JamieTanna of Elastic will be joined by a number of project maintainers sharing their stories.
Register for this free event: https://openuk.uk/event-calendar/openuk-online-1-maintainers-maintainers-maintainers/
#openuk #openukmeetup #maintainersmonth #opensource #community #opensourcemeetup
Want to take a vacation from open source maintenance? You should.
Did you know that GitHub has a profile status feature to mark yourself as busy, mute notifications, and prompt folks who mention you that you're busy for a while?
Before today the longest (optional) "automatically clear this status" preset was a week.
Now the longest preset is a month. Because let's face it, a week is not always a long enough break from the demands of other people.
#OpenSource #GitHub #OSS
Capitalism is an economic theory that posits that a relative handful of greedy fucks gorging themselves is how we provide adequate nutrition to the population at large.
I do wish I could tell recruiters that I’ll never apply to a company that reports record profits and also lays people off.
Like why are we wasting each others time talking about corporate mottos and exciting projects? Your leadership treats people like disposable cups. That’s all I need to know.
#tech #layoffs
There is no war that can be fought with a trapped civilian population. That is not war. If you destroy all infrastructure, bomb the hospitals, ban all media, disrupt the food supply and corral the remaining population into a tiny area and then go after them. That is not war.
I know have separate Mastodon lists of bridged #BlueSky accounts I follow here (thanks @snarfed.org@snarfed.org), Flipboard accounts I follow here (thanks @mike@flipboard.social), federated WordPress blogs I follow here (thanks @matthias@pfefferle.org ), federated Podcast feeds I follow here (thanks @dave@podcastindex.social ) and Threads accounts I follow here (thanks @jessel@universeodon.com & @pcottle@cyberplace.social ) ... and that fact that we can do this at all, and now feels like the new normal, should be an Internet history milestone of some kind.
New: OpenAI—a company that has indiscriminately scraped vast amounts of human knowledge to build a company valued at roughly $80 billion—has made a copyright complaint against the ChatGPT subreddit because it used OpenAI’s logo.
https://www.404media.co/openai-files-copyright-claim-against-chatgpt-subreddit/
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Yikes, bailing on the platform you funded because they are worried about safety is quite the stand.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana
Like many other technologists, I gave my time and expertise for free to #StackOverflow because the content was licensed CC-BY-SA - meaning that it was a public good. It brought me joy to help people figure out why their #ASR code wasn't working, or assist with a #CUDA bug.
Now that a deal has been struck with #OpenAI to scrape all the questions and answers in Stack Overflow, to train #GenerativeAI models, like #LLMs, without attribution to authors (as required under the CC-BY-SA license under which Stack Overflow content is licensed), to be sold back to us (the SA clause requires derivative works to be shared under the same license), I have issued a Data Deletion request to Stack Overflow to disassociate my username from my Stack Overflow username, and am closing my account, just like I did with Reddit, Inc.
https://policies.stackoverflow.co/data-request/
The data I helped create is going to be bundled in an #LLM and sold back to me.
In a single move, Stack Overflow has alienated its community - which is also its main source of competitive advantage, in exchange for token lucre.
Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow's former instantiation, used to fulfill a psychological contract - help others out when you can, for the expectation that others may in turn assist you in the future. Now it's not an exchange, it's #enshittification.
Programmers now join artists and copywriters, whose works have been snaffled up to create #GenAI solutions.
The silver lining I see is that once OpenAI creates LLMs that generate code - like Microsoft has done with Copilot on GitHub - where will they go to get help with the bugs that the generative AI models introduce, particularly, given the recent GitClear report, of the "downward pressure on code quality" caused by these tools?
While this is just one more example of #enshittification, it's also a salient lesson for #DevRel folks - if your community is your source of advantage, don't upset them.
I'm a "full stack developer", in that my stack is full and if you try to push any more tasks on me I'm gonna overflow it and start corrupting my own memory
Devs: We've finally got the thing that's definitely not a Torment Nexus you and running.
That's awesome! We're gonna make a ton of money from tormenting people. They keep asking for it for any reason.
Devs: Speaking of money, I think I deserve a raise.
Absolutely not? Did you even do any work? Also, this thing requires the power of a small country to do even a small amount of tormenting. It's costing us billions. We're gonna have to let you go.
Will you help us build the Torment Nexus?
Devs: What?! Absolutely not!
What if we paid you $1 million a year?
Devs: It's not about the money. My reputation is at stake!
You could tell people you had no choice.
Devs: I won't be responsible for building the Torment Nexus. It's evil!
Oh... well you know it won't look like a Torment Nexus until much later. Right now it's just a cool toy that makes up answers to silly questions.
Devs: Haha, this thing is cool. Wait, what were we talking about?
The question of whether CSS is a programming language serves only one purpose: to demote those who write it.
There is no confusion that needs to be clarified, and no other purpose in asking, beyond the most trivial kind of pedantry.
The debate itself is an act of gatekeeping, whether intentional or not. Its only significant effect is to elevate some work over other work, despite their essentially identical nature.
The only meaningful function of the question is segregation. #css
I will attend MenderCon 2024—a remote conf for people who deal with legacy codebases
📅 May 16
📍 Remote
🎫 Pay what you want (suggested $5)
There will be open-space sessions: you can bring up a topic you want to discuss
Interested? Join us 😉
Details & registration: https://mendercon.com/
protip: drawing a hilariously bad artwork in MS Paint with a mouse is a much stronger quality signal that you care about the blog post than attaching an obvious AI generation
Remarkably consistent pattern as to who still masks, at least in the anglo countries I've been in over the last two years:
Mostly people of color, older folks, and when it's young white people usually disability is involved.
Common thread, I suspect, is that these are the folks who stand to lose more if they get sick. I would that there were a greater showing of solidarity, but rugged individualism and all that 🤷🏻
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Did you know that Open Tech Fund has a NEW grant program just for FOSS projects? You can apply through May 17th!
Join me, @senficon@ohai.social, Laura Cunningham, and Susan Kennedy on May 7th to learn more about the FOSS-maintenance-focused fund and how to apply: https://gh.io/otf-github
Please help spread the word about this great initiative!
Some people think scalability is the biggest challenge in tech. Some think it’s data privacy.
I think the biggest challenge in tech is the constant internal battle between ideals and a fat pay check.
a lot of people don't get this but
software rots. Just like a physical piece of wood or machine, software rusts, software rots.
It's content doesn't change, sure, but the world around it does. The same database you release today, wont work 10 years later perfectly. It'll rust. It won't handle new formats, old formats will introduce new features that will confuse and break your databases algorithm
software rusts and rots. The only way to keep software from rusting, just like a good metallic tool, is polishing it, maintaining it, making sure it's nice and working
Once you've "made it", keep the network going. And give back.
Give back to the nonprofit that lifted you up.
Stay in touch with the people who helped you out.
Pay it forward to another person in need.
Don't just disappear once you've "got yours."
Everything is temporary.
Stress awareness month is officially over.
Please stop being stressed, it is illegal for the next 11 months.
Get your fucking Cortisol under control or you will start incurring fees.
Happy International Workers' Day to the entire Proletariat and to tech workers who just got laid off again but still don't think they have any pressing reason to unionise especially.
Jamie Tanna
.
#union.
