ajbin

ajbin, 10 months ago

I think there's a very interesting area for discussion as to whether the fediverse should do more to bake in the idea that instances should be small and co-operate more closely (portable identities, opt-in discovery mechanisms built into the protocol, post history migrations etc) and that we should actively be working against the centralisation of traditional commercial/VC/BigTech approaches.

ajbin, 10 months ago

+1 for yunohost. You have to spend a minute on the command line to bootstrap the installer then it’s nice GUI all the way.

ajbin, 10 months ago

As a baby GenX-er smartphones, and always-on internet didn't come into my life until I was at university so I straddle both worlds, and I definitely would not go back. What I have done in recent years is revolt against the always-on side of modern tech. My phone makes not a peep of sound or vibration, it shows no notifications unless I look in the tray, all app badges are turned off. I can't tell you how much this has improved my life!

I even went so far to run my phone in black and white for 6 months as an experiment. That was a real interesting experience! I found it way easier to simply read and then put down my phone. When I finished my stint and turned colour back on I actually felt dizzy using the phone for a few days.

When you look at how Kbin/Lemmy has exploded in a just a few short days it's clear that modern tech can be amazing for humanity in terms of creating communities and bringing people together, but how we do it in terms of app designs, notifications, dark patterns and all the hullabaloo of is somehow anti-human and I think with waves hands all that has befallen us in the past couple of years we are suddenly waking up and trying to find new ways to be people with tech.

Let's hope the fediverse is a good step in that new direction.

ajbin, 10 months ago

VCs plain and simple. The entire system they operate within is almost perfectly at odds with how a traditional ‘real’ business would operate.

The net result is always some kind of cash grab, and whether the business survives is virtually irrelevant.

Private equity & VCs are IMO recklessly short term-ist with the ‘line goes up’ approach, with as ever, users & consumers & staff picking up the tab in one way or another.

ajbin, 10 months ago

I think one of the big problems in software dev is that the 'code doesn't care about your emotions' is just an easy out to not put in the effort to work with other people. We seem to forget that although the nuts and bolts of our work is engineering, the only reason we write any code in the first place is to support human endeavors. Yes one line of code can be provably right or wrong, but absolutely everything else piled on top of that is understanding and emphasizing with other people. I wish more of us would take a step back from the line of code in front of us once in a while and just, you know, look around us.

ajbin, 11 months ago

One day in my late 20s, I woke up one morning and liked olives. Overnight, or so it seemed, they went from despised balls of horrific salty bitterness to the radiant green orbs of the gods.

Ditto with the celery, especially when you reach that stage in adulting when you learn properly what salt is for!

ajbin, 11 months ago

Absolutely, and it something that's got worse over my career I feel as 'barriers to deployment' have gone down with modern tech stacks. Many developers seem to either mistakenly view the rise of 'agile' methodologies as meaning that we go to code without any kind of plan or understanding of the domain, or worse yet, use it as an excuse to willfully ignore these things.