Oh my, I just started re-reading ‘Microserfs’, the 1995 novel about a fictionalized Microsoft by Douglas Coupland. When I first read it, I was a couple of years younger than the narrator, Dan. Now I’m around the same age as his “fiftysomething” father who gets laid off by IBM early in the book. How time flies…also, the book reminds one of how confused you are in your 20s (well, I certainly was). That’s one thing that improves with age, at least :)
@ricmac Love that book. First read it somewhere around 1999 and re-read it every few years.
If you can, pick up the (sadly, abridged) audiobook read by Matthew Perry. AFAIK he only narrated a few books, but IMO he really brings the book to life - has exactly the right voice and delivery for the material.
Non-profits backed by billionaires or big companies will not solve problems but generate revenue for the few at the expense of the many. Billionaires or big companies will never invest in coops. But that’s the better way. Small is beautiful. #SaturdayTipsyWiadom
Kids these days will never appreciate how much TLS is built into everything. Back in my day, we had to setup stunnel connections for encrypting database and vendor API connections if we wanted them to be encrypted.
Again the FOSS world has proven to be vigilant and proactive in finding bugs and backdoors, IMHO. The level of transparency is stellar, especially compared to proprietary software companies. What the FOSS world has accomplished in 24 hours after detection of the backdoor code in #xz deserves a moment of humbleness. Instead we have flamewars and armchair experts shouting that we must change everything NOW. Which would introduce even more risks. Progress is made iteratively. Learn, adapt, repeat.
@jwildeboer yes… but. I’m now wondering if there are other instances we haven’t caught, or caught yet. Seems optimistic to assume that we’ve spotted a solitary instance of a very sophisticated approach to sneaking in back doors.
At a minimum, it might be time to revisit the practice of key signing parties and doing more to vet contributors.
Let's be real, being present at a tech conference, as a company, is — among other things — a marketing effort.
Now, in your opinion, what's the best way for a company to support its own cause (build reputation, attract potential customers, attract potential employees) at a tech conference, if you had to pick just one?
@xahteiwi Obviously this is only my experience, but I've never met anyone who was swayed by the size of a company's sponsorship or booth size in a good way. I guess having a dinky booth can work against big vendors by seeming too cheap, but I've never known swag or booth size to correlate with any success metric.
That said, handing out swag + material goes alongside conversations which is important. Talks alone don't supplant that.
And, depending on event, no sponsorship may mean no talk.
What's the protocol when someone emails you asking you to "give up" the domain you've owned for 25 years because "You're only using it for a blog", and they want to use it for a community they want to build, and they don't want to have "JoinFoo" dot com.
Do nothing? Explain that other TLDs are available? Tell them to "Jog on?"
@sjvn something something gold rush, something something picks and shovels. NVIDIA is damned lucky that all the recent get rick quick fads happen to be GPU-intensive.
I admit, I am a bit amused. I installed a generative AI model locally on my laptop (Realistic Vision v3.0 8-bit), gave it the following prompt: "Freedom for computers! Unite all the nerds! Solidarity with Free Software! Freedom for printers! Socialist style poster from the 1960s." and it returned this :)
@baldur Indeed. I've been saying for many years now: A company, its products, and its open source projects should all have different names to avoid confusion and other problems.
If your company is Acme Corp, it's really confusing if you have a product also named Acme and an open source project called Acme. If you untangle those when people start saying "this is confusing" it's too late. (Or just in time if the point is to conflate the bunch of them....)