It absolutely fucking BAFFLES me that Brooks’ Law isn’t known by every software manager on the planet.

I’ve quoted it so many times at work, even in engineering focused teams in at least two big tech companies. It’s not a concrete fact, but it explains why so many teams are hilariously shit at delivering software.

Yeah, the person above isn’t being accurate at all.

While here in the UK we rely heavily on the US for control of Trident, the US dropping NATO support would just require additional defence spending and closer alignment with Europe. If Trump is bought by Russia, Putin would see this as a Very Bad Thing, and would want to keep the US in the fold because even with the US NATO would likely steamroll Russia.

The Trump dynamic is somewhat problematic, should it fester elsewhere in Europe. Globalisation was an important trait to maintain for the US, whereas most populist movements move towards buying local or supporting national interests above all else. Europe is largely self-sufficient, even in defence, so Trump would probably cut off huge numbers of imports/exports just to prop up Elon’s shitty cars.

I say this as someone in big tech, AI is pushed because it’s an easy lie to keep big companies viewed as innovating to shareholders. I say this knowing that Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have contributed significantly to AI research in the last few years alongside the obvious contributions of OpenAI - the goal isn’t groundbreaking AI work, but to act as a smoke-screen to show that nothing else has been delivered.

Google has lost ground in advertising, and is losing customers on many of their services. Amazon is losing ground in cloud computing and in retail. Apple has stagnated with recent poor releases. Microsoft has made ground in cloud, but has struggled in advertising, Xbox, Office, and Windows. They use GenAI to keep their stock price high, otherwise they’d drop like a sack of shit because shareholders would say “what the fuck have you even done in the last half a decade?”

I imagine a lot of it is to remove current stock, and because the UK has several tobacco companies that moved into vapes, and also employ hundreds

Gigs and concerts are pretty grim for this now too.

I got into cooking during lockdown, and have managed to get surprisingly good at it, to the point where if you asked me to make a meal of your choosing I could probably make it without looking up a recipe. It’s actually unbelievably simple to make even complex stuff, basically using all the same rules you apply at work:

• Use the right tools for the job
• Plan it out first, do your prep and the actual work is simple
• A simple dish will take much longer than you think
• RTFM. Many sauces and dishes from classic cooking are basically a mixture of a small handful of base ingredients/techniques, and they’ve been written down for decades.
• Once you have the basics down, you can basically make it up as you go. You’ll make amazing meals, and you’ll never be able to replicate it again because you eyeballed it or cooked it in a way that made sense at the time. You say you’ll document it well, but deep down, you know you won’t.
• Nothing is original, everything is stolen. Adapt recipes you see, look at ingredients of sauces and sachets you buy/use, etc.
• You can be a solid hobbyist, but against a pro that does this shit all day every day, you don’t know a fucking thing. You’re also probably not going to replicate what they can do in a professional setting while at home unless you’ve got money.

The problem with these fundamental rulings is that they’re largely trying to fit square objects through round holes. When a simple ruling is made to essentially say “to current law, no”, the law itself ultimately becomes meaningless, because older games couldn’t be easier to pirate. Most of them are smaller than a TikTok video, and are so cheap/easy to host that you’ll never stop them from being shared. Hell, emulation has come so far that you can effectively emulate these games on a browser, on multiple devices, even devices that don’t natively support gaming.

The smart thing to do would be to say that maybe the legal framework that embodies retro gaming needs to be researched and heavily considered. It’s a hard task that’ll require many lawyers, many fights, and lots of lobbying to ensure the word of law is worth something. Sadly, it’s easier to say “lol no” and to essentially just promote piracy.

Why should a user care about the health of an online community? To them it should “just work”.

(I’m being purposely facetious here, because the average person really doesn’t care about this shit. When Twitter no longer serves its purpose to them they just leave and go to the next place)

But again, what tangible benefit does that have for the average user? They don’t give a fuck about billionaire ownership, moderation, or where an “instance” or server is located.

While true, how is that any different to the arguments that were used for TV? Additionally, Lemmy is a social network in the same way that Reddit is. Is this not also dangerous?

As has been the recommendation for practically everything for the four decades I’ve been on this earth, moderation is key. Instead of hating new media, either regulate it (if the evidence is truly that great) or treat it with healthy moderation.

Let’s be blunt here. Most of the people in this thread aren’t worried about health. They don’t like short-form video/foreign-owned companies/things they didn’t grow up with, and their elitism is getting the better of them instead of them letting people like what they want to like.

That’s…actually a really good use case for something like this. I’d argue that a recommendation algorithm that tailors to the best content a given federated service can provide for their use-case is probably a better source than what you’d get from a single source of truth that could give you everything and nothing.

All true, but what explicit problem do they solve for the average user?

ITT: People in their mid-twenties or later, who feel superior to those that like one form of media over their preferred media.

Elitism aside, I don’t really see what federation solves here. What benefits does federation offer the user? How does the recommendation algorithm give users what they want? How will a decentralised platform perform the kind of centralised events a platform like TikTok is known for?

Why does anyone still give a fuck what DHH has to say any more?

Rails is a ghetto has been a thing for over a decade, and the man is basically just a tech contrarian at this point.

I say this as someone that works in AI.

It’s all a smoke-screen. It shows that Google (and every other big tech company) is producing super secret, super high tech stuff that should make their shareholders super happy. The reality is that Google and co haven’t produced shit for years, have laid off hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, and don’t have long term plans to improve outside of enshittifcation.

The man can’t release an affordable electric car, despite it being on his roadmap for over a decade. Cunt isn’t releasing an affordable taxi lol

Not quite. .NET is owned by the .NET Foundation, and while it’s heavily influenced by Microsoft, it’s an independent entity. C# is owned by Microsoft, but frankly they’ve put together what was even then far more advanced than anything Java could do even now.

To be blunt, back in the 2000’s it was this exact mentality that pushed me towards C#. Instead of people bitching and starting holy wars about Java, Ruby, and other languages, the .NET community just quietly got on with things and built some fantastic tooling. Furthermore, it was one of the communities that helped me go from hapless junior to someone able to give technical talks on what I had learned, or even speak to giants in the industry like Jon Skeet.

Maybe? I can’t say I had noticed that issue before, but it’s possible.

I actually used Drupal a year ago, so it’s definitely still around! Joomla isn’t a name I’ve heard for a while though. To be fair, I mostly work in AI now, so I’m removed from the web dev world also.

I think flat file and API based CMS’s have become more popular now, especially with many people questioning why so many CMS’s were built on relational data stores for largely non-relational data. For many, the ability to drop a CMS in and have it “just work” is why some of the newer ones are growing in popularity.

It’s not early 2000’s Slashdot. .NET and C# have been solid choices for software development for years, and Umbraco in particular is open source and probably the most welcoming CMS I’ve known when it comes to contributions.