Tootfinder

In October, ice agents “smashed the car windows and detained all seven occupants” of a van that they thought suspicious because people in it were going to work together. Carpooling. Carpooling is foreign and unintelligible to the brilliant and diligent ice agent who testified as JB. The concept of carpooling is beyond JB’s comprehension. 🤦‍♂️
The intellect on JB could be studied (but might make anyone studying it dumber).

I've been talking before why money won't solve the burnout problem. But let's for a minute assume that you really wanted to help people maintaining #FreeSoftware by paying them. The problem is that:
1. You have to pay them a living wage.
While all monetary help is appreciated by developers, they need a living wage. Not "that should prevent you from starving to death" but the kind of money that can support a honest (but not lavish) lifestyle: pay the bills, feed your family, cover other living costs such as repairs, clothes, appliances, and let you save enough for future emergencies.
It's simple as that. If you can't do that, they're going to need a dayjob. If they're lucky, it won't collide with their #FLOSS work. If they're not, it will kill them. Or they'll fall somewhere in the middle, slowly burning out until they can neither maintain their projects, nor work.
2. You need to guarantee that the payouts will continue.
People need security. They're not going to stay unemployed, let alone quit their job or turn down a job offer, unless they either have good guaranties or substantial savings (or they're in a really bad shape and wouldn't be able to handle the job anyway). The job market is hell, and people just know that when the payments stop, they may not be able to find a job soon, let alone a good job. Even "passively" looking for a job can burn you out.
So yeah, one-off payments and pinky swears won't do. And it isn't even a matter of whether we can trust you; it's a matter if you'll actually be able to continue paying us. And honestly, I don't really know how to solve that. Perhaps by paying up front, but for how long? Finding a job may take more than a year, finding a good job may be once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
3. It can't end up being a job.
Perhaps most difficult of all, these payments can't really come with explicit obligations. I mean, that's the whole point: you want to support FLOSS, not turn it into a corporate project. You want the maintainer to remain free and enjoy the work. That is unlikely to happen if their livelihood is now dependent on your satisfaction. And even if it isn't, I for example would still feel indebted to whoever's paying me to do FLOSS, even if they really didn't expect anything in return, and would fall into a spiral of guilt-inflicted burnout if I failed to maintain the software satisfactorily.
#OpenSource

Trump's administration denounced CNN for airing part of the new Iranian leader's statement Thursday, the second time in three days it has singled out CNN (David Bauder/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/khamenei-trump…

White House upbraids CNN for airing Iranian leader's message
The Trump administration is denouncing CNN for airing a portion of the new Iranian supreme leader's first public statement since he got the job. It was the second time in three days that the administration specifically singled out the network for trying to find out what the leaders of the country the United States is bombing are thinking. The attack is another illustration of the care that news outlets must take in reporting during wartime, and the responsibilities of journalists to get multipl…

#Rant
Rob Shaw is solidifying his position as the new Dean of Right Wing, anti-Worker Legislative Reporters in British Columbia.
With these gems, it's incredible that he has an education or goes to a doctor at all…
"The BCTF is typically one of the most militant unions, and quickly prone to job action.”
BCTF Strikes since 2000:
2005
2014
phew! almost got to three!
Remember that this was at the time of a union-busting BC Liberal government that had to go to the Supreme Court of Canada to get told that they ripped up union contracts unconstitutionally and were *forced* to compensate many years later.
"The ratification is a win for a New Democrat government. And extraordinarily expensive for taxpayers, too."
“extraordinarily expensive. Really? How is a wage increase that is *barely* in line with inflation after literally decades of below-inflation increases, “extraordinary”? I'll wait.
"Teachers can thank the BCGEU for turning what was an initial 3.5 per cent wage offer over two years by government, into a more than 12 per cent increase over four that is now forming the baseline for all other union deals."
Indeed! For those who can do math, that means 3% each of 4 years instead of 3.5 over two. But thanks Rob for making it seem like 4 times more!
Thanks BCGEU members for your solidarity and perceverence! I have been on strike. It sucks HARD. But it was worth it and it works.
"The ratification by the BCTF means roughly half of the 450,000 public sector employees now have deals of some sort with the province. Two majors left on the table are nurses and doctors.”
Oh no! Let’s not pay doctors and nurses! Surely they'll stay regardless in our incredibly overworked and under resourced healthcare system!
Like how does Mr Shaw believe we are to stay competitive or attract people. Or is he just not worried about getting sick….
"The skyrocketing deficit has the NDP government inking sweetheart deals with organized labour on the one hand, while pledging to cut public sector jobs with the other.”
Ya, we could have kept those public sector jobs if it weren't for fools like you who demanded governments cut taxes over the past 20 years instead of reasonable rises to... again…keep up with inflation and retain service!
It is a crappy balancing act that the NDP is doing and I do not like a lot of it. At the same time as Mr. Shaw complains about "sweetheart deals" for people in post-secondary, I am seeing historic cuts in that same sector. It's a blood bath actually. So the potential wage increases are going to be welcome, but feel pretty hollow as so many collegues have left.
Rob Shaw would have had us all lose our jobs and take a pay cut at the next one for good measure.
Thanks but no thanks Rob, your world view sucks.
https://www.nsnews.com/economy-law-politics/rob-shaw-ndp-deal-with-bc-teachers-sets-another-costly-precedent-for-public-sector-talks-11966874

There are (sort of) two kinds of coders: those who see it as just a well-paying, stable job, and those who do it on nights and weekends because they love it, and it’s part of their identity. Today’s LLM tools now enable an individual to essentially be an entire software _factory_, and this is going to impact those 2 kinds of coders very differently — especially in how they respond to *both* of their bosses trying to put them out of work.

What do coders do after AI?
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

The former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan has added his name to growing calls for the president to be ousted on grounds that he is unfit for the job,
arguing that the US constitution’s 25th amendment addressing involuntary removal from office was
“written with Donald Trump in mind”.
Brennan, who served as head of the spy agency during Barack Obama’s presidency, told MS Now on Saturday that
Trump’s recent volatile remarks about destroying Iranian civ…

Once again an aircraft is evacuated due to smoke in the cabin after an engine fire. Once again passengers prioritise resuing their precious belongings over allowing fellow human beings to survive. 🤡
Others are seen taking selfies next to the burnt-out engine. By making the firefighters' job much more difficult, they too aid in hindering others from continuing to live.
Should you ever need to evacuate, you have my Special Permission to Punch such Passengers in the Face.
…

Person who jumped perimeter fence is hit and killed by Frontier plane during takeoff on Denver runway, airport says
A Frontier Airlines passenger heard a thud and saw the plane’s wing on fire after it struck a person on a runway at Denver International Airport late Friday.

In early 1985, Henry Nussbacher sent a letter to all Bitnet contacts calling for admins to hunt down and destroy every chat server because a dozen users actively chatting could bring file transfers to a halt—file transfers being the primary purpose of the network.
Jeff Kell realized that the problem wasn't chatting itself, but redundant traffic from independent connections. So he built the first Relay chat system. I got involved in August, setting up the 10th relay server and contr…

Source: Anthropic is in talks with Blackstone and other PE firms to form a JV selling consulting services for integrating Claude into portfolio companies (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-talks-blackston…

Anthropic in Talks With Blackstone, Other PE Firms to Form AI Consulting Venture
Anthropic is in talks with a consortium of private equity firms including Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman about forming an AI-focused joint venture to sell the Claude maker’s technology to companies funded by the investment firms, according to a person involved in the discussions and another ...

I've been wondering lately if my job is #bullshit.
I've given it a lot of thought, and I think it's not directly bullshit. I'm doing stuff that's meaningful, at least in a narrow scope, both in my dayjob and my #FreeSoftware / #Gentoo work.
That said, with the arrival of all the bullshit CEOs, CTOs, all their bootlickers, wannabe bootlickers, and all the CEO/CTO/bootlicker cosplayers, the whole software industry is becoming filled with bullshit to the brim.
Even if my work is meaningful, it contributes more and more to software that's either scam in itself, used to scam people or pure unadulterated bullshit. Even if the tools used to be useful, they either gain bullshit parts or bullshit dependencies.
I hate this, and it's making me hate what I'm doing.