thesmokingman

@thesmokingman@programming.dev

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thesmokingman,

I mean it’s FOSS. Have you considered opening a PR to contribute what’s missing? You can be the change you want to see. I wouldn’t normally comment something like this. Your emphasis on “still” raised my hackles a little bit and led me to ask why you still haven’t made your own.

thesmokingman,

All of these packaging systems have plenty of tutorials. Speaking from experience, many maintainers were not developers when they started maintaining packages for distros other than the official distros. I have worked with several maintainers who do work in tech and know socially several who had no background. This could be a great place for you to start!

You bother because FOSS is as much paying it forward as it is getting shit for free.

thesmokingman,

It’s cheaper to use a platform as a service than it is to build your own distributed data centers around the world and hire thousands of engineers worldwide to maintain it. At the federal level, there can be requirements for FedRAMP or a restriction to federal equipment.

thesmokingman,

I’ve never seen avocados in a box. Is that a common thing outside of the US?

thesmokingman,

The US has its own share of overly plastic packaging. I have occasionally seen individual vegetables shrinkwrapped. It’s just not the norm.

thesmokingman,

That was the one I was thinking of! I knew there was an organic veggie I regularly buy that’s wrapped.

thesmokingman,

Over in the US I’ve been stoked to see the boycott. Also over in the US I’m now really sad that your only option is Walmart because that will fuck you in the end.

Costco is great if you need bulk or very specific but completely random items in the rotating stock. It is not a replacement for a grocery store unless you can reasonably buy a lot of one thing and use it before it’s bad.

thesmokingman,

I did some cursory searches to find the actual arguments and came up blank. It’s important to note this isn’t the standard “video games cause violence” lawsuit that has absolutely no merit. This is different. The summary presented in articles is that this gun manufacturer explicitly marketed their product for things like this using a sophisticated campaign. If I understand the summary correctly, it therefore hinges on both the marketing of this specific gun and its presence across the digital landscape. The parents aren’t going after shooting in games; they’re going after a company that actively markets its products on social media and in video games.

It’s novel. I’m kinda skeptical because the solution would have to limit product placement and advertisement which has a massive lobby. There’s also nothing that really says “this specific gun leads to violence” without implicitly relying on the whole “video games cause violence” which is bullshit.

thesmokingman,

Multiple teams are being cut, at least at Arkane Austin. I don’t know the total heads rolling. Many of my friends are now out of a job. The severance isn’t terrible, at least for some of the engineers. That’s not better than a job, though.

thesmokingman,

Robert Altman continues to fuck people with that sale

thesmokingman,

I’m not gonna lie I found he died today when I was double-checking the spelling with a quick google. I then had to check the timeline to make sure he was actually involved in the sale.

Basically selling user data from BNET didn’t work out and after the year of flops the board got antsy. Still blame Altman tho.

thesmokingman,

Is it a hot take to say the Shatnerverse mirror universe kicks ass?

thesmokingman,

If you’re in the US, your bank knows way more about you than that and it’s naive to believe otherwise. A lack of credit doesn’t mean a lack of tracking; it just means your data is being pulled from elsewhere.

If you’re not in the US, you might have a better chance at privacy.

thesmokingman,

Do you have a drivers license? A social security number? A phone number that you’ve used for anything else? Utility bills? Relatives? A car? Other large property?

Cash doesn’t mean shit unless you pay for everything in cash and never use the same info (including name, address, phone number, social, etc) for everything.

thesmokingman,

It’s okay to be naive! The video talks about what data your bank has and how that gets used, as a security professional I know how all of this data is tied together plus the other data (assuming you don’t vote either?), and you don’t think there is anything tied to you so cool. Have fun with that. Keep pushing crypto.

thesmokingman,

The $150 isn’t for the new game mode. People that paid $150 were told they’d get all DLC. The devs are saying this isn’t DLC and these folks will get it for free once the game is out of early access. People that paid $250 can play this now. People that paid any more will have some level of discount to purchase access to this mode.

It’s all in the article.

thesmokingman,

This doesn’t appear to cover the cost of the electricity it would take to keep your stuff running. There is no way to pay anything out at all. Seems like a pretty straightforward pump-and-dump where the end users are collecting imaginary points while some company abuses their resources. Every blog and Reddit post I looked at to try to understand this was full of referral links. Equally classic sign of pump-and-dump pyramid scheme.

thesmokingman,

42, 47, and 50 all make sense to me. What’s the significance of 37, 57, and 73?

thesmokingman,

See my link for 47. Its Wikipedia has more context. If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ve seen it a ton.

otl, to privacy
@otl@hachyderm.io avatar

Finally deleted my LinkedIn account!

After putting my account into "hibernation" for the past few weeks, I finally closed it. But I'm still looking for work. Thankfully I can still find positions (SRE and software dev) by just going directly to the company's site and finding a Jobs page.

Good luck to everyone else out there looking for work!

@privacy

thesmokingman,

This is how I use it. I’ve found a couple of jobs on LinkedIn. I’m currently happy at my job and not interested in dealing with passive searching so I check in maybe once a week to see visitors. Otherwise I don’t touch it at all.

thesmokingman, (edited )

You really shouldn’t apply a CC license to code. Someone who does that after saying what the dev said about not forking their open source code has no fucking clue what they’re talking about and is either about to spiral out or build something really dumb (or both).

Edit: yeah the dev seems pretty delusional

https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/9ec42025-3096-452e-a21e-48a7a44698f7.png

thesmokingman, (edited )

There were forks that wanted to hide the fact that they were Floorp forks, forks that did not want to contribute to Floorp at all, forks that used the code for life and just changed the name of Floorp, and many other forks were born.

There are three visible forks that have any stars. All of them have one star. You’re telling me that a project that is so widely and maliciously repackaged has no normal forks with more than one star? Is this tech that only bad actors want to use and has no following in the open source community?

Where are these evil forks, how do we actually know they’re forks, and why are they still up if they’re breaking license?

Edit: Here is a fork with 200+ stars that isn’t a direct GH fork. Given its premise is an opinionated and branded Floorp, is it morally wrong for its maintainers to not contribute to Floorp (assuming they don’t only for the sake of argument)? Does your answer apply to fediverse server owners (eg Mastodon, Lemmy) whose premise is hosting an opinionated and branded instance often explicitly without the technical skill to suggest patches?

thesmokingman,

If a repo is very popular, it should have a lot of forks. The higher the upstream popularity, the higher the downstream popularity. When a dev makes a claim that there are a ton of malicious forks stealing IP, we can vet that claim by looking at the forks that respect the upstream. Big projects have a big community with big forks with many stars. The popular downstreams drive traffic to the upstream.

In this case, we have a couple hundred direct forks. That’s not a ton. Out of those, only three have stars. All of them only have one star. At face value, that could imply a few things: the repo is not very popular, the community is centralized around the upstream, or something else along those lines. Comparing this to other open source projects, our initial conclusion is that this is not a hugely popular repo and does not get a lot of development outside of its incredibly niche community.

Occam’s razor is a tool, not objective truth. Based on the facts as we can see them, this focus on forking from the dev is much more indicative of a burnout spiral, incredibly common in the FOSS community, than nefarious actors. If we see receipts, eg a collection of takedown requests on malicious forks attempting to claim ownership of the code, our analysis falls apart. That’s still a possibility, however remote.

thesmokingman,

MIT and BSD 2 are basically the same thing. BSD 3 extends BSD 2 with a limitation on using contributors to promote without permission. The BSD family is not copyleft.

thesmokingman,

The ostensible point is to prevent resellers from platforming your code. SSPL is an answer to, say, AWS offering your product much cheaper than you can. RSAL seems to be Redis spinning their own SSPL, BSL, whatever bullshit license because they’re not happy with the existing faux open source cloud licenses that prevent platforming.

There really isn’t a good way to handle this from an open source perspective. Cloud majors can and will undercut the fuck out of anyone to establish dominance. Ideally you’re providing a better support experience or working with them (until they decide to kneecap you) to maintain your business. Previously Redis had an paid tier that had functionality not available at the OSS level. I think that’s also legit.

I personally loathe the compliance issues these random shitty fucking licenses throw and don’t think trying to claw back business from majors is the right approach. The little guy is going to follow the path of least resistance which means you’ve made your software enterprise only.

thesmokingman,

They already did that. They companies the tools to remove negative reviews. Glassdoor has not been much different from BBB for some time (if not all time).

thesmokingman,

I’m really confused. The article points out why Brave is a bad choice right after saying it’s a good choice, says that logical fallacies are a problem, moves immediately into why false equivalence is something to look out for in general, and ends. Why is does this mean Brave isn’t going to steal our info? Because Mozilla might too? How does that address any of the valid privacy concerns with Brave (eg forced affiliate links, a privacy violation) rather than social ones (eg Brandon Eich being a piece of shit)? Empathy is a tool to have a conversation with others who might have different values, not a lens to evaluate privacy or user experience.

thesmokingman,

My stance has been that, just as long as I’m interviewing with someone, I’m happy to do it, up to an undetermined time threshold. A screening interview, a tech screen, and then a bunch of panels is what I expect from a solid firm. Just as long as I’m interviewing with someone, I have a lot of opportunities to learn myself. I will also occasionally do a take home if and only if there’s a novel problem I want to solve related to that take home (eg I want to learn a library related to the task) but this is very rare.

As a hiring manager, I try to keep things to a hiring screen, a tech screen, a team interview, and a culture interview. My team is small. I don’t want to spend more than three hours of someone’s time (partially because I can’t really afford to spend more than that myself per candidate or lose more team hours than that). My tech screens are related to the things I actually need people to do, not random problems you’ll never see.

My assumption is that a good dev has lots of opportunity and I am in competition with everywhere else. I need to present the best possible candidate experience. Big companies with shitty employee experience telegraph that by presenting a shitty candidate experience, which is where the employee experience begins. You can’t have a good customer focus without starting from a good employee focus.

thesmokingman,

Randy Pitchford is a piece of shit and forced out the original Claptrap VA. Jack Black is great and I really respect him because he likes games, seems to treat fans well, and seems to care about the communities he participates in. He should not be voicing Claptrap just like Chris Pratt shouldn’t have been the voice of Mario (aside from Chris Pratt also being a piece of shit which I don’t think Jack Black is).

It just felt weird and off the whole time. Maybe I’m conditioned to be sick of the quips we saw in the preview because of the flood of super hero movies we’ve had. Maybe if I went back and replayed Borderlands I’d respond the same way. It wasn’t violent enough, it didn’t have enough explosions and bullets, the characters weren’t the models and that was jarring. It’s not cell-shaded. I got so fucking annoyed at the trite “it’s in my mouth” scene that I just don’t have a good feeling.

I’m hoping it will be a fun, mindless action movie. I’m reserving judgement other than Randy Pitchford being a piece of shit until it actually comes out.

thesmokingman,

His commentary about why they had to nuke all the fun shit in BL3 is equally piece of shit of material. I don’t want to dig through his Twitter to find stuff. Shit was wild. I dislike a bunch of folks in the gaming industry for poor decisions. Randy’s one of very few I will always go out of my way to highlight how much of a piece of shit he is.

thesmokingman, (edited )

People weren’t playing the game Gearbox wanted them to play the game so there were constant nerfs that fucked up everything in the meta.

This looks like a decent video about it; I have not watched it all the way it’s really good and covers all the junk that drove me away from BL3 as well as stuff from Wonderlands I didn’t know about.

thesmokingman,

It’s even more funny because there’s so much stuff that really doesn’t belong in museums if you talk to curators. The average person thinks a Picasso would go for millions and be on display anywhere; there are sketches Picasso did that only have value because Picasso drew them not because they’re good Picassos or moving art. This piece has a good perspective. If we hoarded everything ever we’d get to the point where future generations couldn’t make any new art because there would be no space.

I will never be able to actually touch one of these gems because no museum would let me. At the end of the day there’s not much difference between me flying across the world and standing in line with a bunch of people taking shitty selfies in front of a ton of protective glass to catch a glimpse of one side of this gem and seeing a virtual scan I can move around. Digitize it, send it back where it came from, and look toward new art.

thesmokingman,

I’ve been using Terminator for years primarily because it’s portable. It predates a lot of the portable terminals in vogue right now. I haven’t really noticed a difference in using any of the newer ones so I haven’t switched. There’s some endowment effect there and sunk cost dotfiles.

If there’s a good comparison someone knows about that I should scope to understand what I’m missing I’m always curious!

thesmokingman,

Their justification is batshit for the seven dropped packages I read. I haven’t seen all of those various talking points together in a single place before. It’s a “who’s who” of every crank idea from the last couple of decades. I’m genuinely surprised they don’t drop support for themselves given their social bloat.

thesmokingman,

I feel like there has to be a half-life for scalping. If I buy a new-in-box item that has limited supply and immediately flip it, that’s definitely scalping. If I sit on it for 30yr and then flip it, is that really scalping? I dunno. I buy a lot of old mint board games to actually play them. I have to pay a huge markup. I don’t know that it’s necessarily right from a commerce perspective to expect someone who’s held onto something for 30yr and kept it in good shape to not get something extra for that time and work.

thesmokingman,

There’s a huge difference between throwing something on a shelf and taking care of it. You’re assuming I have a house to let something sit on for 30yr. That’s an incorrect assumption. You’re assuming I have unlimited space in my apartments and moving trucks. That’s an incorrect assumption. You’re assuming all storage is created equal. My climate controlled apartment and external garage with a crack in the foundation prove that to be an incorrect assumption.

Apparently you have all of those things and that’s fucking awesome. I’m happy for you. Not everyone is as privileged as you and some of us have to make decisions about what we keep and where we keep it.

thesmokingman,

You used the phrase “paying” while saying it’s not much work? Where do you think money comes from if not time and work? It sounds like you don’t have to worry about money but most of us do. That’s another incorrect assumption.

thesmokingman,

I really don’t understand your perspective on commerce. You seem to think that everyone has unlimited space in a house that they own or the money to fund movers to keep shifting things around all the time and that no one ever has to get rid of anything ever and everyone can always afford everything ever or companies are always making everything they’ve ever made. I think you’re just trolling so I’m done with this conversation.

thesmokingman,

I think everyone should have access to books and audio. It’s very important for people like yourself to consume a lot of material so you know there are people that don’t have infinite money to buy and store all the things. I know that comes as a shock. Would you like some resources that might expose you to other new ideas that will help develop yours?

thesmokingman,

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey was terrible with this. The game was artificially extended by all the back and forth running you had to do. I’ve used travelgating to describe this before. The first Dragon’s Dogma was pretty okay without fast travel because you really never went back to old locations. It was a huge slog if you had to, though, and that wasn’t always the most fun, especially having to constantly fight the same battles over and over again.

thesmokingman,

Was there actually a community around Elex? I tried to play it on launch with high-end hardware and faced constant issues. I only recently found out Elex II was a thing when I got it in Humble Choice.

Not saying Embracer is right here; just curious if the studio was able to pull weight.

thesmokingman,

It’s probably a good idea to have a stronger definition and mission. Here are a few scenarios you should consider.

  • FSF defines anything that’s not copyleft as hostile. That’s most companies. I personally don’t think I can tell my users what to do with my software other than remove my liability so I vehemently disagree with Stallman.
  • Mongo wrote the SSPL and MariaDB wrote the BSL. Both licenses are seen as regressions. I personally respect the MariaDB case and have been harassed by too many Mongo salespeople to say the same about them.
  • Platforms like AWS are the reason companies like CockroachDB and Elastic implemented restrictive licenses.
  • IBM has been gutting open source through its acquisition of Red Hat. This is a common story; Oracle has been screwing *nix longer.
  • Protecting trademarks causes a lot of consternation from users. The Rust Foundation is the most recent example of this I remember blowing up the FOSS community.

I like your idea a lot. I think it needs some definition to be very successful!

thesmokingman,

I have attended or been involved with five different state universities and a few different community colleges. For computer science, aside from one glaring exception, the default has been some flavor of Linux. The earliest for me at a school was Fedora 7. I think they had been running Solaris in the late 90s; not sure what was before that.

The only glaring exception is Georgia Tech. Because of the spyware you have to install for tests, you have to use Windows. Windows in a VM can be flagged as cheating. I’m naming and shaming Georgia Tech because they push their online courses hard and then require an operating system that isn’t standard for all the other places I’ve been or audited courses.

thesmokingman,

I made the same comment when I saw it was nominated. It’s Fallout 4 in space with both free base building (outposts) and grid base building (ships). The procedural generation of locations is reminiscent of Arena. The class system is a simpler version of Skyrim and Fallout 4. The story is cliche science fiction using mechanics from earlier Bethesda titles. The dogfights are decades old. The drudgery of running around forever for a simple objective hails back to earlier titles like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and similar Ubisoft map objectives.

I have no idea what Starfield innovated. It’s just like every other Bethesda game with some new things done better elsewhere. I am in the minority that love it because it is exactly what you would expect from the studio that’s been rereleasing the same game for over a decade.

thesmokingman,

What evidence did you find to support Substack’s claims? They didn’t share any.

You can quickly and easily find good evidence for things like Reddit quarantining and the banning of folks like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos.

Which claims are empirical again?

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