LPThinker

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

As with all things, there’s a trade off: how much do you value the [convenience/ecosystem/insert other thing that proprietary system offers you] compared to the ongoing cost - monetarily but also in terms of privacy, market manipulation, environmental impact, etc. of supporting and relying on the proprietary system.

You can’t do your work without connecting to Exchange because Microsoft has leveraged decades of monopolistic gains to make Outlook the default option for any “serious” business, and has invested even further in making inconvenient (or soon impossible) to connect to Exchange from outside their sanctioned walled gardens. Demanding that Linux solve that for you is akin to demanding that the person commuting on bike undo a century of automotive-centric urban expansion in the US so that they don’t interrupt your commute. It’s not their fault they can’t solve the problem and it doesn’t help anyone to get mad at them for doing their best to behave rationally in a system stacked to only serve the 1%’s corporate interests.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

The most obvious cost of detached homes is the completely unsustainable amounts of infrastructure required to maintain them. Roads, sewage, electric, etc.

It’s a well documented fact that suburbs of sprawling suburban homes are bankrupting towns/cities all across America and only the densely built downtown cores are keeping these cities afloat because the tax revenue of dense mixed-use areas is substantially higher than the cost of maintaining the infrastructure for these places. Check out Strong Towns if you’d like to know more and see the studies showing all this.

 

Really intriguing article about a SQL syntax extension that has apparently already been trialed at Google.

As someone who works with SQL for hours every week, this makes me hopeful for potential improvements, although the likelihood of any changes to SQL arriving in my sector before I retire seems slim.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)
 

I found this an extremely realistic, thoughtful perspective on why unions are gaining momentum and how we can continue to win back power for ourselves and our communities.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14246943

I found this talk really helpful in understanding the broader context of open source's recent difficulties (see xz vulnerability, Redis license change, etc.)

I am one of the people who has immensely enjoyed using open source at a personal level (and have done a tiny bit of contributing). I've seen and read a lot about burn out in open source and the difficulties of independent open source maintainers trying to make a living off their work while companies make billions using that work and only ever interact with the maintainer to demand more unpaid labor. But I've never seriously considered how we got to this point or what it might take to move to a more sustainable world of thriving, fair open source.

 

I found this talk really helpful in understanding the broader context of open source's recent difficulties (see xz vulnerability, Redis license change, etc.)

I am one of the people who has immensely enjoyed using open source at a personal level (and have done a tiny bit of contributing). I've seen and read a lot about burn out in open source and the difficulties of independent open source maintainers trying to make a living off their work while companies make billions using that work and only ever interact with the maintainer to demand more unpaid labor. But I've never seriously considered how we got to this point or what it might take to move to a more sustainable world of thriving, fair open source.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

If you dig the structured output of powershell, you might want to check out Nushell. It’s a cross-platform shell that builds on powershell’s structured data approach but is much less verbose and, in my opinion, more intuitive than both powershell and Posix shells.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

This misses the fact that even the experts have been using “AI” to refer to whatever technology used to seem impossible, until it becomes commonplace. Before LLMs there were heuristic algorithms, and then expert systems, and then intelligent agents and then deep learning. As the boundaries of what is deemed achievable expand, the definition of AI moves to just beyond the frontier.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Interesting, I thought Floatplane only hosted LTT content. Nebula has a LOT of creators spanning a very wide gamut of highly content. It has been gaining momentum steadily for several years now.

That said, I'd be happy to see them both succeed. We need more competition, having all internet video (minus NSFW and some short-form) hosted on one platform seems neither sustainable nor ideal.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (4 children)

One alternative that seems promising is Nebula. It only fills a small part of the role YouTube currently occupies, since it focuses on being a platform for high quality professional content creators to make unfiltered content for their audience, but it's funding model seems to be much more honest, stable, and so far viable than an ad-supported platform or the other alternatives. I don't think anything could realistically replace all facets of YouTube (and I think the internet might be healthier if it were a little bit less centrally-located). A self-sustaining, straight-forwardly funded platform like Nebule seems like the best path forward to me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Since I am not a woman, transgender or otherwise, I won’t comment on the differences or similarities of their experiences. That said, excluding transgender women from a woman-oriented space does not seem helpful or thoughtful to me, just transphobic.

Also, distinguishing between women and females is not something I’m familiar with and don’t feel good about it. It’s certainly self-evident that afab women and transgender women have on average different lives experiences especially during their formative years in which an interest in tech and CS is likely to be either cultivated or discouraged. Nonetheless, given the significant prejudice against transgender people, I imagine few women would begrudge them participation in this community.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The first comment literally wasn't talking about a whole group of people, they were talking about the men in this thread leaving comments that illustrate the exact reason why this space created by and for women and non-binary people should be about and for the benefit of women and non-binary people.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 11 months ago (2 children)

This is such a brain dead take. The conference exists to support a group that has been and is actively discriminated against and harassed in the tech industry. All the men crashing the event care not at all about the conference, its mission, and its participants - they’re just desperate to find a job. And while I absolutely sympathize with people suffering unemployment, it’s really shitty (and sadly so typical and indicative of the problem) to flood a space designed for women and non-binary people, completely disregarding them in the race to get ahead.

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