ERROR: The remote file either doesn't exist, is unauthorized, or is forbidden for url 'https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/pkg/windows/1.26.9/msvc/gstreamer-1.0-msvc-x86_64-1.26.9.msi'. Exception calling "GetResponse" with "0" argument(s): "The remote server returned an error: (418) I'm a teapot."
CI was a mistake
A smug GitHub engineer wojak is sitting at his desk. He's wearing a Copilot beanie, and is hooked up via an oxygen mask to a canister of copium. The word "COPIUM" is partially covered by a label, spelling "COPILOT". The engineer is wearing a T-shirt that says "Status: Partially Degraded". On it are a sticker that says "Hello, I am: DevOps", a star-shaped badge that reads "#1 Friday Ruiner", another one that reads "Senior YAML Indentation Engineer", and a blue ribbon that says "Broke the site 3 days in a row award". To the left is a filing cabinet with a comically long book titled "The YAML programming language". To the right is an overflowing trash can marked "Feature Requests". On the wall above is a framed portrait of the horse from the "how hungry?" meme, modified to look like the unicorn on the GitHub server error page. There's a gold plaque attached that reads "Our Founder". To the right is a similar portrait of Clippy, whose plaque reads "Our Mascot". Above the portraits are a navigational sign that says "Creative Writing Department: Status Page Division", a framed and signed "Degree in Wasting Developers' Time", and a graph showing an inverse correlation between uptime and vibe coding. A GitHub logo is prominently visible. On the other wall is a neglected and cracked server rack whose status lights are all red. Labels attached to it read "NPM" and "GitHub Actions". Sitting atop it is an empty and greasy Cava delivery bag, with a wadded-up napkin within. A spiderweb, plus spider, are attached to the server rack. The servers are plugged into a hamster wheel. The hamster is running, trying to reach a bowl labeled "SLOP". He has a desk sign that reads "Copilot Jr." Above the server rack is an erasable sign that reads "0 days since last major outage". Many zeroes have previously been erased. Finally, there is a whiteboard containing sprint goals. They are 1) Copilot, 2) Copilot, 3) Copilot, and 4) Rewrite UI again.
"We are investigating reports of degraded performance"
the nuclear block allows rabble-rousers to respond to the easily-dunkable replies, while making the more thoughtful and reasonable ones (which are inconvenient for their arguments) disappear entirely. basically a feature that lets you strawman your critics for free
thinking about it, the nuclear block might actually *decrease* the quality of discourse. like, say someone posts a hot take and gets a lot of pushback. some replies/quotes are going to be well-thought-out critiques that are hard to refute, others will be impulsive and easy to dunk on
it's embarrassing how X the Everything App is *winning* here. they have community notes, a feature designed specifically to counter popular misinfo. meanwhile bluesky has a system designed to allow people to make any disagreements or corrections disappear
the nuclear block also makes it incredibly easy to spread misinformation under others' posts while banishing anyone who calls you out in the replies
me on the northeast regional when the conductor announces we're arriving at new west townington, connecticut (the previous stop was 2 miles up the tracks at old west townington)
1 large egg plus 1 egg yolk, at room temperature
modern recipes suck so much. can't remember the source but like. why yes, my favorite thing to do when i crave chocolate chip cookies is to let the eggs sit out for an hour beforehand so they can get to room temperature and then slurp down the leftover egg white in one large gulp, why do you ask
a tankie is someone who responds to the label with a long diatribe about how you liberals will call *anyone* you dislike a "tankie"
much of the left seems intent on rerunning the 1960s, but specifically just the parts that gave us nixon
also note that they deleted that post *specifically* (as well as the one it quoted) along with the repo. i can't imagine why
My conclusion so far after this really great discussion: We need to stop leaning on licenses almost entirely, and refocus our attention on collective power and collective action. Organize as developers of Community Software and start finding ways to exert influence on bad actors by having knock-on effects: you misbehave with one project, you get shunned/unsupported/blocked by the entire community. To do this, we would need to stop acting as isolated islands of individual projects, and more as One Big Faction. We need to talk to each other. We need to make decisions together and have the difficult discussions about what we'll accept and what we won't, and how far we're willing to go to do something about it. There's even opportunity to share and pull resources and time. Community Software would need to be a big Covenant that we hold ourselves to, that all are welcome into until they threaten the good of what we have built together.
they explicitly said this the day before launching the list! it was infuriating seeing them go "it's just a readme, why are you so scared" and that they're just trying to inform people, when they flat-out said "we need to exert influence by shunning people" a day prior
"thinking about foss stuff, and I know I've groused about licensing stuff before, and how I feel like my only way out is to just Parity7 everything and fall into obscurity but... ...I think we need a different movement around open source, with new terminology, that clarifies the intent and opens doors to more pro-social behavior and capabilities (up to and including the potential for "ethical licensing"). I've been spitballing the terms Common Software and Community Software. The core idea is that things that count as Community/Common Software can't enter the realm of the proprietary (so, strong copyleft a-la AGPL and Parity, virality not necessary). What's the difference from "Free Software"? We get rid of "freedom zero", aka "the freedom to run software for any purpose". Common Software licenses may have Non-Commercial clauses, Anti-Particular-Industry clauses (such as anti-MIC stuff), etc. I think "freedom zero" was a grave mistake. I get where it came from--a desire to remove discrimination--but what it resulted in was a hijacking of Free Software by the corporate "Open Source" wing to exploit an otherwise healthy community of people openly sharing their creations... for an enormous profit that we can't even quantify right now. We need a strong return to copyleft, and we need to gather together and grow its existing ecosystem, away from the MIT/BSD poison that our world has turned towards. Your thoughts are welcome on this. I want to have a conversation about this stuff and maybe eventually record all this in a longer-form blog post. If you know folks who have had similar thoughts please link them so we can chat, too."
this is just the return of Ethical Source, and @im.giovanh.com already refuted this point-for-point years ago (blog.giovanh.com/blog/2021/10...)
Kat Marchán 🐈️ @zkat@toot.cat My conclusion so far after this really great discussion: We need to stop leaning on licenses almost entirely, and refocus our attention on collective power and collective action. Organize as developers of Community Software and start finding ways to exert influence on bad actors by having knock-on effects: you misbehave with one project, you get shunned/unsupported/blocked by the entire community. To do this, we would need to stop acting as isolated islands of individual projects, and more as One Big Faction. We need to talk to each other. We need to make decisions together and have the difficult discussions about what we'll accept and what we won't, and how far we're willing to go to do something about it. There's even opportunity to share and pull resources and time. Community Software would need to be a big Covenant that we hold ourselves to, that all are welcome into until they threaten the good of what we have built together.
this is a...very interestingly-timed post.
it's not hard to read the subtext here; it really seems like this list is a way to gather, and begin to flex, that shunning power. all their previous claims about this being "not harassment" should be taken with that context
leon @lacroixboi.bsky.social · 2h can you clarify what sort of “social consequences” you’re going for here Kat Marchán 🐈 @zkat.tech · 2h people deciding to use other software, your users posting issues asking you to reconsider your usage, people pointing out that you've chosen to use this technology in spite of its harms. That's the gist of it. Even I'm not gonna stop using this entire list. I don't intend to. Some surprised me.
no no no! we don't want people to "harass" anyone. we just want people to go respectfully over to your issue tracker, open a bunch of respectful issues politely asking you to stop using llms, and shame you for doing so in spite of their "harms"! but we're not *harassing* you, nooooo
not many people know this, but it's actually short for Large Language Virtual Machine
Operating Systems Name Alternative(s) Evidence Linux Kernel BSD? Honestly this one's tough Maintainers are explicitly trying out the technology and considering LLM-based reviews
what are we doing here
@fasterthanlime is a pretty open and prominent LLM user and booster. It's pretty safe to assume any other software/libraries by @fasterthanlime are similarly tainted.
like, c'mon man
"The intention of this list is to raise awareness of this technology's usage in popular software, as well as give people informed alternatives that they can reach for when they want to make decisions for themselves. This is not a list created so you can go and give these projects trouble for their decision. If you want to file a complaint about it with them, we consider that acceptable but ask that it be done respectfully and constructively."
my "don't harass the projects on this list, which explicitly includes the maintainers of all the projects" disclaimer has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the disclaimer
throw in the constant A/B testing (a user asks their friend for help, and they send back a puzzling screenshot of a completely different UI) & periodic redesigns from your neurotic full-time in-house design team, and you're actively discouraging your userbase from learning how your software works
at every stage, you can do something like a user study and witness them going "the software has its own whims, it's too hard to understand, i give up" which only further feeds into your conceptions about your userbase's intellect. you dumb the software down further, making it even worse
it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy/vicious circle: users have trouble understanding your software, so you add more automagic features to try and make it "easier", but that only makes it harder to understand, so you add even more magic and so on
thank you, it's insane how software companies have completely given up on the idea of building a mental model for their software
to add insult to injury, graphics drivers love to do "fast math" optimizations when compiling your shaders, happily optimizing out your workarounds by using algebraic transformations that don't actually apply to floats
one very fun thing i discovered in graphics programming is that opengl es only requires support for 16-bit floats. not only that, but built-in functions for e.g. normalizing a vector will square their operands at 16-bit precision, which overflows hilariously easily
undeterred by ieee-754, hardware folks apparently love inventing new ways to make floating-point operations cursed and nondeterminstic
"capitol gains" was *right there*
i just saw this reskeeted 3 times in a row (in direct succession) on my following feed
i don't think OP specifically believes this, so this is more a general sentiment, but wow i'm tired of the anti-technology contingent of the left, and the pipeline into full-on degrowth pastoralism. whatever happened to fully-automated luxury gay space communism
