vaurora

vaurora, 10 months ago to random

New gender just dropped

vaurora, 9 months ago to random

‘The researchers found that there was no “sweet spot” where a woman could position herself without being criticized. Women were either too young or too old, too attractive or not attractive enough, too educated or not educated enough. Introverted women were not seen as leaders and extroverted women were viewed as aggressive. They ultimately found that women leaders were “never quite right.”’

https://www.sheknows.com/living/articles/2839276/criticisms-that-hold-women-leaders-back/

vaurora, 10 months ago to random

In my lifetime we have gone from “don’t trust Wikipedia, trust the newspaper” to “don’t trust social media, trust reputable online news outlets” to “the only bastion of truth against the computer-generated garbage published by the mainstream news media is the Wikimedia Foundation and the Fediverse”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/aug/01/news-corp-ai-chat-gpt-stories

vaurora, 4 months ago to random

From Atlassian’s remote work study: Team gatherings increase sense of belonging for 4-5 months, but sporadic office attendance does not

https://atlassianblog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/lessonslearned.pdf

vaurora, 4 months ago to random

European free/open source folks: is there a wiki or something that lists sources of small grants for open source work? I am thinking stuff like the NLnet NGI0 or RIPE NCC Community Project Fund grant programs, things that an individual human living in the EU can apply for.

(If there isn’t such a resource, tell me your fave grant programs and I will start one!)

https://nlnet.nl/news/2023/20231201-call.html
https://www.ripe.net/support/cpf/

vaurora, 9 months ago to random

It’s weird to me when people frame calls for bike-friendly infrastructure as in conflict with disability accommodation. Make a city good for biking requires lots of smooth curbless bike paths that are perfect for mobility scooters, much better than trying to use your scooter on the road or the sidewalk. I see people zipping around on their mobility scooters everywhere in Amsterdam. They also have these tiny little cars for people with disabilities that are allowed to use all bike infrastructure

vaurora, 29 days ago to random

Remember that blog post "I got robbed of my first kernel contribution" where a maintainer slightly rewrote a patch and took credit for it? Well, I decided to do something about it.

I co-authored a guide with Maria Matějka and some other folks on documenting how your project gives credit and otherwise handles contributions. If your project's policy is to lightly rewrite contributions and take credit for them, say so! Subscriber link (free) to the LWN article:

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/971817/ae5fbbbc8cd1cf18/

vaurora, 4 months ago to random

I am either proud or embarrassed to say that I score 5/5 on the “So You Think You Know C” test

https://wordsandbuttons.online/so_you_think_you_know_c.html

vaurora, 8 months ago to random

I laugh/cry every time I see people complaining that the volunteer organizer of a blocklist compilation isn’t polite or collegial or nice. I’ve been in the “business” of fighting harassment and discrimination for a long time and news flash: the people who do this stuff are not happy fun get-along pleasant people! If we were, we wouldn’t do things that make the nazis mad. Creating an annotated blocklist sourced from a variety of instances makes the nazis super mad! What “nice” person does that?

vaurora, 3 months ago to random

One way to be a 10x engineer is to make the engineers around you 90% less productive

Via https://x.com/ghosttyped/status/1760734197311000828

Try to keep this going for as many rounds as possible, make the developer resubmit multiple times. My boss said that we should aim to keep all their reviews open for at least 15 days. Meanwhile for all teams other than the targeted team we should give easy reviews within an hour or two of the PR opening, so that the targeted team can't complain about our PR metrics. ex-Dropbox EbPD76 Also the other team complained about our code quality. So my boss suggested that we prioritize some major refactors on the areas they're working on. We then land these PRs by surprise as soon as they finish their work. This way they have to do a difficult merge or even a complete rewrite of their finished work.

vaurora, 6 months ago to random

So the thing I didn’t realize when I co-authored the Al Capone Theory with @leigh is that the next phase of VC investment would have to be in companies led by exactly the kind of person we were talking about: the person who feels entitled to take other people’s work, possessions, and bodies without consent. Most of the remaining plays to get 100x returns in tech rely on theft of some form, and OpenAI is no exception

https://hypatia.ca/2017/07/18/the-al-capone-theory-of-sexual-harassment/

vaurora, 1 month ago to random

Academic journals can price gouge because universities are relieved to be able to outsource performance reviews of PhD students and faculty to them

(From https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/ )

vaurora, 9 months ago to random

Another first for mastodon for me: I saw the news of Prigozhin’s probable death on my timeline within half an hour of it hitting the news sites, and then my timeline filled up with dark jokes. Social media is healing

vaurora, 1 year ago to random

Is anyone else noticing that software just... doesn't work right anymore? Every single booking system I've tried to use in the last week has had a serious revenue-affecting bug (airline, cab reservation, temporary rental, doctor appointment). Two of them were time zone bugs, one was a form field validation bug on a required field, the last was "you can't get an assigned seat unless you call us"

vaurora, 5 months ago to random

My hot take: software companies should not only have bug bounties but also pay external orgs/consultants for other activities: dev tooling, maintenance, testing, standard compliance, accessibility, etc.

My current working theory is that there is a whole range of software-related work that cannot be done effectively by employees of a company because the internal incentives oppose it. Security is the obvious one but also the above-listed activities are this way too

https://mstdn.social/@cammerman/111611237947998075

vaurora, 8 months ago to random

“I sent the maintainer a small patch that represented hours of work and he spent 3 minutes rewriting it and checked it in with himself as the author” - one of the many reasons I quit Linux kernel development. It’s an excellent technique for discouraging new developers from joining your community https://ariel-miculas.github.io/How-I-got-robbed-of-my-first-kernel-contribution/

vaurora, 8 months ago to random

Yesterday I biked by an Amsterdam school during parent pickup. There were only two cars and dozens of bikes. The parents who needed the cars got their kids loaded up in a couple of minutes instead of waiting half an hour. This is what bike-friendly infrastructure means: people who need cars can use them more efficiently and everyone else is enjoying their bike ride home with their kids https://mastodon.social/@TheWarOnCars/111089095480660738

vaurora, 2 months ago to random

Call for interviews! I'm working on an article about an example policy for contributions to open source projects. The goal is for all the contributors to a project, new and old, to have the same expectations regarding credit, reviews, requests for changes, etc. to reduce conflict.

Do you want to share your experiences with conflict over contributions (of any kind) to an open source project? Reply to this post or fill out this form:

https://forms.gle/FJzAvy4MFjqViECv5

Thank you!

vaurora, 1 month ago to random

A friend recommended a newsletter for executives in tech and today's issue had a link to a blog post advising tech leaders on how to get better at asking questions. It had this... illustration...

I am confident the author had no idea how much this graphic torpedoed my trust in them. I am realizing that often people who use AI art don't understand how art works

vaurora, 2 months ago to random

So how would one prepare a consulting business for the wave of businesses realizing they need someone to fix their incomprehensible unmaintainable AI-damaged code in about a year?

vaurora, 9 months ago to random

I don’t remember who first told me this, but an excellent life hack for taking pain or cold medications is to take a photo of each pill you take. When you can’t remember if you took your meds, look in your photo roll and the time of the photo tells you when you took it. Way easier than taking notes, especially in the middle of the night

vaurora, 10 months ago to random

“an autonomous vehicle entered an emergency scene and parked between a fire engine and a vehicle on fire.” https://missionlocal.org/2023/08/sf-cops-firefighters-vent-prior-to-big-vote-on-driverless-car-expansion/add

vaurora, 1 month ago to random

Test your detection of AI images (I'm about 70%)

https://detectfakes.kellogg.northwestern.edu