jenniferplusplus

jenniferplusplus, 4 months ago to random

You know all the random unforced tech layoffs are just labor disorganizing, right?

That's it. That's all they are. They're making us play musical chairs with our jobs to keep us from ever building enough trust to organize. Their ideal outcome is a labor pool that's too traumatized and reactive to act collectively.

Just pushing everyone into a scarcity mindset on purpose. It's the whole US economy writ small.

jenniferplusplus, 7 months ago to random

jenniferplusplus, 2 months ago to random

Do you ever get sad because the cyberpunk dystopia we're living in is so much stupider than the one we were promised?

jenniferplusplus, 6 months ago to random

So anyway, if you liked my incendiary toot the other day, then you might also like the long form version.

In summary:
❎ AI isn't reliable, and even if it was
❎ AI does real harm in the real world, but even if it didn't
❎ AI hypesters are not acting in good faith, but even if they were
❎ AI can't know things or understand your complex system

Even if all that were true, making ourselves into reviewers for AI written code is still selling out ourselves and our futures
https://jenniferplusplus.com/losing-the-imitation-game/

jenniferplusplus, 5 months ago to random

"Your right wing uncle"

At some point, we white people are going to have to deal with the reality that it's not one distasteful outlier. Something like a third of your relatives want to dominate, harass, and hurt people; including you if you try to stop them. And another third is happy to go along with it, if it saves them from having an awkward conversation.

jenniferplusplus, 3 months ago to random

Quote from the group chat: "It turns out there are no 'adults in charge,' just increasingly powerful toddlers"

jenniferplusplus, 1 month ago to random

Reminder not to eat the rich.

The rich are apex predators, and they accumulate high concentrations of environmental toxins.

Instead, you should compost the rich

jenniferplusplus, 6 months ago to activitypubtestsuite

I want to share a fediverse test resource I've started putting together over the last few days. It's a minimal config sandbox with automatically provisioned SSL and DNS for fedi services. A lot of apps refuse to federate with instances that don't have ssl or proper domain names, as a security measure. This makes that easy to run locally for testing.

https://github.com/Letterbook/Sandcastles

It's worked for the few people who've tried it out so far, so please have at it.

cc @activitypubtestsuite

jenniferplusplus, 1 month ago to random

I've seen like 100 people say something to the effect of "we need to find ways to support open source developers" in the last couple days.

But I don't get the impression that most people know what that would look like. Can I suggest listening to Astra Taylor's lecture series as a place to start imagining that future?

https://www.cbc.ca/radiointeractives/ideas/2023-cbc-massey-lectures-astra-taylor

Or the book version, if lectures aren't your thing

https://houseofanansi.com/products/the-age-of-insecurity

jenniferplusplus, 4 months ago to random

I can't stop thinking about the fawning copilot demo from a very senior engineer I saw earlier today. It starts out like "this interface changed and I need to update the usages"

prompt
Look at that it's exactly right
prompt
fix the imports
Yes, that's exactly the implementation I already did in a different place
prompt
correct the snippet
It's just amazing how productive this is

jenniferplusplus, 3 months ago to random

Re LB https://mastodon.neilzone.co.uk/@neil/111965092574634669

I don't want contributions so much as I want contributors. I want people to engage and stay with the project beyond a single commit. That includes learning about the project, helping shape the project, and hopefully eventually teaching others about the project.

Submitting gen AI code patches is also just entitled and rude. It shifts even more of the burden onto reviewers. Open source should be a mutual collaboration.

Gen AI produced code undermines all of that.

jenniferplusplus, 1 month ago to random

Wow, tech oligarchs are really getting tired of our* shit**, huh?

We have so much power. We would win that fight every time, almost immediately, if we can just stop pretending we're somehow above being merely labor.

*software developers, defined broadly
**expecting to have a say in the terms and conditions of our work

jenniferplusplus, 6 months ago to random

Forget naming things, the hardest problem in computer science is managing dependencies.

jenniferplusplus, 9 days ago to random

Do you ever just look at big tech, and think wow, this trajectory looks exactly like big oil, big tobacco, big automotive, and so on?

jenniferplusplus, 3 months ago to random

always a fun time to do non-discrimination training that just assumes everyone doing the training is an abled cishet white dude who needs to be reminded that other people are also people

How do I report the microagressions made by the microagressions training module?

jenniferplusplus, 3 months ago to random

God damn.

Please read this. This is everything I keep trying to say about how capital works.

https://defector.com/how-will-the-golden-age-of-making-it-worse-end

jenniferplusplus, 5 months ago to CSharp

Happy new year 🎇

Did you want to get into open source, or building the fediverse in 2024?

May I suggest checking out #Letterbook
http://letterbookhq.com

🔖 Brand new fediverse server, not a fork
🔖 Written in #csharp
🔖 Focused on supporting admins and communities
🔖 No BDFL; you can be a part of the project governance

We just got to working federation, and I'm wrapping up a lot of work on docs and cleanup this weekend. There's a ton to do, and we want your help.

jenniferplusplus, 2 months ago to random

"can you prooooove that would-be neofeudal lords hurt people on purpose, instead of just incidentally in pursuit of money? Hmmmmmm?"

Okay, one yes, actually. They don't actually do these things in secret. They advocate with each for their preferred plans in the op-ed sections of business magazines and the like. You can just read what they plan to do, and then they do it.

Two, I need people to understand that a sufficient disregard for the consequences is indistinguishable from intent.

jenniferplusplus, 2 months ago to random

Free™ Software™ was never sufficient. It always needed to be a step on a larger path, and maybe this weekend's news with xz illustrates some portion of why that is, and also where the rest of the path lies.

jenniferplusplus, 1 month ago to random

Are we still talking about supporting open source maintainers? I hope so, because I wrote about a more holistic solution than giving everyone a patreon or whatever.

https://jenniferplusplus.com/the-free-software-commons/

jenniferplusplus, 1 month ago to random

I'm sure this is true for many people, but I'm having the opposite experience, tbh. Coding (mostly) for myself, and taking a lot of care to make it long term maintainable, has been incredibly restorative for me. Keeping a code base tidy is so much more relaxing than constant tip toeing around a bunch of hazardous piles of legacy junk that you're not allowed to fix.

https://digipres.club/@foone/112340266377188389

jenniferplusplus, 4 months ago to random

Hm

https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2024/01/25/copilot-research.aspx