The Bard in Green
- Technology Consultant.
- Software Developer.
- Musician.
- Burner.
- Game Master.
- Non-theistic Pagan.
- Cishet White Male Feminist.
- Father.
- Fountain Maker.
- Aquarium Builder.
- Hamster Daddy.
- Resident of Colorado.
- Anti-Capitalist.
- Hackerspace Regular.
- Traveler of the American West.
- 2 Posts
- 78 Comments
We’re also using Forgejo for a small consulting team working on lots of different projects for a lot of different clients.
A couple of our team members who came from a more complex and scaled environment (particularly our DevOps / SRE guy who’s worked at such places as LinkedIn and Snowflake) want to move us to Gitlab because it’s “more powerful” but I like Forgejo because it’s just super simple. Just does exactly what I need, doesn’t give me to many more options.
We have
- Projects segregated into teams, organized by client (so only those working on a specific client’s projects have access to their repos).
- Able to invite clients and put them into the team for their project (we’ve had a couple clients that want that).
- Able to automate deployments with webhooks (this was pretty easy to get working).
One of our devs wanted to use Actions. It’s hard to get that working and (at least a month ago) there were warnings that Actons aren’t mature yet and are probably insecure (looks like that may have changed with the recent jump to Forgejo 8.0). I think it’s now a non issue for us though because we were like “Dude, stop trying to role your own CI/CD, that’s why we have two infrastructure people!”
Too complex to explain to anyone who’s not a politically / culturally curious intellectual (or who even just lacks a lot of the sci-fi / gaming and science nerd inspired philosophical context).
A lot of these breakdowns of the weird and out of touch thought coming out of upper class technocrats and their acolytes are missing this kind of bridge: a simple way to explain this to anyone who wouldn’t read more than the first paragraph of this article. No one like that is going to try to parse an acronym like TESCREAL.
My main thought about this is that “Right” and “Left” aren’t even the right terms and using them gives people the wrong impression of what’s happening. It’s better to say that techno-authoritarians with their heads in the sci-fi clouds are attracting followers from the intellectual and better educated side of the “disaffected young men” pool and are aligning themselves with more traditionally conservative authoritarians for the sake of political convenience. They don’t want the government or left wing populism getting in the way of their profits and science experiments, so their support lines up with the party that wants to sabotage the government.
This exact thing happened to one of my clients. And it sucked because they didn’t even register the domains with Ionos, they registered them with some other company that then got bought by Ionos. They were not technically savvy and didn’t understand what was happening until it was way too late. They lost about 8 domains closely associated with their business and with their CEO’s research.
I have a kid, I spent 10 years working with kids professionally, and I agree with this dude.
In fact, lots of people, myself included, are drawn to leftist anarchism BECAUSE of lessons we learned about the failures of authoritarianism in school from parents and teachers. It’s always super annoying to see parents and teachers settling comfortably into an authoritarian role with their own kids, after hearing them wax emphatically about the effects of authoritarianism in adult society. I’m surrounded by hypocrites, and it’s not harmless. It’s like everybody either forget what it’s like to be kids, or think that the lessons of adulthood give them license to stop caring about those “little” problems, (and be fricken condescending in the process) when actually they just find it “easier” or it “feels safer” to them.
I have friends who we’re excellent teachers, but left the school system in absolute despair because they went in intending to be collaborative, entertaining teachers and passionate advocates for the kids in their care… Only to run up against all the bureaucratic walls the education system throws up to prevent exactly that and create as much conformity as possible… And then the icing on the cake is the vast majority of parents who just don’t get it, Don’t even try to get it, Don’t listen, know what they know, their opinions are their opinions and talking to them is just effing hopeless.
Whenever I’ve dealt with really difficult children, 9 times out of 10 you meet the parents and you’re like “Oh, this all makes sense!” (I can actually only think of three exceptions and two of those were clinical sociopaths). Or you go to work with a school (I’ve worked with and at dozens of schools) and you’re like “Oh, I understand why the kids from this school that I see in my program are always behaving in X, Y and Z dysfunctional ways. How is everyone this clueless and incompetent??” I have watched teachers utterly fail to teach or connect with the kids in their charge, and then watched those same teachers play politics and keep their positions while teachers who are doing a great job get let go (or forced out through social bs) because they want to ignore all that crap. I have had teachers come up to me when I’m running a program or event at their school and had them say “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I saw the kids in your program and those are all the most difficult children we have!” And I’m like “these kids are fine! You’re an authoritarian in an authoritarian environment, aren’t you??”
And I’m literally surrounded by adults who like think they know what they’re doing, and aren’t even trying to get it and MAN do they have opinions they want to share and it pisses me the fuck off.
My kid creates super good boundaries, he emphasizes kindness in communication in ways I was totally unable to do it his age, he advocates for himself (and other kids) like someone a decade older, and if he’s on his phone in class, it’s because the teacher is failing to engage the class. End of discussion. When I see that situation, I’m almost always like “I could teach this class and these kids would not be on their phones, and I have the experience under my belt to prove it.” (And I have seen shit like that).
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You want OpenWRT. They’re not too limited, but they’re not very powerful either. Fan controller? Probably. Pihole? You can probably hack that together, though I’ve never tried. Media server? Erm… not my first choice. Other stuff? Limited only by your imagination, time constraints and willingness to troubleshoot weird problems most people have never had before.
Easy. I have servers that are only available on my local network and lots of different devices that I MIGHT want to use to access those servers. I haven’t bothered to make sure my key is on EVERY SINGLE DEVICE and some of them, I might not actually even WANT my key on as they’re not terribly well secured and they might leave my house (my Windows gaming laptop I haven’t used in six months comes to mind).
But for cloud accessible servers… yeah.
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The rich go insane because the people around them enable them to believe their own bullshit and set no boundaries with them. This is SUPER bad for humans psychologically and causes us to lose touch with reality. Something in our brains depends on that group consensus to affirm our concepts of self and beliefs and decisions and it loses calibration when it gets crappy feedback.
They’re the people who never would have touched it, because it was too technical, had too high a barrier of entry, and saw it as niche.
Yep. My dad uses Facebook, Reddit and Youtube now. I remember having conversations with him where he was confused about why anyone would ever want to use Facebook and what the point of Youtube is… it just wastes time. When I first exposed him to AMAs I thought he would be interested in, in like 2012, he was like “It’s really cool that you can talk to this person, but there’s so much noise and joking around… how are you supposed to follow it all?”
Now he posts on reddit for help with home improvement projects and watches youtube channels about classic cars and how to fix your garage door opener and talks about stuff he saw his other Boomer friends post on Facebook. He sends me unfunny Youtube videos of AI Deepfakes of Trump and Biden talking about how they pooped their diapers. It’s a weird role reversal, because now I’m like “I’ve left every single one of those enshittified platforms.” But it took him years to get on them. It would take him even longer to get off.
I don’t care what the science says! I don’t care about the suffering of others! This offends my capitalist sensibilities that I have never questioned and I’m not about to start thinking too hard about it now just because some hippy libs want to sneak communism in the back door!
I have zero respect for this world view and hope we are able to simply bulldoze it with unstoppable momentum.
Well, time for four more years of Trump, I guess.
When I look around the Democratic party, I see old people unwilling to change, from Biden and the DNC all the way down to my parent’s friends in their little rich white suburban neighborhood with a median age of 57 and a median net worth of $3,000,000. People who are firmly entrenched in the liberalism of the 80s and 90s and who are terrified of Trump and terrified of progressives and think it’s all insanity that also doesn’t really affect them.
This is the Democrats’ race to lose. All they have to do to lose it is stick their fingers in their ears and fight like hell for “Business as usual.” Which is exactly what they’re doing.
Agreed. We bought my son a phone when he was traveling between states and flying as an unaccompanied minor a bunch because of split parenting. He was about nine. We had strict rules about when he was allowed to use it and when he ABSOLUTELY was not allowed to NOT have it. We also didn’t turn on the data (and made him use Wifi) until he was 12.
We absolutely NEEDED him to have it, given those conditions.
It doesn’t help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist…
“I’m not like… elitist man, but like, being better than 19 out of 20 other programmers like… isn’t actually that good!”
Takes drag on topshelf hybrid joint laced with gold dust and 100% pure Colombian nose powder. Exhales slowly.
“Like, when being better than 95% of people like… isn’t that hard man, you know?”
Takes another drag.
“Damn this is good shit. I like it anyway. It’s got like… gold dust in it? You probably wouldn’t like it.”
I’ve dealt with plenty of difficult people in the dev world, but they’re just difficult people like any other people.
This author seems to have VERY specific complaints about VERY specific toxic work cultures. I have experienced some DIFFERENT toxic work cultures / personalities much more than I’ve experienced this laziness / gatekeeping that’s being described here.
The sins of my particular difficult devs have been:
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Arrogance: “I designed this, I need to be in charge, you need to write code the way I want you to and if you don’t I’m going to go over your head and complain about you.”
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Paranoia: “I’m the only one who can do this project. I don’t need help, I don’t need support, I don’t want to work with anyone else, I refuse to attend meetings or write comments / documentation. Management should fire EVERYONE but me and let me build the whole app myself.”
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Malice (dealing with this one right now - not targeted at me but REALLY poisoning the team): “I hate $OtherDev. I will lie about them to others, insult and taunt them to their face, put them down, belittle their code, claim they don’t know what they’re doing and otherwise do everything I can to make their life miserable. And management can’t fire me, because I’m the only one who understand $ImportantBusinessProcess, so I know I can get away with being utter poison.”
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Code Shenanigans: “I write jokey, unprofessional shit into my code / comments and give zero fucks. I am acidic and accuse management of creating a hostile workplace when asked to stop.”
Funny story about that last one. I once led a team building an HR application. I got a call from the HR director of the customer saying they had a VERY pissed off job applicant who had threatened legal action. The jokey “fun guy” goofy dev and named all his functions / classes in lolcat language. So they were called things like “longStringIsLong()” or “uCanHazEmailz()” or IBroughtedYouAJobApplication()". A bug in the code, introduced by a totally different dev, caused function / class / variable names to sometimes get rendered as a string in the email body when a string (usually a first or last name) in the database had unusual characters (Arabic characters would trigger it every time). The jokey “fun guy” had written a function for sending rejection form letters to job applicants and had named it “uCanHazNoJobKThnxBai()”
So some Saudi Arabian job applicant had gotten an email that said something like
Dear $firstName $lastname
We have reviewed your application and regret to inform you that we have chosen to move forward with other applicants. We wish you the best luck in your future endeavours. Sincearly $companyName.
uCanHazNoJobKThnxBai().
If those words are connected to some automated system that can accept them as commands…
For instance, some idiot entrepreneur was talking to me recently about whether it was feasible to put an LLM on an unmanned spacecraft in cis-lunar space (I consult with the space industry) in order to give it operational control of on-board systems based on real time telemetry. I told him about hallucination and asked him what he thinks he’s going to do when the model registers some false positive in response to a system fault… Or even what happens to a model when you bombard it’s long-term storage with the kind of cosmic particles that cause random bit flips (This is a real problem for software in space) and how that might change its output?
Now, I don’t think anyone’s actually going to build something like that anytime soon (then again the space industry is full of stupid money), but what about putting models in charge of semi-autonomous systems here on earth? Or giving them access to APIs that let them spend money or trade stocks or hire people on mechanical Turk? Probably a bunch of stupid expensive bad decisions…
Speaking of stupid expensive bad decisions, has anyone embedded an LLM in the ethereum blockchain and givien it access to smart contracts yet? I bet investors would throw stupid money at that…