As a software dev and open source contributor: stay the course, then! I’ll take open source software over a union 10 times out of 10. I get paid so well for what I do that it’s silly, and I love spending my time doing the stuff I like. I’ve been a union member in other fields, it’s not an experience I’d like to repeat.

I seriously doubt anybody is contributing to open source for status & seniority. Respect, maybe. The status & seniority people become managers; as the old joke goes, that’s the best way to get them out of the workforce.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

I mean, it was more like over the course of a millennium, starting with the Roman destruction of the 2nd temple. I’m sure it picked up with the Muslim conquest, but that wasn’t the start of the diaspora.

What’s funny?

Seems to break along subreddit lines.

I think they claimed they’re not discriminating against browsers, they’re just better at identifying adblockers on Firefox or something.

Illegal to do…what? Not offer high-res videos? To have any delay before streaming videos? To refuse to serve you videos, even if doing so caused them to lose money? How would you enforce that on Google, much less on smaller startups? Would it apply to PeerTube instances?

Google sucks for doing this. It’ll drive people to competitors–hopefully even federated competitors. But laws to ‘fix’ the problem would be nearly impossible to craft–and would be counterproductive in the long term, because they’d cement the status quo. Let Google suck, so that people switch away from it.

Well, fair. But even in that case, they have every right to degrade your YouTube experience, as owners of YouTube. As ISP (I mean, assuming NN was still a thing) they couldn’t selectively degrade traffic, but YouTube has no obligation to you under net neutrality.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.

Fair. I’ve worked in tech for just over a decade now, and I’ve only been in the polar opposite environment, and found it sorta suffocating. Everybody knows this guy is pumping out crap, and every bug in the system comes from his part of the code, but well…if anybody says it, or even hints it, they’re being unnecessarily confrontational, and nobody ever gives anything but positive feedback in peer reviews.

I feel, from my limited experience, like the 90s might have been peak machismo rock star hacker work culture, and the pendulum has now swung to the very far side.

I mean, that’s fair, and as was pointed out elsewhere Linus has sought help for his temper.

On the other hand, for all the talk of how “unprofessional” it was for him to behave this way, he did shepherd an OS kernel from a hobby project to the most popular OS on the planet (with the possible exception of Minix, apparently…)

I agree that polite directness might be better, bu IMHO the more common polite indirectness and avoidance of any hint of conflict is clearly worse.

Well that’s pretty hilariously ironic. I’m nothing like this, I wish I were more comfortable being direct. But meanwhile, you heap abuse on me and threaten to beat me up because I said “boy, it’s nice to see someone speaking directly”. You’re much worse than Torvalds, and I completely agree it would be a terrible idea for us to ever work together. Or for you to work with anyone else, for that matter.

Yeah, it’s kind of invigorating to see somebody speak so plainly. No “There’s a couple issues we should maybe discuss”, no “Let’s loop back on that sometime”, no “Hmm, is that really the best approach? Do you have any documentation?” Just a straightforward “Dude, this is shit! Here’s some reasons why!”"

Having worked for a decade in tech, I would love it of people were this direct.

There’s an important difference, though, especially with Lemmy. You used XMPP to communicate with particular people. When Google convinced, whatever, 70% of users to use Talk and then slammed the door shut, the smaller instances were no longer viable. People on those instances lost contact with their friends. They aren’t going to just chat with whoever else happened to be left outside the walls.

But I don’t look for specific people on Reddit, or on Lemmy. Any large-enough instance is fine. Just like people moved from Reddit to Lemmy, they can move from one instance to another. A major rift could drop the quality of the experience, at least for a while, but the instances would still be viable. They’re not suddenly useless the way an isolated Jabber server was.

I mean, there’s not a lot of incentive for them to change the way they operate…

FTX stole from customers. Binance didn’t sufficiently spy on its customers. They are not the same.

You think Google was fishing for VC money?

It’s not historical consensus. It’s a claim made by some historians that went viral online.

H1B holders are chained to the employer (as are other visas), but green card holders are not. Source: green card holder.

That works if you’re dominant in the market, and you have companies rushing to make software for your platform. If you’re not, you end up as an also-ran platform with a handful of half-baked ports (like every “smart TV”).