Yeah same. I respect the huge amount of work it takes to make a suite like that, but... I'm lucky I've worked with Blender a lot to give me a good impression of open source software. If Libre was my first thing I experimented with in the open source world (and I think for many, many people it probably is), I would probably think "wow open source software is a joke, I guess you get what you pay for after all". It really makes a horrible impression. I wonder why LibreOffice has so many usability pains vs Blender, despite the fact that both applications have very high demand. Maybe it's just that LibreOffice seems really dull to contribute to?
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No, it's actually the worst name possible. It's the latest in a long line of giving things names that force them to be talked about like they're good. Big Beautiful Bill. Patriot Act. It's like if I name my proposal to make every human on Earth my personal slave the "Best Idea Ever Act That Only Stupid Evil People Disagree With". What's sad is that it's actually effective. There are people out there stupid enough to really think "How can you be against the AMERICA party? Aren't you an AMERICAN????". It takes advantage of linguistics to manipulate psychological response to the topic. And even if you say "well actually the big beautiful bill is actually not beautiful at all" then you sound like a silly hair-splitting moron who doesn't have an actual argument and can only attack the name.
Furthermore it creates an ambiguity. I can no longer say "I'm proud to be an American" without tacking on "but not the Elon Musk Party kind", which then spreads and reinforces the dominance of his term.
The left should really try to start some sort of social media trend of saying we're proud to be Americans just to try to undermine the ambiguity before Musk's marketing bots get into full swing and co-opt the term.
Post-Zuckerberg? I'm confused on the eras of Facebook I guess. He's still CEO isn't he? Wouldn't that make the whole history of the company the Zuckerberg era?
I, too, spent longer than I ever should have thinking about this. My first thought was, they're just using it in a linguistic sense, so it doesn't matter that the exponent would have to be something very small to go from 1 qualification to 4. But then I thought, hm, I guess since there's only 1 qualification for Bill, no exponent would be enough. But then I realized that grammatically the value in question is "qualification" and not "number of degrees". The number of degrees is merely standing in as a heuristic proxy to illustrate qualification. This "qualification" scale makes the most the most sense if it's between 0 and 1, representing percentiles of qualification. Therefore, the exponent applied to Bill's qualifications must also be between 0 and 1 in order to increase the value to Lundgren's. For a moment I thought this was the nail in the coffin for the original text, but of course the word "more" there again refers to the qualification, not to the exponent itself. This interpretation has the nice benefit that no matter what the exponent is, we always get a qualification value between 0 and 1. Hence I can conclude this is the only viable headcanon for this post.
I think the difference between middle management and C-suite is nothing more than (1) the extent to which you can keep yourself from drinking your own psychotic kool-aid, and (2) the ability to present your psychotic kool-aid tactfully.
This is such a ridiculous thing to say, and sadly, I think that it's only on a subconscious level that he's saying this to help MS AI products. Having interacted with many such people, I think they repeat the corporate line so much they actually end up buying into it themselves. CEOs are smart enough to know they're saying psycho bullshit. Middle management ends up fooling themselves, and as a result of their true belief, they don't see any need to mask their insane nonsense ideas like "we should tell the people we lay off to talk to AI, maybe they'll use ours". A CEO at least has the sense to realize "this makes me look like a psycho who is trying to milk money out of people I fired. I'll save this idea for a closed-doors board meeting or something, not LinkedIn".
I believe this difference is what makes middle management so uniquely despicable. It's sort of like how (at least for me) I am less frustrated by televangelist con artists who clearly don't believe in what they say and are just trying to get rich, vs. the substantially more deranged megachurch pastors who actually are true believers yet still fool themselves into thinking it's reasonable to have a private jet. At least the televangelist knows what they are and (privately) owns up to their bastard nature. But the true believer wants it all. Not only do they want the direct satisfaction of their greed, but they want to feel morally justified in it.
Those are some good nuances that definitely require a nuanced response and forced me to refine my thinking, thank you! I'm actually not claiming that the brain is the sole boundary of the real me, rather it is the majority of me, but my body is a contributor. The real me does change as my body changes, just in less meaningful ways. Likewise some changes in the brain change the real me more than others. However, regardless of what constitutes the real me or not, (and believe me, the philosophical rabbit hole there is one I love to explore), in this case I'm really just talking about the straightforward immediate implications of a brain implant on my privacy. An arm implant would also be quite bad in this regard, but a brain implant is clearly worse.
There have already been systems that can display very rough, garbled images of what people are thinking of. I'm less worried about an implant that tells me what to do or controls me directly, and more worried about an implant that has a pretty accurate picture of my thoughts and reports it to authorities. It's surely possible to build a system that can approximate positive or negative mood states, and in combination this is very dangerous. If the government can tell that I'm happy when I think about Luigi Mangione, then they can respond to that information however they want. Eventually, in the same way that I am conditioned by the panopticon to stop at stop sign, even in the middle of a desolate desert where I can see for miles around that there are no cars, no police, no cameras - no anything that could possibly make a difference to me running the stop sign - the system will similarly condition automatic compliance in thoughts themselves. That is, compliance is brought about not by any actual exertion of power or force, but merely by the omnipresent possibility of its exertion.
(For this we only need moderately complex brain implants, not sophisticated ones that actually control us physiologically.)
I am not depressed, but I will never get a brain implant for any reason. The brain is the final frontier of privacy, it is the one place I am free. If that is taken away I am no longer truly autonomous, I am no longer truly myself.
I understand this is how older generations feel about lots of things, like smartphones, which I am writing this from, and I understand how stupid it sounds to say "but this is different!", but like... really. This is different. Whatever scale smartphones, drivers licenses, personalized ads, the internet, smart home speakers.... whatever scale all these things lie on in terms of "panopticon-ness", a brain implant is so exponentially further along that scale as to make all the others vanish to nothingness. You can't top a brain implant. A brain implant is a fundamentally unspeakable horror which would inevitably be used to subjugate entire peoples in a way so systematically flawless as to be almost irreversible.
This is how it starts. First it will be used for undeniable goods, curing depression, psychological ailments, anxiety, and so on. Next thing you know it'll be an optional way to pay your check at restaurants, file your taxes, read a recipe - convenience. Then it will be the main way to do those things, and then suddenly it will be the only way to do those things. And once you have no choice but to use a brain implant to function in society, you'll have no choice but to accept "thought analytics" being reported to your government and corporations. No benefit is worth a brain implant, don't even think about it (but luckily, I can't tell if you do).
Can you elaborate on why? Genuine question. It seems like if the alternative is also not getting what you want, then there isn't much to lose?
Cool. So since she's a member of the house of representatives, she must have initiated proceedings for impeachment, right?
Edit: I am happy to see that she did (or rather joined in with Al's), and it served a useful purpose of highlighting what posers the rest of the Dems are with their resounding votes against.
Yeah, I ask because I'd really like to start moderating or contributing to some type of community that is very popular outside of Lemmy but not currently on Lemmy much. Art seems like a good one. Cooking too potentially. I wonder what would bring the most new visitors to Lemmy?
What interests in particular do you think aren't well represented?
Noooo the last part was critical. That was the part that explained how "moving fast" by not having a dev environment is justified because it taught them the crucial lesson of having a dev environment. Does that seem paradoxical to you? That's because you're not thinking about it fast enough!!
Dang, sorry to hear you lost your raw unfiltered high octane startup velocity all the way back in 2006. /s
Beware: a toxic and probably unfair rant lies below.
I hate this type of content and I hate the tone the author takes. Like every mistake they made is actually secretly a good thing in disguise. Every setback and misfortune can be spun into "a win" if you're clever enough (or in this case, if you pay to upgrade to the premium version of the service you're using. So... money?)
It's all in service of meritocratic narratives. "I fucked something up but actually that was great, which means that if things don't go great for you it's not because something bad happened, but because you choked and weren't as inspired and entrepreneurial as me and didn't make lemonade from your lemons which is why you're worse than me and deserve to be poor and my company is great and give me your money and give us your money and money I deserve money because I'm smart and good and better than you GIVE it GIVE IT now NOW"
The whole writing style just makes my skin crawl.
"Picture this: It's a Friday evening in Paris, and I'm wrapping up what should have been a routine week at Joe AI, the real-estate startup where we were building an AI agent that automated communications for property developers across France."
We're starting with the shilling and advertising already? My goodness, at least buy me a coffee ($5 ♥️) first!
"Now, here's where I should mention a small detail: we were developing directly on the production database. You heard that right. No staging environment, no safety nets. Just pure, unfiltered startup velocity. We were early-stage, moving fast, and honestly? It felt like the right trade-off at the time."
Eeeyyyyuuuck. "A small detail" hits like some 2012 Marvel trailer joke "he's right behind me isn't he? 🤪". "Uhhh, yup. You heard that right." And oh my God "pure unfiltered startup velocity ". No, that's not """"start-up velocity"""". That's a stupid half-assed business plan that doesn't deserve to be called "engineering", and it blew up in your faces and you were only saved because other actual engineers at your DB provider were smart enough to have backups of the data before you upgraded to get access to it. Damn their diluted established business meandering rate of stability and reasonable choices! As if you couldn't make a replica or at least a periodic backup or have a god damn dev or test environment. I have a test environment for my private react apps for God's sake.
"Without even asking my team for credit card details (everything was broken, time was critical), I threw my personal card at the upgrade and prayed those automatic backups existed."
See? Our hero has actualized his triumphant victory in the story by committing the noblest and most wonderful thing any hero could ever achieve: he has spent his personal money (i.e the only thing he or you or anyone else is good for) without being asked, for the good of his company!! Thus representing his willingness to make the ULTIMATE sacrifice (money) in exchange for the ultimate payoff (the continued chance at making lots of money later). I guess that's why this post is filed under "Profitable Programming" (barf).
"Here's the technical takeaway: Never use CASCADE deletes on critical foreign keys."
I....this....this is your takeaway? Why do you think cascade deletes on critical foreign keys are even allowed by the software then? Really, never???
This is like saying "I accidentally shit my only pair of underwear before my date night. The takeaway here is to never shit until your underwear are off.". No, the takeaway is to own more than one pair of underwear, obviously. The takeaway can't be "simply never do the stupid wrong thing".
But now, our hero has triumphed against their darkest hour and will return to the land of the living, bearing the ambrosia wisdom of the gods: "But here's what surprised me most about this disaster: it actually made us stronger as a team. That weekend, I spent hours setting up local Supabase instances for development"
Oh!! But I thought local dev instances was for dumb slow lame-o non-startups??? So the big payoff of this mistake was....now you're finally doing what you should have been doing all along? Sorry, you don't get to spin that as a success story. That's just not a double failure story. You could have had this "success" from the onset, without nearly losing all your data, just by circlejerking less about your idea of what a startup is supposed to be and just doing your job the right way, the way you knew you were supposed to all along.
"Sure, I wish I’d set up local Supabase earlier, but missing that step is a small price to pay for the lessons we gained"
So let me get this straight, not setting up a local DB was a small price to pay to "gain the lesson" of... setting up a local DB? Hmmm....
And to cap it all off, we cite the Netflix CEO's book. Truly the perfect disgusting corporate ass-kissing cherry to top off this bullshit sundae.
I'll be very interested to some day figure out what the explanation for this is. It's extremely bizarre and very creepy. Also, it's crazy that Internet access can just be whisked away so easily by the government. I guess satellite is just about the only way around that.
I love the antigravity vomit coming out of the bottom half of the mouth.
Nice, that's pretty cool. Like I mentioned in my other comment though, I'm less concerned about getting this functionality for myself, but more about how to most easily distribute it to as many Lemmy users as possible so that it becomes a part of the service itself - just because I feel like that kind of feature has benefits for the whole community as it is more adopted.
Yeah very true! It's just too bad that then it wouldn't be a core/universal feature, but I agree it makes the most sense on the client. I just wish it was possible to make it more universal, since this seems like a feature that would be useful to average users, but selecting clients based on these features seem more like a power-user level of concern. I suppose that would just be a matter of clients all copying useful features from each other if it gets popular.
In the same sense that some users might post only articles about ICE in California, or only articles about hurricanes in Florida, I still think that's not very strange. Some people are particularly invested in specific topics. Maybe the author is or is close to rape victims and is therefore especially interested in it. People dedicate their whole lives and careers to specific activist topics, so I don't think it's too strange for someone to dedicate most of their posting activity on one particular website to one. Anyways, I'm not sure what the ulterior motive would be here anyways - what do you think is the real reason for posting so many articles about rape?
I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I'd rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don't want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?
Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I'm not going to take that into consideration, because that's not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.
Lastly, all other things equal, I'd rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let's be honest, especially developers) won't want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that's reasonable or not, it's hard to deny. It's certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.