Bethesda Game Studios has unionized!
CW-boost: isolation, community building, reference to state violence
uncomfortable truth for anarchist computer folks
You know that thing about how any system of hierarchy and power is eventually coopted, regardless of how good the intentions are, by authoritarians? And how it will turn into a system of oppression? And how that's fundamentally unavoidable on a long-enough timescale even with 'checks and balances'?
Yeah. You know how computer technology is structured, with only a few parties capable of manufacturing it, and most of society being centralized into a handful of different 'shapes' of computer system?
That's a system of power.
While this is not a call to 'abandon technology' or similar primitivist rhetoric, this is absolutely a thing you need to be thinking about long and hard as a tech anarchist.
CW-boost, Microsoft, DEI
As an example of the consequences of that monumental shift in what society allows to be "normal," to make DRM work even to some rough approximation, you need a way that a device can prove to a server what software is running on that device — so-called attestation. That fundamentally breaks the idea that it's the *protocol* between a device and a server that matters, not the *implementation*, and thus fundamentally restricts what implementations are possible.
I'm still mad that as a society, we basically let the idea of "sideloading" become normalized. Just the idea that the software you run on your device is subject to DRM is so inherently and extremely wrong, and yet it's just normal now.
So many other abuses of power in computing come back to that; to adapt Doctorow somewhat, there was a war on general-purpose computing, and we lost.
(edit: see replies below for important discussion of "lost," and why that might not be the best word.)
@emma I'm quickly coming around to the opinion that passkeys are "what if SSH keys were DRMed."
Some weirdo writing a whole thread on “NULL pointer” [sic] after seeing a screenshot of a stacktrace with a read at 0x9c in what I have to assume is kernel memory. And then I see he’s a Xoogler and claims to be a “professional C++ programmer”.
The thread, which is the worst analysis of this as is possible, ends in sexism and racism. *this is my surprised face*
I need to Kotlin harder.
funding idea for open data projects
A long-standing problem with open data projects is that they are not free to run, but companies tend to heavily exploit the data for their own profit without providing any funding to the project, and any technical restrictions on that would also harm the legitimate users.
So here's an idea that just occurred to me: charge specifically for CSV and Excel exports. JSON/whatever exports and feeds are free and unrestricted, but CSV/XLS requires contributing to the project. Because as far as I can tell, 'business environments' are pretty much the only place where people would *willingly* choose CSV/XLS over standard(ish) serialization formats.
CW-boost, US politics, project 2025
@foone
Developer: "it works on my machine"
Manager: "yes, but we can't sell your computer to every customer"
Developer: "can't we?" [[SD card cloning intensifies]]
CW-boost, racist murder
good lord. I pulled a microSD card out of a Raspi inside an IoT product and it appears they had some developer use a raspi to develop/test some software, and then they just yanked the SD card out of that machine and duped it on to all of their deployed products.
it's got .bash_history of the development process! there's git checkouts of private repos! WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.