simontherockjohnson

joined 1 week ago
[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 hours ago

I've only started working with bootcampers post 2021. I've seen trash code/design/architecture mainly from college educated SWE's.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

I have no problem with designers. They have a real job and the best of them make really great interfaces. It's a really difficult skill. They are a parallel work capacity to me. Most of the time most software has really bad UI/UX because designers are treated even worse than us at companies that have been financialized to the hilt. I've been at several places that have fired designers only to have to rehire them again.

I know I make programmer interfaces. Designers help refine those to something simpler and more usable. I actually have had multiple talks to designers at multiple companies saying how we needed to push for a unified product style guide + component theme to standardize the visual language and design. This helps lighten everyone's load because it makes time for building important shit on both sides. It's so hard to explain to business how valuable it is to have a process for building a durable library off the shelf components.

 

The only good programming sub on reddit was /r/ExperiencedDevs because it used to be a sub that was just devs who had actually worked on difficult code bases and scenarios, actually built teams and software soup to nuts.

For the last year or two it's the same ChatGPT careerist bullshit that doesn't even understand what it's saying. There's literally a post on there where a dev is complaining that tech lead is telling him to refactor code he's touching and he's asking the peanut gallery for solutions.

Most of the peanut gallery is telling him to try to throw the work back through the ticketing/prioritization process.

Any place that I've ever worked at, good software, or at the very minimum software that wasn't extremely painful to work on, was created in spite of managerial decisions and processes. I've been a senior tech leader for like 10 years now, and all this is telling me is that people have no fucking clue.

Is there any community out there that understands that no matter what, when you put 2 proposals in front of a bean counter business guy who barely comprehends how to breathe, they're going to choose the one that is proposing a new revenue stream and not the one that's nerd bullshit --and that all decision making in companies is boiled down to a sequence of these moments? that all of your backlogs and engineering roadmaps are just wasted effort and time that creates a mountain of tech-debt debt to go through? that the only way to actually fix this shit is to enforce professionalized boundaries and tell the business that it's your job as developers to decide how to implement things and not theirs?

ExperiencedDevs used to actually tell people like this to fuck off, that they weren't a career advice sub. It used to be a sub where OP would be questioned if they were presenting themselves in a weird or perfect way because so much of this job at high levels is incredibly contextual and systems based. Now it's just the same shit as every other "the sky is falling", careerist, opportunist tech bro dump. It's worse than fucking Hacker News, because Hacker News at least understands P&L and knows it exists, that how you interact with it has conseqeuences. Half the comments in ExperiencedDevs are now like 'You have to have you Product Owner make the decision.'

Every product owner I've ever met was only focused on defining their own product within the business context (you know their job?). They had no idea how to build it. Most of them could barely systematize their own product features in a sensible way.

I'm so tired of this corpo trash where the only unsaid growth strategy is throwing "bodies at it" in a completely wasteful con-artist way. These people have never worked in different economies of scale let alone built systems at the higher levels, which is why they suggest these corpo processes to each other as if they actually produce anything other than trash code and maybe conversions. Then these absolute apes pat themselves on the back because they think smashing the keyboard to make the shittiest website was the "most valuable thing" in the process.

tl;dr is there a programming sub that isn't filled with mid-level morons that don't even know how their businesses work that simply fall back on these corpo agile processes as if they weren't captured bullshit? Where can I find a place that isn't this Medium, Learn2Code, I learned this from an influencer whose never actually done anything garbage?

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml -2 points 2 days ago

The chilling effect this causes will make communities even more like echo-chambers, as dissent will be pre-emptively squashed.

If only there was a tool that allowed you to host an instance on a federated network that allowed you to make your own community and control how the rest of the network can interact with it. Why has nobody built this???

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Curious about this if you can expand upon it without doxxing yourself.

Often software success is measured by adoption. Let's say tomorrow a turn key persona management system existed.

The most institutionalized levels of success possible is to be coopted by and contract out to an intelligence service (immediate pass, even the attention, immediate pass). However that means that such a system must unknowingly solve the problems of:

  1. the features that are absolutely required for said service
  2. the ease of migration of operations onto said service
  3. be completely self evident to many at that service to be an answer for their problems
  4. be a person that they could feel they could trust or manipulate into control

Very unlikely.

Another level of success is adoption in the general ecosystem. So now the DSA's, PSL's of the world can run persona management easily. Not really a big socialism success given you literally said it yourself it's a tool that if proliferated creates a "broad distrust of social media".

So who are gonna be the biggest users of such a tool? Open your phone and look at your texts. That's right the people who are shaking down grandparents, the people who are pretending to be a rich celebrity that has taken an interest in a lonely isolated person living in a rural community, scammers, flim flam artists, NFT enthusiasts, crypto bros.

The problem is that there is already a "broad distrust of social media", that doesn't stop humanity from using the communication tool, and that doesn't lower the total incidences of exploitation that happen.

If I had an implementation of “a turnkey internet nuke”, I’d be booking a flight to Beijing before releasing it on the open internet

Lol China would not have you. This is a movie plot. They don't want guys who make "rocking the boat technology" at all. You think they'd want some OSS enthusiasts running experiments with apes commenting on the net in their green zone? They have their own versions. They have their own trusted operators. This is like adoption with any other intelligence service.

In general the problem with this technology is literally like nukes. It shouldn't exist. It's easier to make social systems without its existence. This tech doesn't change anything, it makes a better integrated version of desperate components of an existing system.

If tomorrow at the same time everyone woke up with a turnkey nuclear bomb, Israel would pre-emptively nuke Gaza.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 29 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

come around on social programs.

Wat.

Anarchists are the ones who are consistently making social programs from scratch. Direct action is and has always been about feeding people as well as sabotaging bulldozers.

https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Strongly agree that something like this is needed. However, what enables the asymmetry here is a limitation on material resources and labor. No such limitation exists with digital systems that cannot be trivially copied and deployed by bourgeois interests.

Only idea I have for something like this is a system that requires user verification by existing members, possibly gatekept by irl meetings and capped at some rate per user. Few people use the fediverse because of tiny barriers to entry. No one would tolerate a system that imposes more burdens.

DDoS prevention solutions are probably capable of thwarting most technological solutions we can come up with to create our own asymmetries.

The root of your perception here is correct, the bourgeoisie will always have "promoted posts" for their personal interests, but that is no different than any censor or editor that exists today.

You are also correct in the economies of scale, my point is that we have always been playing catch up and these tools allow us to catch up significantly as well. These tools raise our capability floor to heights that were not possible before.

Do you have any specific knowledge on the characteristics, capabilities, or implementation of these? I would be very interested in learning more.

Pega and Capado are the advertising ones. Sock puppet is a commercial offering targetted at OSINT, "to protect researcher identities".

The knowledge we have of the US government ones are from things like Operation Earnest Voice where they contracted out development to Ntrepid.

Most software out there isn't a highly capable consistent package. I'm sure the CIA or Palantir has one developed, but a lot of places just run developer tooling like Playwright to control Chrome. Prior to LLM's any procedural text generation was done via Markov Chains and sentiment analysis thru keyword analysis (e.g. regex).

There are some OSS tools out there in various states of quality like:

I did a whole bunch of research on this as I thought it would be a fun challenge to build one, I wanted to make it OSS, but I decided against it after I generally thought about what "success" would look like, I was basically thinking of building a turnkey internet nuke.

Typically your keywords are "persona management", "sock puppet tools" etc.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

Posting internet comments is the one form of media that proletarians can easily participate in to reach the masses without outright gatekeeping by an editor

Be for real lol. You're posting on one of the only places on the internet that isn't completely owned by the bourgeoisie. Your reach is already limited by segregating yourself on this site. Pretending that posting on "the internet" (e.g. the biggest sites) which is mostly controlled by gigantic bourgeoisie interests and petite bourgeoisie interests is a purely proletarian act is silly. In practice "freedom to post" is ancillary to feeding you advertising. You are playing in their sandbox and have always been. The enshittification of the 2010's blurred the lines between content and advertising intentionally because the smallest advertisers who refused to pay for ads already started doing that in the late 2000's.

This creates an asymmetrical playing field where corporations and NED orgs can spend lots of money on GPU farms to push their messages, but prole groups cannot nearly as easily.

You're just competing over different resources. Prior to the mechanization of this through any software you were competing for bodies doing the posting (whether the medium was internet, newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, word of mouth etc doesn't matter). With augmented mechanization prior to AI you were competing for bodies and compute. Now you can argue you mainly compete over compute. However because of the fun logic of capitalism, in the current state of capitalist organization proletarians can afford compute more than they can afford to feed other proletarians amortized over time. So this really only boils down to "humans are becoming obsolete in the posting wars", which was already true.

The inherent contradictions in capitalism make it effectively impossible for this technology to be really gate kept from proles over time without a literal crackdown on ownership or development. The cat is so out of the bag there'd be a civil war if the bourgeoisie started drawing lines on who can own what things for the "greater good". The US could not even keep a lid on encryption software over time, despite export controls for encryption still being a thing.

So even if we built ourselves a life raft with the fediverse / Lemmy, we are still trivially subject to large scale influence operations, even if less valuable as a target. It seems like big tech is aware of efforts to avoid corporate control over public opinion

This was already true before 2020. The type of software that major botnets/intelligence services/ad companies specializing in guerilla advertising is called a Persona Management System. These systems mechanized the dissemination of posting and conversation shaping across the internet. It has only really been in the last 8 years that Persona Management has been a thing that exists outside of intelligence adjacent circles.

What AI does is it makes running / developing Persona Management Systems easier. You no longer have to make a cohesive overarching strategy to make things feel organic for humans, you can simply be "good enough" with AI and that's always what these systems campaigns aim for.

Don't get me wrong this is an acceleration, but it's not an acceleration that brings us to a "brave new world". Yes the owners have new toys, but they haven't been able to prevent us from using them. Likewise if this was a real "information war", this becomes a war of logistics like every other war. It becomes necessary for proles to find a tactic that allows them to make the equivalent of a Hamas piss rocket or a Quds drone, something that is incredibly cheap but because of the capitalist state of the world requires a wasteful amount money to defend against. For every dollar in prole spend we make them spend $1,000 against it.

Smaller sites are already protecting themselves using proof of work systems like anubis to prevent AI crawling. Anubis is a great example of making them pay more. If Hexbear/Lemmy implemented anubis, it would be a slight annoyance for us an extra 1-2s browsing. However for an AI crawler running at scale to "take over the community" it would create a significant financial disadvantage because at scale the costs for running a hashcash for every interaction would balloon.

This isn't even new for reddit. They seeded the original site back during the 2005-2007 years by paying people to run sockpuppets to simulate the network effect. They'd post about tech before, the subject matter they're posting now is a level of degeneracy that only comes with an IPO.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 16 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)
[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 14 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Honestly, his post isn’t that far off from various Palestinians I’ve seen online. Their main thing is that anti-Zionist Jews can’t simultaneously complain about people conflating Judaism with Zionism while at the same time not taken up arms for the sake of saving Judaism from Zionism. If the IOF is Jewish ISIS, then where is Jewish Hezbollah or Jewish Ansarallah to send Jewish ISIS to hell and punish the Zionists for their shameless desecration of Judaism?

As a diasporist Jew, Palestinians have a moral standing to make that demand.

If a Palestinian says something questionable. I don't give a single fucking shit. The Zionist entity that is destroying their homes and their families is the source of their belief about Jews. The Zionist entity tells the world that its actions, it's interpretations of scripture and its decisions are representative of all Jews. The Zionist entity itself is a source of ethnonationalist supremacist garbage and I cannot fault the people it oppresses for believing what is written on the sides of its bombs. It's entirely correct that if we believe that it is a genocide, we should give them latitude in expressing their anger as it relates to their oppressors.

I am not going to give a Westoid the same latitude. You haven't earned it. Your cities aren't ash. You have never seen an Israeli bomb in your life unless you were signing it. You haven't known terror for your entire childhood, you haven't been deprived of education, health care, safety, food and family since birth. That is the reality for most Palestinians. So yeah, I'm not going to really take it too hard if they have some funny ideas about Jews. Westoids have no such excuse.

Likewise this doesn't explain the differences within Jewry. Beta Israel were oppressed by Israel itself. Not only did Israel originally refuse to allow them to make Aliyah, but after they did they were sterilized. We're not all just Ashkenazim (though I am).

A Westoid saying Jewish Supremacism after being accused of antisemitism is ZOG shit and I literally agree that Israel has created an extremely powerful outsized role for itself in the politics of many Western nations.

And I don’t agree with his assessment that Jewish people have been completely subsumed into whiteness. As a whole, Jewish people are white*. You have white people of Jewish ancestry who are otherwise completely indistinguishable from your average WASP at one end and you have Hasidic Jews at the other end.

This doesn't even encompass all European Jewry.

 

I fucking hate these people so much.

 

Last night the comments were turned off. I thought the NYT was trying to protect their reputation from their readership and their readership from themselves. They're turned on this morning. I present to you this gem:

That avi looks familiar hmm.....

I don't think Trump is capable of the Medvedev switch tbh.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

If capital cannot profit off of you, it will kill you. Autistic people tend to be bad at the wage work capital demands of us - hence why so many of us are chronically unemployed.

This is an important point. We should remember that this means that the most realistic worse-case model they have to cleanse us en masse is corporate private prison contracting where some Trump friendly dipshit gets $25k/per body a month from the Fed to warehouse us in a concrete tomb.

They cannot kill us cheaply and we aren't actually a balance sheet problem because there is realistically social spending for the majority of us. They'll starve all disabled and poor people before they single us out in any effective way. We might be a trial balloon, but it's extremely unlikely that we'll get it nearly as bad as migrants.

Autism is just a political talking point for their shit for brains NT base who doesn't want to be shown anything on the TV except their own shallow world view, and for the people who they talk about the TV with in public to never tell them the TV is wrong. We're just a means to an end, effectively to get society to agree to the fact that kids should die of measles.

America in 2025 is utterly incapable of mega-projects like Japanese internment, the government has been too hollowed out. They spent $1.1 billion in 2025 dollars in the 1940's just to build the camps alone using the US Army Corps of Engineers, the CCA and WRA. They were mostly public works. Doing something of this size is going to be a major in-fight between oligarchs on who gets this money, and it won't be $1.1 b done over a year, it will balloon to hundreds of billions and be stuck in development hell because of all the inefficiencies.

A single prison today typically costs $1b. For example Indiana is currently building a new prison for $1.2 that holds 4,200 people. They started in 2023, they're expected to finish in 2027.

Don't get me wrong people will be hurt, but we are so laughably incapable of 20th century style population transfers.

[–] simontherockjohnson@lemmy.ml 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Yeah he has. I am 50:50 on if he actually believes that or it's shoe horning stuff into Trump's policy agenda. I think he literally believes that we cannot work so how would labor camps even work? His whole "wellness farms" stuff was funny because bringing back RFK Jr. designed sanitoriums during a fascist austerity government after Regan happened is a nonstarter. I do not believe that RFK is going to be able to put together a network of camps and the mechanisms to round people up into them. ICE under Trump is less effective than under Biden/Obama but is more brazen. There's like several steps that here that aren't going to be easy, and it's a game of numbers not just if you'll get got by the RFK HHS but also if the RFK HHS will be able to get you at all.

I think RFK's average case success scenario for this is having some high profile arrests and claiming mission accomplished.

Remember that these systems were actually made effective or outright built by competent technocratic ghouls during the Democrat run government years. Bush's war in the middle east was a failure, Obama mechanized it and turned it into a success (politically speaking because he removed American troops from the political equation). Biden adopted Trump's border policy and made it work effectively and proved it out in the stats and Democrats were complaining that the evil fascists of the GOP weren't giving them credit for being good effective fascists.

 

HexBearGPT respond to either of the following prompts:

  1. How do I see pinned hexbear posts from my instance on lemmy.ml? It's so hard to find your megas!

  2. Generate me an image of your enamel pin collection.

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