otl

@otl@lemmy.sdf.org

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otl,

For me it’s the bloody “video essay” format. Hyper narrated, spoken straight to the camera. Waste of traffic, waste of storage, waste of attention. People think the argument carries more weight, or is just more persuasive, when someone is speaking at you with some vaguely related visual in the background. But really a written piece could be pulled apart so much more quickly.

Unfortunately OpenAI’s Whisper doesn’t do written transcriptions fast enough on my workstation yet for me to use it full time.

otl,

Looks like there’s a fix incoming: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4288#issuecommen…

FYI, on lemm.ee I have been testing 0.19.1 patched with the changes by @phiresky for the past week and have noticed no further issues with outgoing federation, so I think this issue will be resolved with the next release

That patch has been applied (github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4330) so now I guess we’re waiting for a release to be cut. Fingers crossed.

otl,

If I remember rightly, the backend update takes a long time as the database needs to do a particularly slow schema update. old.lemmy.sdf.org seems to still be ok.

otl, to programming

Why We Can't Have Nice Software

https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-we-cant-have-nice-software.html

From Andrew R. Kelley, he's the author of the Zig language

@programming

otl,

Growth might be impossible, but a steady and “boring” amount of profit should still be possible selling plain-ole-dishwashers. Yet … for some reason, we don’t see that.

God yes this bothers and fascinates me.

Instead companies throw everything into growth and we get the retarded bluetooth enabled dishwasher problem everywhere, and I’d like toknow more about why.

I think it’s alluded to in the article:

They found a way to make consumers spend more money on dishwashing. The line goes up, for one more year. But it’s not enough. It has to go up every year.

Digging deeper: why must the line go up? Pesonally I see it as a deeply emotional, human thing.

When you read those annual financial reports from big companies, they will do anything to make sure things look rosy. Bullshit terms like “negative growth” are used because “loss” or “shrink” sound bad. So what if it sounds bad?

Confidence. Trust. It’s emotional. These are deep in our psyche. It’s how governments get elected, contracts are won, and investments are made. It’s what makes us human. If that line goes down… will it go back up? What’s going to happen? Alarm bells! Uncertaintly. Anxiety. People abandon you. Money, power, influence fades. You could find yourself replaced by the up-and-coming who “show promise”.

Our social emotional species has hundreds of thousands of years (millions?) of years of this stuff hardwired into us. Trust let us cooperate beyond our own individual or family interests. Would we be human otherwise? (I found the article Behavioural Modernityinteresting).

otl,

Not sure it’s capitalism per se. Perhaps rampant waste. Criticism of capitalism could include monopoly formation; massive tech companies buy small ones (obtain more capital = more control over production = more profit).

There’s despair over everyone, big & small, resolving the same recreated problems. Kelley doesn’t talk about breaking Microsoft up (i.e. redistributing their capital). He implies he’d be ok for Microsoft to maintain its market position if it just fixed some damn bugs.

otl,

Here’s the article’s source: www3.weforum.org/…/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2023.pdf

That report’s data is a survey they sent out to companies. Quantising “so… what do you think is gonna happen?” seems… shonky?

otl,

Even with (more) UX engineers, it was incredibly difficult to get any development done. When I was in this space, management and contractors were incredibly entrenched playing political games to grow teams even bigger to get more funding. There was nobody with any authority using the thing end-to-end saying “this sucks”.

otl,

Fantastic story - thanks for sharing!

otl,

So you went 5 years without any programming? What got you back into it?

otl,

You can report the message so that future messages from the spammer won’t send. Unfortunately no direct way to mark the message as junk automatically like email, but Signal does have Message Requests which may help? …signal.org/…/360007459591-Signal-Profiles-and-Me…

otl,

Gotcha. I had a feeling something around how Mastodon doesn’t support ActivityPub Groups (yet?) would be where things are going on. Congrats on piefed, by the way. I’ll start studying the codebase now as I’m keen to understand how server-to-server communication works more deeply than I do now. Sending Announce(?) and fetching stuff from other servers…

When I look at the ActivityPub Note object (via curl -H 'Accept: application/activity+json https://hachyderm.io/@otl/111887721960075860) I see:


<span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "@context": [
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "ostatus": "http://ostatus.org#",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "atomUri": "ostatus:atomUri",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "inReplyToAtomUri": "ostatus:inReplyToAtomUri",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "conversation": "ostatus:conversation",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "sensitive": "as:sensitive",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "toot": "http://joinmastodon.org/ns#",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "votersCount": "toot:votersCount"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    ],
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "id": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "type": "Note",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "summary": null,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "inReplyTo": "https://ttrpg.network/comment/4965852",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "published": "2024-02-07T01:59:08Z",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "url": "https://hachyderm.io/@otl/111887721960075860",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "attributedTo": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "to": [
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    ],
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "cc": [
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/followers",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        "https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        "https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    ],
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "sensitive": false,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "atomUri": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "inReplyToAtomUri": "https://ttrpg.network/comment/4965852",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "conversation": "tag:hachyderm.io,2024-02-06:objectId=123754186:objectType=Conversation",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "content": "<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato" class="u-url mention">@<span>Neato</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux" class="u-url mention">@<span>ForgottenFlux</span></a></span>  I totally get how you feel. One use-case I think of is machine-generated image alt-text. These are often not added to images. But with image-to-text ML models, visually-impaired people could hear a descriptions of images that before were never annotated.</p>",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "contentMap": {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        "en": "<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato" class="u-url mention">@<span>Neato</span></a></span> <span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux" class="u-url mention">@<span>ForgottenFlux</span></a></span>  I totally get how you feel. One use-case I think of is machine-generated image alt-text. These are often not added to images. But with image-to-text ML models, visually-impaired people could hear a descriptions of images that before were never annotated.</p>"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    },
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "attachment": [],
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "tag": [
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "type": "Mention",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "href": "https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "name": "@Neato@ttrpg.network"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        },
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "type": "Mention",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "href": "https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "name": "@ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    ],
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    "replies": {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        "id": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        "type": "Collection",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        "first": {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "type": "CollectionPage",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "next": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies?only_other_accounts=true&page=true",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "partOf": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies",
</span><span style="color:#323232;">            "items": []
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>

So I’m assuming an Announce was posted to the shared inboxes at lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and ttrpg.network… hmm… I better start reading!

otl,

Ah! Interesting.

Which instances? Do you mean hachyderm.io with, say, lemmy.one?

otl,

Ex NSW premier John Barilaro was an executive director of a western Sydney property development company. That development company is closely tied to organised and gang crime - murders etc. - and so far its kingpins has evaded any serious prosecution. The video insinuates that this is a result of corruption of the NSW government.

otl,

The art of turning a 500-line text file into a 50MB tarball. Welcome to the future :(

otl,

BYD employ about 570,000 people and by some measures are the largest carmaker in the world. I’d never heard of them either until a couple years ago. They’ve definitely got the cash to put into PR like this. Past couple years Australia started importing their electric cars. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Company

otl,

I suppose there’s positive, then there’s “totally changed how I work”. It’s a big call. Maybe a real-world example would make it sound more believable: “before ChatGPT, I would have to sift through stacks of outdated VB6 documentation on $task. This took up most of the day. Yesterday I used a LLM to get a basic implementation of $task then I tidied it up and installed it within an hour.”

otl,

Thanks for helping me reframe my thoughts.

Haha don’t worry it’s for framing my thoughts too! ;)

To that end, I’d want topics to be problems or shout outs. Something like “how do we test credit cards” might be a sign of “our documentation isn’t great and it slows me down” but it’s talked about as a discreet item.

Devil’s advocate: what are those good practices? What constitutes improvement? One way to focus discussion is to try and pick some specific team values/objectives. Let’s go with the example about Jira.

Similarly “I haven’t seen Jira used this way before” isn’t a problem; maybe the underlying issue is “I don’t understand how we use Jira” or “what we’re doing causes a lot of paperwork”

The statement “I haven’t seen Jira used this way before” is not ideal starting point for discussion - agreed! But with a value in mind I think we can work with it. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, the goal is stronger shared understanding of project management.

You mentioned other team members asked “what’s the problem you’re hoping to solve?”. I think that’s a very pragmatic, specific question (I’m a software engineer, too, I get it!) but it’s not really in the service of the goal of the discussion: a stronger understanding of project management.

So how can discussion help with that? What about a Q&A session? The interactive, conversational exchange is a natural way for people to learn (I hear ChatGPT is pretty popular!), and it’s likely others will learn a bunch of stuff too about why things are done the way they are.


Another technique is to use the free-flowing discussion format for what its best at: exploration of ideas, not necessarily solving problems. Solving problems usually takes code, data, testing, experimentation… things that require time spent at the keyboard.

Taking the credit card example:

Something like “how do we test credit cards” might be a sign of “our documentation isn’t great and it slows me down” but it’s talked about as a discreet item.

Use the conversational format to its advantage. Respond to the question with another question: “why do you ask how we test credit cards?” From there they might reply with something about documentation, or maybe the tests aren’t clear, or they’re not run often enough. Maybe they want ways to run credit card tests on their own workstation as unit tests? From there we identify a whole bunch of ways to improve the code/project/workflow/better align with best practices.

Anyway, I’m not a manager :) I’m just thinking out loud so next time I start speaking to a team to join maybe I understand the dynamics a bit more.

otl,

Hm. Interesting. This is something that gets me too…

Taking a step back: what are you hoping to achieve with the retrospective?

I find that the items people are bringing up aren’t really important or could just be a question in Slack.

What criteria would make something important? Conversely: what makes something minor?

Once we nail these it might be easier to focus the discussion.

otl,

Hm. Some views from other Lemmy instances…

Seems… OK…? Apart from lemmy.world (but that’s running a previous release of Lemmy).

PS from Mastodon (hachyderm.io): hachyderm.io/…/111866487723645951

No replies or anything because nobody subscribed to mechkeyboards from hachyderm.io. I just subscribed, though :)

otl, to usenet

Accessing Mastodon and the fediverse via email:
https://www.olowe.co/tmp/fedimail.mp4
An experimental and interface.
I feel like interface would be more appropriate.
But gotta start somewhere!
Threading and replies work ok too (so far!).

@fediverse

otl,

Oh wow thanks! :) One program syncs my home Mastodon timeline, with all replies, to a Maildir. Dovecot serves that over IMAP. Sending involves a custom SMTP server which reads the mail message and creates a post from it.

For Mastodon it was all about converting statuses (toots? Posts?) into RFC 5322 messages. Using the status’ ID as Message-Id in the message header is handy. Mail clients do the heavy lifting of rendering threads thankfully!

otl,

Ha good eyes! :) I have basic receive-only working with Lemmy using a virtual file system interface I wrote (pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Just realised we actually spoke about this a while ago haha (lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382 )

But synchronising to disk is super inefficient: too many API calls. Should subscribe using ActivityPub proper and store updates received as RFC 5322 messages.

From there we could serve the messages via NNTP. Then, finally, we could use nntpfs(4)

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