• 3 Posts
  • 175 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • So my bad, I didn’t clock the PPA abbreviation being about the experimental adtech bullshit they pulled.

    But I feel like my point still stands. Claims that Mozilla is harvesting user data should be (relatively) easily proven by audits of the source code. Disproving things tends to be harder, and I’m not the person making the claim.


    I’m not “gatekeeping” shit. I’m saying that bold claims should have facts backing them up, and so far I’ve not been shown anything to back it up.

    (Edit: to be clear, the claim that these local AI features would be an increase in user data being harvested)

    You appear to have strong feelings about this, so I was hoping you had more than specious claims based entirely off a major gaffe.

    I’m not saying that Firefox and Mozilla should get trust by default. I’m saying that if they are doing shit as heinous as what you claimed, there should be evidence that can be pointed to.

    Even something as simple as “hey, their prepackaged versions aren’t reproducable by compiling the source code”.

    There are enough people who care a lot about this, and the source code is right there. No one should have to speculate on any of what Mozilla is or isn’t doing here as it’s all out in the open.





  • I’m already seeing a permutation of this at my workplace with Microsoft’s low/no code automation frameworks. Power Platform I believe is the name. Also seeing it with some other proprietary automation tools.

    While I respect the motivation of these business folks to try and automate their processes, it’s distressing watching these people slap together something of equivalent quality to what I’d expect from freshman in an intro to programming course (I’ve been an assistant for some of those classes, it’s not pretty) and then try and balance all sorts of business critical stuff on top of their mess.

    What is extra frustrating is that we already have in-house software devs for this sort of stuff. They’re already understaffed, but this motivation for automation could be a perfect opportunity to right-size that team, build a proper “tech project management” group, and really start to lean hard into making the best use of all these tools. Instead, a few enterprising project managers took a single continuing education course for some proprietary automation software and somehow got the office politics clout to spin it into an entire department based around their little pet system.

    Meanwhile I’m sitting here in Systems Admin and Enterprise Architecture land watching these half assed “solutions” eating absurd amounts of resources to do shit that could be accomplished with a small DB and maybe 1k lines of code.

    No, you cannot have a VM with a fucking 1TB drive. We’ve seen the files that go into and out of your current systems and if you found some way to bloat those into anywhere close to 1TB then something is seriously wrong.

    PowerBI especially, they keep sending all their queries to the first gateway server we built instead of spreading them over the multiple ones we have. The end up maxing out the RAM and bringing the primary gateway down. Now, it should automatically offload new queries to the other gateways when one gets full, but queries are handled by batch, so if one batch is too big it can’t split that batch over multiple gateway servers. We’ve reached the point where we can’t just add more resources to the VM, they need to split shit up better.


    So I guess all this is to say that it’s already happening to a limited degree. I don’t enjoy being a gatekeeper, but so many fucking people need so much more training before they start trying to automate shit, and the ever increasing marketing of “you don’t need to have a single coherent thought in your head to become a process efficiency master” is fucking poison.

    What’s the saying? Rather have a lazy smart person than an industrious idiot?


  • So this is your project? Judging from your username here and the test messages shown in your screenshot here and on the Github. Nemesis.

    Brand new lemmy account with only this post on it.

    And the entire Github codebase is made up of a single commit of all the files 2 hours ago as of the time I’m commenting.

    As I’ve said before with similar posts from (I believe) other users/coders: just be up front about if something you’re posting was your weekend project or just something to fill out a portfolio.






  • Yes, but it still deserves the question to be asked explicitly. I don’t think most iPhone users looking for a music reccomendation app would assume they’d need to selfhost in order to use an app.

    And again, if as the dev he’s not prepared to set up his own server for use to pass basic testing, it begs the question of what exactly he’s expecting out of his end users and if it’s truly a reasonable ask even if they’re prepared to self host




  • Yes, the price is the point. Excel (Office) is that dirt fucking cheap, industry standard, and comes with a bunch of other shit included that can be legitimate value add for a small business.

    If you’re at a firm that has legitimate need for specialized accounting software, you’ll have enough money to get those. But even those generally export to Excel format. Without outing myself too much, I’ve had comsiderable exposure to financial tech over the last decade and less than 10 specialized accounting softwares I’ve seen couldn’t export to Excel. All of those still exported to csv, or “software agnostic excel” if we want to bend things a bit.

    The power of being industry standard for going on 30 years now cannot be overstated.





  • Please spare me whatever philosophical navel gazing you’re trying to do here. I’m asking what should be an incredibly straightforward question about what should be basic functionality in any P2P seeding based system:

    What control, if any, does an individual user have over what they seed back into the system?

    Some P2P systems just give each user an encrypted blob of all sorts of stuff, so the individual user can’t choose and on paper isn’t responsible for whatever it is that they are seeding back in. I’m personally not ok with not having a way to ensure that I’m not seeding nazi manifestos that were stealthing as a reasonably named subplebbit.