Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

@joepie91 @cwebber I really liked the lobsters response along the lines of “yes, I’m curious. that’s why I want to understand what’s going on well enough to write the code myself”

if you use proprietary/corporate software you *are* signing yourself up for enshittification.
that's not to say the choice of proprietary is always wrong. just that it's a tradeoff you need to know you're making.
there are times it's definitely worth making. if your place of work requires you work with Adobe, you work with Adobe. if the game your friends want to play with you goes out of its way to block Linux, you play it on windows.

and hey, it's okay to say you're knowingly making that tradeoff! you know best your situation, and no one can tell you you've made the wrong choice, because they don't know you well enough. if you took that into account and came out the other side still choosing proprietary, no one has the right to tell you otherwise.

but you *have* to remember that tradeoff. if you choose proprietary *there will* be a downside. *there will* be an enshittification. *you will* get betrayed by whatever multimillionaire/billionaire owns the company and *you will* curse the day you chose them.

if you pretend otherwise you're fooling yourself, and worse, others.
making an informed decision is great. making other people's choices uninformed is not.
choosing corporate is fine.
pretending it's like choosing libre is not.

and now i ask myself, of the people joining the latest big move to [you know what i'm talking about and if not good for you], how many actually think of this tradeoff and make and informed choice, and how many are pretending (or are being told) that tradeoff doesn't exist?

It has turned out that the world just does not suffer significantly from the kind of problem that our research was originally intended to solve.

this is pretty titanic and sums up so much of what is wrong with software and computer science: just because a problem is theoretically interesting and/or rigorous and/or fun to work on *has no bearing whatsoever* on its usefulness in the real world. none. theyre unrelated. sometimes they overlap, cool, but they are not correlated.

you have to do a kind of analysis that engineers are not equipped to do. its a kind of design research that involves understanding your intended audience and their challenges. its deeply human and subjective and i was only exposed to it when working towards my MFA.

something about one of the titans of thought of computer science working for decades only to realize his formal systems -- while intellectually thorough and interesting! -- didnt solve anyone's problems. he just assumed they would. but he never asked. something about that to me feels like The Whole Story.

i'm thinking about inventory systems because there is no way i could keep track of extremely similar looking hard drives and SSDs which have different levels of wear and usability (at this point i already forgot 🫠 and also other computer parts stuff i guess)

but like, what software do i even use for that then? writing CSV by hand sounds like a management hell, does anyone on fedi know of like inventory system software things?

Find that one person in your organization with Kira Nerys energy and get her on your side