• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Where do we stand on hoarding code to protect against outsourcing? I have a friend who is encouraging his team to do everything he can to hoard and make it impossible for recently onboarded individuals in a “cheaper cost center” to mess with it.

    I think it’s the right call, for both the team and the company. The team wants to keep their job, and to keep building the thing they worked so hard on. But I think it’s also best for the company. Management can’t control themselves when they see that they can get literally 10 engineers for the price of 1 local engineer. They know that each of the 10 is going to be less good than than a local engineer, but they always fall for “but still, they’re not that much worse and for that price how can I lose!”. Of course, the damage of 10s of mediocre-bad engineers is far more costly, especially when outsourcing an existing project. So I’d say it’s the right thing for everyone for the team to protect their code ownership anyway they can.



  • Not to feed into the bosses’ paranoia, but I’d say WFH 5-days (on paper) and bunk off, which is a lot easier to do WFH anyway.

    I don’t actually think the employer misses out here, even if most companies already take far more than they’re owed from their employees to begin with.

    The reality for a lot of jobs, especially those that require deep work, creativity etc, is that watching how long people are sat at their desks is not a good way to improve results anyway. Better a motivated happy workforce, and managers that are thinking in terms of how well a team is delivering useful things for the org rather than obsessing about timesheets.

    If the company is happy to pay me X salary for the results I provide them, everybody wins. It’s foolish for organisations to think that getting people to work longer hours, whether it’s forcing people to work 4, 5, or 6 days, is going to get them more bang for buck.

    As for remote working, I’ve worked exclusively from home for over a decade in fully remote teams. Everyone wins with WFH. There can be problems to mitigate and there’s always some subjective preference to consider, but on the whole the average employee and employer wins big from the arrangement.

    All the pushback I’ve seen on WFH since the pandemic seems in large part management using it as an excuse for their own incompetence.

    “How can I tell my employees are working if I can’t see them at their desks?” If you cant tell if they’re working now, then you didn’t know they were working before either!

    On-boarding new people, building up young people, is just different from before. Make sure they have decent equilment for video and normalise teams sitting in video rooms when the work. Encourage buddy working at all levels. Recognise and respect the upfront cost of training. Encourage and fund opportunities for socialising both remotely and in person.

    Managers don’t know what’s happening without the “water cooler effect”. They’re used to be able to shout at teams across an office, or easedrop. Again, this demonstrates a weakness in their ability to communicate and interact with the people they claim to “lead”. Good managers will be in the same video rooms and chatting shit with the people they lead while they work as a united teams. Shitty managers will sit on their hands while not even noticing their team does everything they can to avoid a unhelpful or unsupportive “leader”.

    The worse one is productivity. I have no doubt things are going worse for corpos since the pandemic. This likely correlates with increase WFH. The ideas that this is proof that WFH is outrageously. During the pandemic we had teams working 17 hour days. Corpos took the opportunity to cut every corner and show contempt to the workforces, and they didn’t fix things when the COVID numbers went down. The big shots made some truly terrible strategic calls. All these things and more are seeming to lead to a kind of mass enshittification across a ton of organisations. But bosses don’t want to own their mistakes, let alone fix them , so WFH ends up the scapegoat.

    (Sorry! This thread seems to have brought out the rant in me!)


  • I just did. I’m lucky that I can afford it. Although, because of tax, it affects my take home way less than 20%.

    It’s wild really. I’m lucky, and most of my career I’ve been in the maximum tax bracket in my country. Also cause I’m lucky, I kept getting raises and bonuses, because I work damn hard and I’m pretty good at what I do.

    The thing is though, I’m no better off in terms of my life quality for all that money. I live in a small semi-detached in a nowhere town. I’m incredibly grateful to have been able to buy rather than rent, but I’d still like to strive for a little more space, a little more privacy or a little more excitement. But the way property is, even though I’m earning well, it seems impossible. I’ve tried unsuccessfully 3 times in the last 5 years to move , and come to the conclusion without earning a considerable amount more than I am it’s impossible.

    My basic needs were met long ago. I find ways to waste money here and there, but nothing to really work towards. I guess I could have kids, but this place is too small for a dog, let alone a couple of sprogs, and I wouldn’t wish this world on another generation. The only good reason to be earning more for me is to maybe protect the quality of life I have should I lose my job or the situation gets worse in general (inflation, climate change etc), and again it doesn’t seem like it’s much protection. I believe in the important of tax, I’d pay even more if I thought it’d be used for good, but with this circus in charge, it’d hard to imagine much of my considerable tax bill going to help people rather than ending up in the pocket of some corpo with a government contract.

    Add to that, jobs seem to get worse and worse. I swear everyone I know, across multiple sectors, is burning out. Corpos and governments alike are treating people like garbage, working them to death then discarding them as reward. Profits go up. Nothing of value gets made. Everyone but the bosses gets fucked.

    As for my job, I worked hard and gave it a lot. I’ve seen the company mistreat and discarded good people for years, while outsourcing to halfwits and grifters (and I can’t even be that angry at the grifters given what they’re paid regionally). It’s impossible to make a positive change, although I still try. But I hate it. The job grinds me down and takes everything.

    I plan to work as little as possible, even if it means cutting back. I live in hope that it’ll mean I recover a little, maybe find some joy again. Not much hope, but worth 20%.

    (Sorry for that becoming antiwork tirade. It’s been a shitty few years.)


  • Like gabapentin? I was on them for years, in theory to help with really bad restless legs (keeps me up all night). My normal ADHD meds are 60mg Equasym XR + 20mg methylphenidate SR.

    The gabapentin never helped, even up to relatively high doses. I’m seriously suspicious that the long and short term side effects are under emphasised, especially for long term use. Titrating up felt bad, but coming off them was absolutely awful, probably one of the worse experiences I’ve had with medication. I don’t normally get anxiety but it skyrocketed, and I was nauseous and groggy for weeks, even titrating really slow. Anxiety is still worse months later, and while I don’t entirely trust my judgement on this, I do wonder if it’s maybe had longer effect on me than is explained by just the half life.

    Still pissed that my neurologist just dropped them on me and never really followed up!

    Given the lack of info on official side effects, I do wonder if the methylphenidate did somehow interact with the gabapentin to make the whole thing worse, but that’s just a conspiracy theory on my part.



  • I’m going out my damn mind trying to work out what I should set it at. I’ve been obsessively adding more and more temperature and humidity sensors around my living space to work out exactly what my idiot brain thinks is comfortable.

    I don’t understand why 23C/50% makes me feel like I’m in the fucking Amazon rainforest one day, but on another I feel like I’ve got ice forming on my damn face like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.

    I’m this close to buying a ZigBee rectal thermometer. Core body temperature has to be the missing piece. (I suppose any ZigBee environment sensor can be a rectal one if I bite down on something first).

    (Oh and lux, I wonder if lux levels tricked my brain but that doesn’t seem to correlate either!)


  • While I appreciate the difference between mirroring and emulation, @lemmyvore@feddit.nl might have a point in so far as scrcpy and other options that aren’t emulation, may still be part of the reason why no one is making polished emulation options. If a dev can get by with a bunch of physical devices connected and controllev via adb, scrcpy and the like, or a passable emulator in Android Studio, then there’s less reason for them to build or contribute to an emulator for their needs, and consequently op (and the rest of us) don’t get a shiny open-source emulator.


  • Man! I was super excited about this, being a big NixOS fan, but then I realised that the “Way” bit is going to kick me in the nuts. I haven’t made the switch to wayland yet; I keep thinking about switching, but last time I checked being tied to i3 and nvidia hardware scared me off (although I’m aware sway is a drop-in alternative to i3, but it’s an extra complication). Another reason to make the switch when I can though!

    Out of curiosity, how do big media apps treat something like Waydroid? Like, I imagine Netflix and co being awkward with anything like this in a misplaced attempted to prevent “piracy”. Do you find apps treating you like a second class citizen?


  • While I understand the logic wrt the concerns about the content of hentai, I do find it interesting that it’s so prominent in the discussion of safety issues.

    To me, it’s always felt “safer” than real-life content because a lot of the big risks go away. I don’t have to consider whether the actors were coerced, or whether they would have been able to stop a scene if uncomfortable, or whether they regret putting that content out there and so on.

    As a consumer of hentai or similar, it becomes a lot more reasonable to say, “I don’t know what the imaginary background of this character is, but I’m interpretive them as an adult, so I’m all good”, or “Did they really give their consent to dick-cthulhu? Of course they did! Who wouldn’t!?” because I can’t really be meaningfully wrong about a imaginary character.

    Whatever the morality of, I guess let’s say, fictional immorality, the potential harm from “real” porn just seems so much larger than the potential harm from drawings and writing. However much I enjoy seeing real human beings doing delightful things to each other, if the only porn on the internet was hentai and dirty stories, I’m inclined to think it’d probably be an overall win in terms of harm reduction, just because it doesn’t require real people to be doing the stunts. So it’s interesting that the fictional stuff seems to be so top of mind when we talk about safety.

    Although, I imagine that’s likely because in the discussions of rule-setting the issues around “real” porn are talked about far less, because who’s really going to make a good-faith argument that’s pro sharing images of abuse of real people.

    (Also found your point about cultural imperialism interesting! An angle on the topic I’d not considered before)




  • As someone with an interest in human (ironically given the context of tentacles) sexuality, seeing all these nuances and intricacies emerge from the complexities of human kink is really fun.

    Although that being said, I can imagine it’s very much not fun for you admins trying to navigate this stuff in your free time. Much appreciation for taking on the task! ♥️

    I keep beating this dead horse (no kink shaming 😜), but it’s still a bit worrying how difficult it appears to safely build a sexual community online today. The work of making a community safe, diverse and welcoming would naturally always be a challenge, but I can only imagine the stress worrying about the legal and regulatory side of things, so again, thanks for your efforts!





  • can you really handle it 24/7 being mixed in with normal discussion?

    It’s a fair point. In the past, I’d have enthusiastically said yes, aside from not wanting to make people around me uncomfortable if they can see over my shoulder. I’ve always liked the idea of sex being normalised and part of our everyday experience, rather than something that we keep hidden away. I find sex fun and exciting, even if I’m not horny. Further, when I was a naive younger person, and maybe my neurodiversity didn’t help either, I struggled to really understand how people would be potentially upset, disgusted or shocked by pictures of consensual acts between people, let alone drawings. “Why is this thing different to a picture of people hugging, apart from all the extra goo?”.

    Now this was clearly naive of me, and as I’ve hopefully grown since then, I’ve tried to understand more diverse viewpoints and can better understand for some people, it might be annoying, unpleasant or outright traumatising to see this stuff out of their preferred context, or worse, have it sprung on them without wanting it at all.

    I guess in an ideal world, we’d get to decide for ourselves. If I lived in that world, I’d probably still mix in that spice with my non-sexual content, safe in the knowledge that no one would be harmed, but that’s not the world we live in. My partner doesn’t mind if I enjoy porn, but I also know they can find it challenging to be confronted with my enjoyment of it, and ultimately, I want them to be happy, so in practice I avoid shoving it in their face. It makes me feel shameful and conflicted, but wanting other people to be happy, safe and comfortable is more important.

    So while to me, my interest in sex and porn is not all that different from the joy I find in music, and I want to share and indulge in it no differently, I know that me getting that, would mean other people being hurt. Likewise, pragmatically, if Beehaw decided to be open up to that sort of content, I’d worry that people that feel differently than me would feel excluded from the space as a result, or that Beehaw itself would be compromised by the complications of moderating that content. For those reasons, I’d not want it mixed in here, certainly with the limited feature-set of lemmy making a more nuanced cohabitation strategy impossible, even if there was a conceptual way to make it work.

    But all that being said, there is a sense of otherness that goes along with being the kind of person who would prefer to, I guess, wear their sexuality in a more open way, and there’s a sense that the prevailing direction is to hide and close the more open sexual communities, which as I say can lead to feelings of shame and invalidation.



  • Good points.

    Monetisation is an issue that I definitely dodged in my post.

    I know much of your comments focusses on basic access to the ability to even receive payment, but however much I “love” some of these communities, it’s hard to ignore how many thrive on the sharing of other people’s content without paying, and while my sympathy for the other industries is limited wrt copyright theft, there are an awful lot of very small, often vulnerable creators in porn, that in particular really deserved to get paid for what they do.

    On the other hand, as a consumer, paying for porn (when it’s even an option) often means locking into a very specific creator or site, and again there’s that lack of diversity and creativity that goes with that. I think the patreon model works well for media creation and consumption that scales well, but there we end up back with your point about payment services excluding adult content, as I believe is the case with patreon. I don’t have any experience with OnlyFans, but when even they’re trying to cut content creators off, it’s a bit bonkers.

    I was interested to see what looks like the hentai-foundry people experimenting with payment for creators in a way that, I think, could scale well (not that it’s fundamentally a new idea) with subless, but I can’t see them building traction without being cut-off by their own payment provider.



  • I had a great time with it myself, despite many obvious flaws. It seems to scratch an itch that I’ve yet to find an alternative way to scratch!

    Maybe it’s as simple as cyberpunk fallout? But the worlds texture (again despite it’s imperfections) feels more than just cyberpunk. The fallout comparison has other similarities too (apart from the buggy engine lol), I love the active and relatively expensive mod scene too.

    I was definitely disappointed that the story felt a bit limited, but I’m looking forward to a new play through when the DLC is out, even if it’s another trainwreck.

    I loved the anime too which makes me excited for my next play through, similar to how reading the Witcher books opened up a whole new lover for the Witcher 3, although there’s much less of a connection between the Cyberpunk game and the anime obviously.

    Long story short, I can understand others frustration with the game, and I hope (perhaps naïvely) that CDProjectRED get their shit together with how they treat there devs. But despite that I loved it, and deeply hope they don’t abandon the franchise due to how badly the first release went. I must guiltily confess that it’s a real struggle not to preorder the DLC out of the vague sense that it’d count as a vote to stick with it. I won’t, mostly because corpos don’t work that way, and I don’t want to endorse the bad behaviour towards their Devs especially, but still.


  • Go easy on people. It’s hard to change, and something like lemmy can be intimidating for people to get on board with. That’s ignoring the fact that even if they move they can’t force their communities to come with them.

    I’m personally happy to see the back of Reddit, and am convincing anyone I can to switch too, but I can understand the challenge for the average user to switch. Hell, even Reddit is a technical step-up for a lotta people. The tech world has forced a paradigm that traps the average user, using the fact it all appears free as the bait. Be angry at big tech, not the ones they swindled.