Mastodon Feed: Posts

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:

AI'm sad about Affinity. It offered this wonderful rebellious position against a shitty SaaS company. And it was good software!

I got to say "fuck you" to Adobe for like five glorious years. Now, my days are numbered. I'm hoping I can hold on to my Affinity Designer 2 for at least three to five years. But who knows. Gotta watch out for TOS updates. 😭

Fuck Canva already. I just know they're gonna do the wrong thing. Ahhhhhhhhh

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

The negative outcomes of a static senior/junior distinction mindset include:

- complacency once you've achieved an arbitrary title
- failure to identify specific skills needed to complete specific projects
- treating other engineers as homogenous and fungible based on level
- not listening to people lower-level than you are because you're now Senior-er than them
- failing to provided needed pushback on people higher-level than you are even when you have specific knowledge that they don't

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

If you want to improve your professional standing, by all means, make a skills inventory and try to achieve those skills. Many of these skills might be in common with other "senior" people you know. Take some from your organization's leveling doc. But remain aware that there is nothing that "separates" juniors from seniors, that there is no threshold you cross, and that a good team is made up of a diversity of skills that complement each other, not just a bunch of people with maxed out 10X stats

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

This is where the parade of thinkpieces come from, people picking apart elements of experience they admire in others and in themselves, trying to chart a path.

But the reality is that there is no path. Many of these decisions are made arbitrarily. What your particular organization values may be different than what another one does. Not to mention tons of implicit biases at play. Different skills are evaluated and rewarded differently in different places and at different times.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

As humans, we look at our environment and try to find patterns. So if we find ourselves in a place with some people called "senior" or "staff" who seem pretty skilled, and some people called "junior" (or "no adjective", that's always fun to try to talk about, just in terms of grammar) who seem less so, it's natural to begin to think, "hmm, it seems that senior-ness is a quality I should cultivate and try to achieve. how can I do that?" These correspondences are not *random*, after all.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

In addition to skills, people have *titles*. Titles come from promotions, which means that they come from self-advocacy and luck. In 2017 when engineers were a red-hot commodity and people could get raises by skipping from one company to the next every 6 months, we had a fair amount of title inflation. In 2026 when layoffs are happening every year in the tens of thousands and early-career folks are barely hanging on, title advancement is significantly slowed.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

People have skills, and skills come from training and experience. Recent graduates often have a clearer memory of specific aspects of their training. If I needed to have someone implement a customized hash table, chances are I'd seek out someone who had recently been to college or to a training program that focused on algorithms. That does not mean I would look for a "junior"; some "juniors" are self-taught. Some had education that focused less on fundamentals and more on a specific tech stack.

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:

Bit of info that wasn’t in the original post—Proton also gave up activist’s backup email addresses to the FBI.

All the backup emails were Proton addresses so, unclear how useful that info was to the FBI.

One of the podcast hosts (Koebler?) also stated that this is the first reported instance of Proton working indirectly with the FBI. So washg they refusing before? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-404-media-podcast/id1703615331?i=1000754658188

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Nowadays we are hearing constantly about "treating an AI like an enthusiastic junior". I've recently written at a bit more length about why that's not really a good metaphor specifically <https://blog.glyph.im/2026/03/what-is-code-review-for.html> but it also makes an incorrect categorical assumption about people: that there is a clear distinction between "junior" and "senior" people, which just isn't true. You might think it's a spectrum, and of course any cutoff will be arbitrary, but even that's wrong. It's multiple spectra.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Trying to wring some useful insights out of the roiling AI discourse: today I want to talk a little bit about Senior Engineer Essentialism. As with many AI Coding things, this is not a *new* problem, but it is now a *worse* problem.

According to my hazy recollection, circa 2012 we started seeing a rash of forgettable blog posts about "what it really means to be a senior software engineer".

There is no such thing as a senior software engineer. 🧵

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Not a ton of novel analysis here or anything but I just have to share because

“I don't know anyone who's like ‘Yay, I love the prospect of a world where my job is paying a monthly subscription to a worse version of my own brain.‘”

is sufficiently 🔥 that it warrants sharing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mISCcAtIYOc&t=398s

Boosted by jwz:
charliejane@wandering.shop ("Yoko's Asterisk 🏳️‍⚧") wrote:

I woke up this morning and chose violence

https://buttondown.com/charliejane/archive/let-firefly-stay-dead/

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
3psboyd ("Matt Boyd") wrote:

How am I supposed to get any work done when the world is falling apart AND Slay the Spire 2 is in early access?

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

getting a lot of email may be unfortunate but getting these types of numbers in OmniFocus is literally tragic, it is inherently a hell of one's own making, the downfall that naturally follows hubris

Boosted by jwz:
sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place ("The Seven Voyages Of Steve") wrote:

I saw a young person ask ChatGPT how long their flight was today when they were literally holding the boarding pass with that information on it in the same hand that had the phone in it. ChatGPT spat out about 4 paragraphs on the subject when the answer was “40 minutes”. What a time to be alive

Boosted by jwz:
babe@glitterkitten.co.uk ("tiddy roosevelt") wrote:

Forgot to add the new paintings, now they've got frames on

soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker") wrote:

(If you don't get the reference, don't worry about it)

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

I started buying guitars, which is an approved, valid third choice, and started posting cover songs to YouTube, where they are heard by dozen of people.

https://youtu.be/vK3PwAC4dsU?si=3sJKMGucXdbH5oeB

RE: https://www.threads.com/@batsalad/post/DVzyWlxDL86

soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker") wrote:

Age verification law destroyes the E2EE cryptosystem

#meta #instagram #facebook #surveillancecapitalism

Boosted by jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi"):
jococruise@threads.net ("JoCo Cruise") wrote:

Congratulations to Oscar winner and JoCo Cruise 2026 featured guest Mark Sonnenblick!!! 🏆 #oscars #golden
#oscars

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

physics (pronounced 'fuzzics')

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

I'VE COME TO TALK WITH YOU AGAIN

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
grimalkina ("Cat Hicks") wrote:

My friends here in San Diego who are R1 scientists, leading some of the most successful labs in their areas in one of the world's densest regions for scientific and medical innovation use words like: broken, bleak, devastating, nihilistic. Half the people I know who worked on equity & science topics have stopped posting publicly about it or producing scicom on it after experiencing too much stress and burden for their safety. Even *left* social media foments rage spirals and pileons

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
Daojoan ("JA Westenberg") wrote:

Conservatives built an economy that requires two incomes to do what one did and then blamed women for going to work

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

HELLO DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND

typst ("Typst") wrote:

helene started clickbaiting her followers here into Typst. When that did not work, she noticed the tremendous amount of note takers and is now exploring how #Typst could be their best solution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Q7r7Y%5FwBg

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mttaggart@infosec.exchange ("Taggart") wrote:

Office 365 and Copilot are down.

Run. Now's your chance. Don't look back; just GO

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
gvwilson ("Greg Wilson") wrote:

@mhoye my brother used to say that if you're not willing to walk away from the table, you're not negotiating: you're begging.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
AlSweigart ("Al Sweigart") wrote:

When you use LLMs to code something, are you using diff to compare the changes the LLM gives you?

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
qgustavor@urusai.social ("Gustavo") wrote:

I found @soatok's argument for E2EE encryption in this post quite interesting:

End-to-end encryption doesn’t just protect the users, it protects the people operating the infrastructure. And that’s why it still matters.

That's pretty much the only reason why http://mega.io/ is end-to-end encrypted: the previous Kim Dotcom project - Megaupload - was seized by FBI and hadn't E2E, making it a easy target. MEGA's encryption isn't good (source: me) but it's good enough to avoid making them an easy target for law enforcement.