javi

javi, 1 month ago to random

These people are so fucking dumb. Let me do some quick math.

Any given week day, at peak hour, any train from Madrid's metro can be carrying around 500 people. Let's consider that some of them may be traveling together, so let's say that being optimistic, they could be divided in 250 robotaxies.

Now, that's one train. At any moment there are between 10 and 20 trains going in that line in that same direction. And as much in the opposite. That makes it between 5k and 10k robotaxies. To cover a single metro line

Madrid has 16 metro lines. That makes it between 80k and 160k robotaxies just they could move the same order of magnitude of people our Metro moves in any given workday. If you want to cover really busy moments, like big sport events, you need twice that amount (the nominal max capacity of metro trains is around 1200 people per train, and believe me, I've seen them so full that you couldn't get in pretty often).

That's just for the subway. Local commuter trains and city buses, combined, are actually carrying more people daily than the subway. So let's double the robotaxies fleet again if they want it to "kill public transport". So you need between 350k and 700k robotaxies just to be able to kill the public transit of a single major city.

That's about 1/6th of every Tesla ever made. Just. For. One. City.

The current Madrid taxi fleet? 15k cars.

RE: https://botsin.space/users/fuck_cars_bot/statuses/112232273717775735

javi, 2 months ago to random

Actually, let me use this as an example of how everything has gone wrong with web development in the last decade or so.

Dan Abramov is a very brilliant guy who is part of the Facebook's React team. He has been the most important name in the team working on React for years. And now, they are pushing for changes in React that would make it consume streams of data that updates the UI before the entire data request is completed, instead of just requesting the data and then 'painting' it once they get the reply for that request.

This is nuts. This is a micro optimization. 95% of the users won't ever notice, and those who do (people using extremely bad connections) would be much better if the site wasn't using React at all. At the same time, I'm sure half of the websites in the World who currently uses react will jump to implement this, making their code way more complex, brittle, sucking their productivity down, and in the long term, being worse for the users. Just for absolutely not even a short-term gain at all in their products.

Then why these kind of things keep happening? Because Facebook is too big. And somehow they ended being the ones in control of the most popular web-app framework used by most of the sites nowadays.

The state of the current Javascript ecosystem is what happens when you get companies with hundreds, thousands of engineers, to build sites that 15 years ago would have been built by 1/10th of that number of people. What you get is a lot of people working on a product that's actually mature already, and whose job end being going after that extra 1%, that last micro optimization that could make your site better in a very narrow set of cases. And they don't care about the complexity, because they are part of an engineering organization with literally thousands of hands to throw at any problem. Setting up your code bundler now takes hundreds of lines of code that need constant maintenance to achieve just a 5% improvement over gzipped plain JavaScript? No big deal, they have 6 people working full time on that. React switching to a different programming paradigm each two versions? Nice, now the 900 devs working in the web version has something to do for a few months.

But then small to medium teams adopt these tools. And suddenly you have a 5, 20, 50 devs team having to do the same work the Facebook web team does. Without any of the problems Facebook has to solve.

What's worse: a big share of the current JavaScript ecosystem exists just to solve problems introduced by the previous iterations. Think about it from a user perspective: does the web work any better, does Netflix, Facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc load faster, perform better than they did ten years ago? On the contrary, most of us have more powerful computers, phones. We have significantly faster internet connections. But sites are, at best, as fast as they used to ten years ago. In most cases they are even slower.

And from the engineer perspective it's not better: web development is significantly harder, more complex, slower nowadays that what it was ten years ago. Things that were trivial are now complex. Things that were complex still are. Product-wise, we are not doing anything more complex than what we were doing in early to mid 10s. But somehow now everything is harder, involves more code, everything is now orders of magnitude more complex. And it's not even making the web a better experience.

We made this mess. We made the web worse for everyone. We made our jobs harder for ourselves. It's so stupid.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9qyaoxpilruusopk

javi, 1 month ago to random

Look, USians, I don't want to step into your internal politics, but you see, 45 years ago, we spaniards had the occurrence to write in our constitution that the head of state (the king) has immunity from prosecution for anything they do while they are in the job, and now we have an ex-king with a Wikipedia page that includes a "alleged corruption" section 55 paragraphs long.

And it's only "alleged" because he can't be taken to court even with the piles of evidence that exist.

Just saying.

javi, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

javi, 1 month ago to random

Since I've a new work laptop without a goblin dev environment, I think I'm going to use it as an excuse to install the docker branch there and iron down the last details so we can take it to master already.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9s92oktgu6bg5w5q

javi, 1 month ago to random

Acabo de salir de mi centro de salud (centro de salud Los Castillos , en Alcorcón). Iba a pedir cita en el mostrador porque desde la app de cita previa no me salía ninguna (lleva así meses).

La primera cita que me podían dar es para el 23 de mayo. 23 de mayo. Más de un mes de espera.

Me han dicho que en el turno de tarde tenían siete médicos para atender los pacientes que lleva ese centro. Hace unos meses les han dejado con tres. Tres.

En Alcorcón hay siete centros de salud públicos. Tocan a 24.000 personas cada uno. Y en el turno de tarde del mío han dejado a tres médicos.

Quiero ir a quemar la sede de la comunidad de Madrid.

javi, 28 days ago (edited 28 days ago) to random

One: a Nazi promotes her own speech about The Great Replacement (core Nazi doctrine)

Two: Musk promotes the post and says the problem with [Nazi doctrine] is that it doesn't center enough in [Nazi historical doctrine]

Three: my ex-boss and automattic and Tumblr CEO jumps in to recommend Elon a book about [Nazi doctrine]

So yeah, my ex-boss seems to be full in the movement.

Now let me remind you about this thing called reality:

US population grew 0.4% last year

EU population grew 0.1% last year

World Population? +0.8%

None of those figures has gone under 0 in the last 50 years (and probably before, I just don't want to look for more data). The population collapse the are talking about is about WHITE population. If someone talks about population decline, they are a white supremacist.

Good fucking grief.

javi, 3 months ago to random

Besides all the damage control Automattic is trying to do about selling user data to openAi and Midjourney, I don't think they realize how much they have jumped the shark for some of us.

See, I worked for the company for a long time. I was really proud of being part of Automattic: For years, there was a clear push to be 'the odd silicon valley company', one that actually respected user privacy, gets its money from the users themselves and not from stealing their privacy, etc.

When Automattic bought tumblr, I remember Matt saying on an interview that his plan was to try to show the world that there was a different way to do social media, one that was not based in selling user personal data: he wanted tumblr to be funded by its own users. I remember actually defending him in tumblr itself: People was skeptical, but my reply to them was always that even if I not always agreed with Matt in everything, believed he was really serious about protecting user privacy (even if it was only to protect his own reputation of being, somehow, a champion of the open internet).

Well.

Now this has been proved as bullshit. Automattic signed a deal with the two more prominent AI companies to sell user data, and didn't announce it until the first data delivery was already done. What's worse, if you read the announcement they posted, it's clear they intended to gaslight the userbase: They talk about a new profile setting to protect your blog from AI scrappers. They are trying to sell it as an extra layer of protection against data scrappers, when they know very well that they only think they can do to prevent that is politely request the scrappers to not take this or that blog data (spoilers: AI companies couldn't care less about those requests). And of course, what is worse: at no moment it's mentioned that Automattic has reached an agreement with the people behind those scrappers to proactively send the data on their own, without even needing to scrape the web to get it. In exchange for (what I assume) is a hefty amount of money.

Not only Automattic has sold your data behind your back, but on top of that, they are trying to gaslight you about it.

The AI data selling is a punch in the gut. It's horrifying, but at least it's not surprising: Matt Mullenweg has been hyper-bullish about AI since last year, so he probably doesn't even see this is a the huge betrayal of user trust that it is. But the way they intended to communicate it to the end-user, the sneaky, shady way to talk about it in the official posts... that feels like an entire battering.

For me, the trust is absolutely broken. I can't trust automattic more than I trust Meta: Yeah, there's this 'don't share my data with AI thieves' checkbox in tumblr and WordPress now, but they haven't even communicated clearly what the 404 media article is telling us: That the data is already in OpenAi hands, and that the only thing the toggle does is kindly requesting them to not use the data they already have from your blog. And that they are not even contractually obliged to comply.

Even if they actually comply and don't use that data, I can't trust Automattic to not change their approach and remove that checkbox in the future (It's not the first time I see the company doing these kind of changes, but I always lied myself thinking that in the end it was minor issues with less impact than the overall stance of the company). I can't trust Automattic to not start doing these kind of things behind our backs (since they have clearly tried to do it this time and got caught only because some brave soul leaked an internal doc to 404 media).

How could I trust Automattic anymore, when they even tried to keep which kind of data they were selling to OpenAI in secret from its own engineering team? I feel terrible for my ex-coworkers still in Automattic, because I know a big share of them are mortified and aghast for everything that has happened in the past week. But it's their job and they are powerless against greedy and evil executives ('evil' as in "couldn't care less about the users or their employees")

When I was laid off last summer, the reason I got from HR was that 'I wasn't aligned with the direction the company needed to take'. And holy shit, wasn't that true.

As I said, I can't trust Automattic more than I trust Facebook, Google, or Twitter. And it breaks my heart and I can't believe I've just wrote that.

javi, 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago) to random

Fuck, this may very well be the end of Eurovision as a cultural force in Europe.

What's going on:

The Dutch artist have been showing some mild unease at the Israel presence there this year during the past week. The Irish ones have been forced to change their looks because it included the words "ceasefire" and "freedom for Palestine" in ancient gaelic script.

Yesterday, someone from the Israel delegation staff joked about the dutch artist's father death (the Dutch song is dedicated to him) and there was "an incident" (undisclosed, but the rumor-mill says the Dutch guy may have punched the jokester it looks it was only a verbal confrontation)

Eurovision have disqualified the Netherlands from today's final.

The Dutch broadcaster association (those who pick who to send to EV) posted this a few hours ago:

There has been protest within the Finnish public broadcaster asking for Finland withdrawal

The head of the political party who is the junior partner in the government of Spain is also calling for our withdrawal.

The Israeli delegation seem to have spent the week literally harassing anyone they perceive as critical, with several complains about their behavior already being published.

The Israeli song is one of the favorites to win, and if they do, next year Eurovision would be organized by them. If that happen, there is no way several countries wouldn't just refuse to take part.

So yeah, there is a chance this may be it for the festival. Good job, Eurovision. Great fucking job.

javi, 1 day ago to random

My employer gave us keys to GitHub copilot three months ago

I got my new work laptop a month ago

I've just realized that I haven't set copilot at all in the dev environment of this laptop

It really doesn't look I was finding it useful at all, if I didn't even remember about it once it stopped giving me pointless suggestions.

javi, 1 month ago to random

I decided to get an english keyboard with this laptop, and after a couple of hours with it, it's already clear that was a huge mistake. Not only because a bunch of things change positions but specially... because the enter key is tiny! What kind of joke is this? is this a key for ants?

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9rx6bf1hl87bbauf

javi, 1 month ago to random

And you be clear of what I mean: there isn't any "non profit" reasons for a German company to stablish a non-profit entity in the US. Zero.

RE: https://journa.host/users/w7voa/statuses/112343524122689542

javi, 1 month ago to random

I've already posted about it in the past, but there is an actually decent chance of the current generation of AI companies not surviving the next few years.

I'm listening to this episode of Better Offline pod, and they are doing a great job explaining why:

https://pca.st/episode/359b3345-83d4-47eb-aa6a-5c4100fb6bd1

javi, 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago) to random

Shit is going down HARD in Eurovision right now.We are hours from the beginning of the fest and in the last couple of hours:

The french artist stopped his song during the dress rehearsal today, gave a speech about peace, and left the stage

The Irish ones sent a press release asking the EBU to disqualify Israel for the comments their broadcaster had done about the Irish song

Both Ireland and Greece didn't show up to the festival flag parade that kickstarts the show.

Norway's artist who were going to be the spokesperson of the jury tonight announced she is declining to participate... An hour ago, about 8 hours before she would have to go live

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9t5qbo5qfs3a8r19

javi, 5 months ago to random

Those of you who develop any fediverse based project, how do you do to locally test any change you are making that involves federated content?:

(Please give me ideas I don't want to have to program directly in the server 🥲)

javi, 1 month ago to random

Froilan, 4th in the line of Spanish Crown succession, and an absolute paragon of the house of Bourbon (previous blog post about him over Tumblr), had been pictured leaving an afterhours club in the outskirts of Madrid, actually close to my house, at Sunday's 11am, after spending the entire Saturday before that in the Madrid's mayor wedding.

I'm weeping we'll end with his younger cousin as our future queen instead of a party animal like him.

javi, 1 month ago to random

Btw, as a citizen of a country that as recent as... [checks notes] ... five months ago, expelled three US spies for trying to infiltrate some government agencies, I find hilarious that there is a moral panic over there about the Chinese government theoretically having the chance of using TikTok for spying matters.

javi, 4 months ago to random

Oh new Wordpress-drama in the brewing! So, yesterday, the WordPress official twitter account tweeted this:

It was extremely cringe for the WordPress main social media account to not only be this level of sycophantic with his leader for his birthday, but also using its platform to ask for donations for a pretty banal art project, totally unrelated with the WordPress project, he has been involved with in the past. People from the WordPress community were bothered by this and raise complaints in the WordPress slack channels.

And this is where things gets interesting and hilarious:

What... what???? So Matt, Automattic's CEO Matt, WordPress "dictator" Matt, took over the WordPress twitter account to ... congratulate himself on his birthday and ask the community to donate to his favorite rich-kid toy project????????

WHAT??!? Wait, this can't be true, right?

Also, it's against WordPress rules!! Surely its leader hasn't violate his own project rules, right?

Oh, wait, there's more:

So long story short:

WordPress chief guy takes the WordPress project twitter and bides himself happy birthday by asking the community to donate to his favorite frivolity, and when called out about him, he goes all "oh you wouldn't expect my own rules would apply to me, right?"

Yeah, this is very non-toxic behaviour for someone who leads a project that's the backbone of 40% of the Word Wide Web :D

javi, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

about all this thing about Elon & his lackeys saying (tesla) robotaxies will kill public transit (https://goblin.band/notes/9rtp0ennfkn9xl7q), I just had a shower thought:

Elon is a rich kid. He grew up not only as part of the white minority in south africa, but also a from a fucking rich family on top of that. Then moved to Canada for a couple and spent most of his time there in a small city in the US border. And then finally he moved to the US.

So my hypothesis is: Musk may not have ever used public transport. I would be surprised if he ever has used a subway or a commuter train. I'm absolutely sure he hasn't ever used a public bus. He has NO clue about how it works, about how many people use those things, even in the US and Canada, how many stations the public transport system of a big city has or how long it takes to go from A to B using mass trans transit.

But somehow he (and some people) thinks he may have any fucking clue about how to improve a system that has been under continuous refinement for the last century.

We are living through stupid times.

javi, 1 month ago to random

I've just realized that Senshi from Dungeon Meshi is basically a buffed up Oscar Isaac and suddenly everything makes sense

javi, 2 months ago to random

The comments on this thread seems to point that a sector of the people in the fediverse who cares mostly about it getting mainstream over it keeping its principles.

According mastodon.social's own rules, threads should be defederated. it's a pretty crystal clear case. And yeah, it may even not be intentional, moderation at threads scale is almost impossible to do without making a social network unprofitable. But that's not an argument for keeping threads federated, that's an argument for no social network (or node in the fediverse) to be big enough to be properly moderated. There shouldn't be any single network with tens, hundreds of million users. That's the whole point of the fedi.

I don't want the fediverse to become mainstream, I don't want it to become the new Twitter. I want it to become something new, what the social internet should have been if it haven't been taken over by amoral corporations in the early 10s.

RE: https://mastodon.ar.al/users/aral/statuses/112168710600332531

javi, 9 days ago to random

Ok, now the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, clearly accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity, I hope that means it's time for the UK, US, Germany, etc to finally drop the support for the gazan genocide. I'm probably too naive, though.

javi, 2 months ago to random

Seriouslyyyyy

look at this disappointed face:

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9rb66jw7o9wpju11

javi, 1 day ago to random

Question about USian politics:

Does Biden have to win in the primaries to be the candidate this year, or is it like the World cup and the last winner gets in the next competition without having to go through the qualifying phase (so he will be the candidate 100% sure)?

javi, 6 hours ago to random

So... So... This is what people feel when their national team wins the world cup???