schmichael

schmichael, 16 days ago

@molly0xfff I have been too online since I was a teenager in the 90s. Made Geocities pages, lived on IRC and ICQ, used newsgroups, etc.

I don’t really miss it. It’s always been balkanized (various chats, various phpbbs, slashdot, digg, something awful). The same arguments around moderation.

The tech was just awful. Browsers had splash screens they loaded so slowly. JPEGs were progressively loaded. Flash and Java abounded. Security was nonexistent.

But no outbrain. I do hate outbrain.

schmichael, 22 days ago

@bitprophet whole family is sick so that's fun. why is something happening at work?

schmichael, 1 month ago

@jef @whitehouse I really miss NWS accounts, but as far as I know they’re not on Threads yet. There are Twitter scrapers, but they’re hampered by Twitter’s anti-scraping efforts. Any clue if there’s a fediverse option now or in the works for NWS?

schmichael, 1 month ago

@geofft @glyph Yes! I have regularly spent hundreds of company dollars a day on cloud, sometimes leaving it running a week too long before a timeout is hit, without anyone batting an eye.

Any money I want to spend on other software takes pre authorization and expense reports. Barely anyone bothers.

Software needs an enterprise sales channel to get enterprise sales dollars. Companies don’t pay for things they can get just as easily for free. If they did: their investors would revolt.

schmichael, 1 month ago

@glyph @geofft but tipping is part of a preexisting policy and transaction.

Random OSS Library fits into no preexisting transaction, business relationship, or policy. How do you track it? How does accounting treat it for tax purposes? Is there just some random dev receiving the money or a company? What liability is implied by the micro transaction?

Paying money for things with company money is really hard if it doesn’t fit neatly into preexisting policies and channels.

schmichael, 1 month ago

@glyph @geofft changing those policies and channels requires convincing finance not engineering

schmichael, 1 month ago

@glyph @geofft ha no need to apologize I appreciate the passion. I’d be up for trying for this at work, but I’d love to know any specific path that works:

Credit cards for every engineer?! Monthly expense reports with annotations for tax deductible orgs? Business related only and no giving to coworkers?

If this approach works a web page or pdf or whatever that folks can just shop around at work would make this turnkey to implement.

schmichael, 2 months ago

@jacob all i can think is that when we as an industry finally got "docker run X" to mostly work for a wide variety of things people were like "now what would be the maximally complicated alternative"

schmichael, 2 months ago

@bitprophet @jacob yeah don't get me wrong: nix seems to solve a lot of real, hard problems for a lot of developers, and i love that. it has a lot of interesting ideas that i think the broader industry can learn from.

...but making it the default way to install your app is a good way to get me to walk away. even as the official way to work on an oss project just seems so painfully overcomplicated it reminds me of autotools

schmichael, 3 months ago

@shochdoerfer You should be able to subscribe to the mailing list I linked. We do not have a separate mailing list for security releases vs normal releases though.

Filtering our mailing list for the letters "CVE" would probably be the most effective mechanism if you only want security related releases.

schmichael, 4 months ago

@apollo13 it’s recorded!

schmichael, 4 months ago

@robpike reading this at the same time I’m reading Annapurna by Maurice Herzog is interesting and makes me yearn for book length engineering retrospectives. I enjoy the first person perspective far more than the outsider perspective presented in Soul of a New Machine. The detail and humanity of a first person account is just far more valuable to me than the professionalism of the prose.

The 20th or 25th anniversary of Go would be a great opportunity for a book length retrospective. 😁

schmichael, 4 months ago

Threads users don’t care about mastodon. Big accounts cross post. If threads users did care about mastodon they can already have an account on both.

Threads advertisers don’t care about mastodon. They can’t reach us. If they really want to scrape our shitposts… it’s all already out there on the open web. They can already get it without federating.

I really think Meta just wants to use Mastodon as the kids table: a place to shunt the ungovernables without technically “deplatforming” them.

schmichael, 4 months ago

Regulators have demanded tech giants open protocols in the past. Meta sees a cheap and easy opportunity to get out ahead of that. It’s a win for open protocols and federation. If I’m wrong, we can unfederate at any time.

If you were hoping mastodon was going to somehow destroy big tech rather than coexist with it, I don’t know what to tell you. You’re going to have to do more than toss $5/mo to a niche network to unseat trillions of dollars and billions of users worth of entrenched megacorps. 🦦

schmichael, 6 months ago

@glyph if it ever crossed your mind while posting this picture to look and see if there were any family friendly post apocalyptic graphic novels centering on monarch butterflies, a friend of mine has you covered: https://www.littlemonarchsbook.com/