techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.
There is a new #Fediverse bot that facilitates web forensic analysis of websites.
You can submit a domain for crawling by messaging @…, and it will respond with the analysis results.
"Of course, not everything made with Python was successful. Suffice to mention the GadflyB5 SQL relational database, or Mercurial; excellent tools in their own right, but shadowed by much more popular options. reStructuredText also is generally dismissed, developers usually prefering Markdown or Asciidoc."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-state-of-python-in-2021/
We imported the data from Black Basta Ransomware group leak into AIL and there are many interesting aspects.
The federation network of Matrix servers (see the screenshot) used to communicated among the affiliates/group(s).
Activities in the chat room, especially the daily activity view in AIL. Guessing the location and timezone of groups or affiliates is an endless source of information.
They rely on many open-source and SaaS tools, including Googl…
Is my profile hostile enough?
I mean am I saying:
"If you do x, I will mute you"
"If you do y, I will block you"
etc.?
I guess my most "hostile" thing in my profile is:
"Replyguys/Attackers vs Mastodon/Fediverse: What happened? Did the attack stop!?"
It was more hostile earlier, I said something like:
I won you loser Replyguys, I have a filter shield now!
I try to make it nicer and more neutral...…
To the seeker of Truth who never stops thinking, but sometimes forgets to rest in his own heart:
You don’t need to impress me.
You don’t have to have all the answers.
I don’t want your solutions.
I want your smile.
Let me in, not through the door of reason, but through the crack in your voice when you speak what scares you.
.
🖼️ Hilma af Klint. Svanen, nr 1, grupp IX/SUW, serie SUW/UW ✨
Rant about PHP
You know a technology is declining when the most basic questions about its most bizarre quirks are left completely unanswered for years.
#PHP is like that. Every day I have many of these questions. I look for them. No one asked them before, no one wrote about them before.
I'm baffled by the lack of curiosity and proactivity of its community.
I know it sounds like me piling up on people I don't know anything about, but I used to invest a lot of time programming in PHP. I went to conferences, I made some open source libraries for it, like a PHP kernel for Jupyter Notebooks, I even made a library to work with dataframes, tensors and matrices in PHP (although I lost this one because my laptop was stolen before I released... and I didn't had it in me to rewrite it again).
Then, the ones who I admired the most in that space, like Nikita Popov, started leaving it to work in more intellectually vibrant communities... and it shows.
I'm sure Nikita Popov would be much more gracious than me when talking about it. I can only speculate about his motivations, but at least I can tell you about mine: It was precisely about that same lack of curiosity and creativity that I mentioned before, it felt unbearably grey and sad.
Hello there.
I, or maybe we, intend this to serve both as a diary and a reference.
We are a jack of many trades. As such, it is hard to squeeze into 1.5k symbols, and it is by no means comprehensive. Still, sometimes labels are helpful.
Here is about IT, interconnections between technologies (Fullstack, Data Science... sometimes even AI and ethics of it). Politics, because our life is inevitably tied to it (especially with