I worked for a company once that installed a remote-activation killswitch in their drivers, as a secret weapon to force the customer to stay current on their maintenance contract.

The CEO was a fuckup however, and the code killed their system even without being activated - resulting in a bunch of angry phonecalls and some of the most egregious lying I’ve ever heard.

god, he was a piece of shit

So, only the rest of the world gets superior technology.

The investors will love that.

Butlerian Jihad when?

… just don’t use instagram?

I never have, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out

2008. It took a while to be affordable here.

I never used twitter, I tried to use mastodon about a year ago and hated it, I joined bluesky a few weeks back and love it.

Mastodon gives you an autoscrolling firehose of unfiltered junk on all, or an empty wasteland of subscribed tags, with nothing inbetween. I never found anyone I wanted to follow while sifting through screenfuls of firehose, so I didn’t bother.

Bluesky has nice UX, the posts on Discover are mostly engaging content, there’s a bunch of people i’ve heard of over there, tags are encouraged via feeds, the starter packs are nice and the blocklists are amazing.

Will it enshittify eventually? Sure.

But then you just move on to the next free trial.

It took me a week to find a bunch of lefties, journalists and shitposters on bluesky; whatever comes after it will doubtless be just as quick. They’re a fungible commodity - if I can’t find the same specific set of people on the next one, ehh.

It’s not the unusable firehose that mastodon is, and it’s a lot less fediverse-stanny. (it’s not actually federated yet).

I kind of like it, it feels like the right level of engagement, and there’s a culture of just block the assholes, grownups are talking.

It’s worth a few days to try it out. Nice place.

Spoken like a person who isn’t forced to use JIRA

Let me guess, they laughed at trump?

What do you think an algorithm is?

He says, on social media

How complex does a neural net have to be before you can call any of its outputs ‘pain’?

Start with a lightswitch with ‘pain’ written on a post-it note stuck to the on position, end with a toddler. Where’s the line?

How about a law stating that the terms of all contracts with corporations be listed in a public registry?

You want the state to enforce the terms of your agreement, you put that agreement out in the open. No secret laws, and no secret laws-by-proxy.

If you want something decent, check out ‘Lauren Ipsum’, by Carlos Bueno.

THe phrasing of the message implies that you’re still subject to eg. your employer logging your network access, and third-party sites logging your IP - both of which would be physically unavoidable and not within the browser’s ability to control.

It very carefully avoids saying ‘we’re still selling your identity and browsing habits to ad companies and dataminers even though we could totally prevent that lol’.

Universities aren’t there to teach marketable skills, and they never have been.

In fact they get quite snotty about the distinction; they’re not some trade school, ugh.

They go and market themselves as employment-enablers, because that drives enrolments which drives funding, but a large percentage of adademics see undergrads as a vexing and demeaning distraction from their real work of writing grant proposals. Which to be fair is what their whole career (and the existence of their employer) depends and is judged on, so…

The other thing is that there’s two skillsets involved here: learning to use a specific set of tools and techniques to produce a desired outcome (the trade part), and learning to wrestle large, unwieldly and interconnected tasks in general, while picking up the required specific knowledge along the way (the adademic part).

Teaching just the trade part gets you people who are competent in narrowly-defined roles for now, but it doesn’t necessarily get you adaptable, resilient, bigger-picture people with common sense and a strategic outlook. Teaching just the academic part gets you people who aren’t necessarily productive right now, but have a lot of potential wherever you put them.

Employers would like to hire people who are both. They’re also lazy and cheap, and will use anything they can get their hands on as a resume-filter because they aren’t willing to put time and money into usefully evaluating someone’s potential usefulness as an employee. If they can farm that off to the universities to do (and the students to pay for), they’re happy to let a degree stand in as a not-chaff marker they can require of all their candidates. It’s like bad video game designers using bullet sponges to ‘increase the difficulty’.

Teaching CS is important and useful, but the benefits only really pay off longterm - apart from the bullet-sponge factor.

Teaching programming is important and useful, but the benefits can be short-term and dead-end.

If you only pick one… depends on whether you can afford to eat while those nebulous long-term benefits slowly kick in.

Universities should communicate these things better, and employers should be incentivised to stop using junk degree-requirements to offset their laziness and incompetence. Make it so for every position they require a degree for, they’re taxed the tuition fees for that degree every year.

He says, on the internet.

This is pretty much the textbook definition of moral panic.

It was zero degrees today, and it’ll be twice as cold tomorrow.

“some protected characteristics”

Which would be what, exactly?