A very gifted programmer I met from Iran had to do the same. Originally from Iran, he wanted to marry a girl from Myanmar. This was forbidden for some reason so they said "fuck it, let's go to where there is loads of tech jobs". I was working in the Netherlands at the time when I met them. He's now flourishing in the open source software space over there. Brain drain 100%.

and log files eating up storage space was a common culprit.

Another classic symptom of poorly maintained software. Constant announcements of trivial nonsense, like [INFO]: Sum(1, 1) - got result 2! filling up disks.

I don't know if the systems you're talking about are like this, but it wouldn't surprise me!

The article argues for a reworked IT education industry in the hopes of a more skilled workforce:

The result would solve the industry's most pressing need, for good people doing good work, and through expansion into other areas benefit us more than AI will ever manage.

Most IT today exists as a means to support business and commerce. Corporations post absurd profits year over year. They don't need more knowledgeable IT staff. What is "good" for the IT industry employers may be more staff willing to say "yes, sir" and kick the can down the road. Business doesn't care about efficient systems if their systems are profitable.

So why is IT bad at getting brains? Because it is against most leadership's interests. Progress, change, automation all introduce risk which can hurt profitability.

They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.

This touches on something that I've been struggling to put into words. I feel like some of the ideas that led to the separation of files and applications to manipulate them have been forgotten.

There's also a common misunderstanding that files only exist in blocks on physical devices. But files are more of an interface to data than an actual "thing". I want to present my files - wherever they may be - to all sorts of different applications which let me interact with them in different ways.

Only some self-hosted software grants us this portability.

Yes, by design: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/accounts/

IMO, the problem is not them taking the information per se, but in abusing that info to further the massive surveillance apparatus that harms society.

Looks like that will happen later. From Mozilla's original article:

Following a period of testing, these packages will become available on the beta, esr, and release branches of Firefox.

Absolutely agree with you. The point I wanted to make is that there are different ways to summarise, say, in this example, a 50-page memo. The sad thing here is how the official needed to resort to the good versus evil false dichotomy. This oversimplification to have been required because, unfortunately, Trump is stupid.

I guess I'm saying that it's a shame that there are probably a lot of smart people trying to make sense of all the geopolitics, picking things apart, critical thinking... but in the end it was all for nought; they had to appeal to someone - Trump - who never really wanted to, nor was able to, internalise or contextualise it.

I worked in a big German car maker's EV division. The waste of resources put in to not actually developing a good electric vehicle was staggering.

I was part of a 100 person team who was responsible for one cog of a data ingestion pipeline which read in analytics data from each EV car. It was already about 2 years' in when I joined and it was a total failure. Why the fuck they were spending so much money on something so inconsequential to making a car was initially frustrating; now I think it's just sad.

The reality is that the leadership didn't really care. The brands are so strong that they can afford to move slowly on this. There is also a gravy train going on where money is being pumped into these projects and middle leadership are happy to sit back, do nothing, and still earn free $$$ rather than develop good tech.

Here's one of the stories from my experience (software development perspective): https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/08/sbt/

Cut from 6(!) years to 2 years. I had no idea the support stretched as far back as 6 years. 2 still seems totally reasonable, especially given all the work put into backwards compatibility in the kernel already.

Something not mentioned yet: Forgejo, the software running Codeberg, has a smaller feature set and narrower scope than GitLab ("GitLab is the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps Platform" from their website).

Forgejo is much easier to administrate for smaller groups. For example compare the dependencies mentioned in the Forgejo installation documentation and the Gitlab installation documentation.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.

-- Ken Thompson

Good to see development effort going towards actual Firefox and not those random Mozilla products that I can't keep track of

A listicle? What is this, 2008? Get with the times. Give us a TikTok video with recycled ideas.

I remember installing XFCE on an old Pentium 3 tower some office had stored under the stairs. It was like magic - the system just... worked again?! It was the first time I successfully installed Linux and it felt so fast. With Windows the thing barely worked.

That became my younger sister's first computer. The tower and monitor etc. all just stayed on the ground and we played games on it together. Eventually I found an ethernet card and learned how to plug it in. I ran an ethernet cable from our modem through the house along the floor. Then we could go on Myspace and send email to each other.

Can't believe my parents were ok with tripping over all that stuff, ha!

The art of turning a 500-line text file into a 50MB tarball. Welcome to the future :(

For me, that feeling of needing to learn new things I think comes not from new tech or tooling, but from needing to solve different problems all the time. I would say there is definitely a fast-moving, hype-driven churn in web development (particularly frontend development!). This really does wear me down. But outside of this, in IT you're almost always interacting with stuff that has been the same for decades.

Off the top of my head...

Networking. From ethernet and wifi, up to TCP/IP, packet switching, and protocols like HTTP.

Operating systems. Vastly dominated by Windows and Linux. UNIX dates back to the 70s, and Windows on the NT kernel is no spring chicken either.

Hardware. There have been amazing developments over the years. But incredibly this has been mostly transparent to IT workers.

Programming. Check The Top Programming Languages 2023. Python, Java, C: decades old.

User interfaces. Desktop GUI principles are unchanged. iOS and Android are almost 15 years old now.

Dealing with public cloud infrastructure, for example, you're still dealing with datacentres and servers. Instead of connecting to stuff over serial console, you're getting the same data to you over VNC over HTTP. When you ask for 50 database servers, you make some HTTP request to some service. You wait, and you get a cluster of MySQL or Postgresql (written in C!) running on UNIX-like OS (written in C!) and we interact with it with SQL (almost 50 years old now?) over TCP/IP.

As I spend more time in the industry I am constantly learning. But this comes more from me wanting to, or needing to, dig deeper.

Sadly the impression I get, from when I've spoken with Iranians, is that the establishment don't see those things as issues to move past at all.

I would never use anything like this. But I want it to exist. Wobbly windows got me into Linux back in 2006. Compiz, Beryl… so cool, so stupid… keep us updated!

Does ActivityPub even share the user's IP address with other nodes in the network?

No this is not in the specification.

A malicious instance could in theory distribute this information but it would be non-standard. Of the 2 systems I've studied - Mastodon and Lemmy - neither do this.

Are they talking about your IP address or the service's?

In this scenario they would be talking about the IP address(es) of the services.

I’m in Indonesia right now. Stuff can be randomly offline or blocked because they think I’ve already accessed or am spamming something. Even little things like New York Times saying “you’ve reached your free limit for today” but I didn’t even have internet access for a couple of days!

I see where you're coming from. Battery electric vehicles I think are a good example of trickle-down. It seems the R&D for electric cars affordable to wealthy people leads to new infra and tech for a changing power grid, buses, trains and bicycles.

But two examples you raised:

• corrective lenses
• refrigeration

have clear quality-of-life and health benefits. Supersonic passenger flights feel more like a luxury and convenience compared to food preservation.

Hopefully in the development of reduced flight times between other sides of the world we perform research with impact beyond flight. Things like improved materials, fuel, aerodynamics that could be used for trains and trucks. I'm not an engineer but I hope it works like that!

Not clear on what systems they are switching operating systems. Assuming workstations operated by people? I’m sure there’s a lot of Linux there already on servers. Apparently there’s at least 1.4 million people in the Indian Ministry of Defence so I’m worried this is one of those announcements to get a licensing discount from Microsoft :(

In a word: convenience.

It was in the right place at the right time with easy UX. A big audience were developers not so familiar with sysadmin in the commercial software world. It provided an easy way to get a kind of executable package. Devs could throw in all their Python/Ruby/JS dependencies and not worry about it. "works on my machine" was basically good enough because you just ship the whole damn thing over.

Docker then supervised the process for you, too. The whole Docker package took care of a lot of things

PS: for those really interested in containers, I always recommend looking into Plan 9: the OS from the original UNIX team intended as a successor to UNIX. Every process has its own namespace and the whole OS is built around that concept (plus a few other core things.. too much to go into here). see also https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rsc/plan9.html

Haha yes I think you're right! I find it difficult. And I'm interested in getting better at it. That's part of the reason why I like discussing stuff on Lemmy. Do you have any tips?

I think my original comment was taken as if I was excusing Trump. That sucks. I wanted to convey the opposite :(

Now I really appreciate package managers more than ever before.

how can a writer be so ignorant.

They probably know exactly what they're doing. Singling out Japan makes for a "better" headline to a mostly North American audience.

It's also a bit of a clever headline. Compare the original headline and this one: "All major automakers continue to produce sports cars". Both headlines could technically be true.

But the original headline lets you get away with stirring up some emotion e.g. "Japan alone is keeping the sportscar industry afloat, European, American manufacturers don't care, sportscars are dying". Life, death: strong words! It's misleading and shitty journalism.

Devil’s advocate: what about the posts and comments I’ve made via Lemmy? They could be presented as files (like email). I could read, write and remove them. I could edit my comments with Microsoft Word or ed. I could run some machine learning processing on all my comments in a Docker container using just a bind mount like you mentioned. I could back them up to Backblaze B2 or a USB drive with the same tools.

But I can’t. They’re in a PostgreSQL database (which I can’t query), accessible via a HTTP API. I’ve actually written a Lemmy API client, then used that to make a read-only file system interface to Lemmy (https://pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Using that file system I've written an app to access Lemmy from a weird text editing environment I use (developed at least 30 years before Lemmy was even written!): https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382

More ideas if you're interested at https://upspin.io

Fascinating insight about those brain dump services.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Massive respect for you to have done 30 years in this silly industry!

It’s that pesky root user, right? There’s loads of their files on my system. I can’t edit any of them. Don’t know why they are so protective.

Unfortunately for those who have those values, not all paid positions involve acting on those values.

Random brain dump incoming...

Most businesses pay money to solve problems so they can make more money. You can solve their problems - but not in the way that you may be thinking.

This is a generalisation that is not strictly true, but I say it to illustrate a different way of thinking: Businesses do not undertake penetration testing because they want more secure software. They do pentesting so they can stay in business in the face of compliance and bad actors.

To find a job, you want to start learning what people pay for. People pay contractors to come in and fix things, then leave again (politically easier, sometimes cheaper). People pay sotfware developers to develop features (to sell more stuff).

Start looking up job titles and see which ones interest you (DevOps, frontend dev, backend dev, embedded...). Don't get too stuck on the titles themselves. It's just to narrow down what kinds of business problems you find interesting.

Other random questions:

• What specific projects are you interested in?
• What types of problems do you like solving?
• Do you like digging in and finding those tricky bugs that have been bothering people for years?
• Do you like trying out new frameworks which let you think about the system differently?
• Would you rather implement a database or GUI toolbox?

Once you're deep in the belly of the beast, you'll find ways to exercise those values. It's hard to know in advance what this will look like.

BYD employ about 570,000 people and by some measures are the largest carmaker in the world. I’d never heard of them either until a couple years ago. They’ve definitely got the cash to put into PR like this. Past couple years Australia started importing their electric cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Company

From Audi 2022 fiscal year:

Revenue rose 16.4 percent to a record €61.8 billion while operating profit climbed nearly 40 percent to an all-time high of €7.6 billion.

The brand is strong relative to Chinese competitors but I don't think it will stay this way forever.

I think they want to move fast, but they simply aren't able to do so.

They want to move as fast as they can maintain their profits. I think major shareholders would ideally like to see more tangible results from their R&D division. But it was clear at the time that it didn't matter enough for real action. Middle management I interacted with were actively hostile to me when I spoke about, for example, making source code visible between teams. There was constant calculated behaviour to keep things the way they were and delay completion to maintain funding.

Ah yes! That is a great trick that kept me going doing software dev professionally.

Instead of trying to get the system I was working with to interact correctly with some shit enterprise system, I would find common protocols (or related protocols) and implement that well. Then I would discover more specifically where the shit enterprise system was behaving badly, and point to something politically neutral (like an IETF RFC) to help get us out of a rut.

It made debugging so much easier. Those specifications and open-source implementations have had much more engineering talent put in them than what I was usually dealing with.

Changing that much was probably a bad thing,

I'm a generalist and this gets me too.

For many jobs the ones doing the hiring are thinking of their domain, so more experience in the domain means a better worker. But a software developer who has developed CRUD apps 50 times on-budget and on-time over 20 years is almost certainly going to be a fantastic candidate alongside the dev who specialised in the health insurance (or whatever) domain for the entirety of their 5-year career.

Now I'm aiming for more software-focused companies and consultancies since I think I'm more likely to meet people who appreciate that broader experience.

Even with (more) UX engineers, it was incredibly difficult to get any development done. When I was in this space, management and contractors were incredibly entrenched playing political games to grow teams even bigger to get more funding. There was nobody with any authority using the thing end-to-end saying “this sucks”.

But maybe you personally don’t have to write the docs or packaging stuff; if you publish it as open source, others can have a go themselves! :)

I worked for a German car company for a little bit, in a team responsible for a similar system: https://www.srcbeat.com/2023/08/sbt/

Thanks :) I think I'll follow that advice, especially on political forums! My clumsy wording aiming to criticise Trump was taken the wrong way and generated negativity. Thanks for your time.

Of all the articles to copy and paste without attribution, you chose this one...?

Haha yeah actually I wonder whether people actually did ask this when Linux started making the rounds. If I read the history right BSD was already almost 15 years old at the time!