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

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage:

"Creative workers who cheer on lawsuits by the big studios and labels need to remember the first rule of class warfare: things that are good for your boss are rarely what’s good for you." https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

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

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage:

"And in the meantime, it’s bad art. It’s bad art in the sense of being “eerie”, the word that cultural theorist Mark Fisher used to describe “when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something”."

Good read. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
luci@chaos.social wrote:

@sekas

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

more ghetto biryani, this time with mushrooms and kidney beans

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
kurrikage@meow.social ("Kurrikage :deifirev:") wrote:

The birds are back in town.

🦅 @BigPurpleSentri
🐦 @Seiko
🐈🐦 @Kittiara
✂️ Thatsfurredup & Clockworkcreature

#BatPics #Fursuit

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
gimulnautti@mastodon.green ("Toni Aittoniemi") wrote:

"Zuckerberg wants you to think that it is technologically impossible to have a conversation with a friend without him listening in. Cook wants you to think that it is impossible for you to have a reliable computing experience unless he gets a veto over which software you install and without him taking 30 cents out of every dollar you spend. Pichai wants you to think that it is impossible for you to find a webpage unless he gets to spy on you from asshole to appetite."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
ifixcoinops@retro.social ("Dan Fixes Coin-Ops") wrote:

Been fighting off slopbots trying to bring my site down since last Wednesday and man if you thought I was pissed off at AI before, hoo boy, wow

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
skeletor@mas.to ("Inspirational Skeletor💀") wrote:

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

Shout out to Obsidian and iA Writer. Just two queens saving our files in .txt and not looking for new ways to lock us into their apps.

I'm such a big mobile guy and there are so few mobile apps that aren't SaaS-ified to hell.

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

amateurs argue strategy & tactics, professionals talk logistics. Whiskey Pete served, but he is still an amateur.

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

Plato out there saying "what an asshole"

Descartes chuckling knowingly

RE: https://www.threads.com/@perfectunion/post/DV88utRAVov

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
caitp@mstdn.social wrote:

https://www.readthemaple.com/canadas-richest-1-nearly-as-wealthy-as-poorest-80/

its not enough to give the finger to the psychos with cybertrucks

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
jeremiah@tldr.nettime.org wrote:

@glyph Something of a small coda to this. I think you touch on it when mentioning the mistake of assuming on whether someone is fungible based on their level but take a single organization and swap two senior engineers into different parts of the business.

From afar and for a period of time their work is going to look a little similar to what junior engineers usually do because the fastest way to get the business understanding is to go through and do the simple but tedious maintenance tasks.

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

Fuck this dude

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gregory-bovino-border-patrol-to-retire-sources/

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
preinheimer@phpc.social ("Paul Reinheimer") wrote:

I'm hearing a lot about "Right to compute" acts, which seem to be written by AI lobbyists to protect their interests. Maybe make it easier to build new datacenters.

What about "Right to create" laws. Giving creators the right to make things and not have them be ingested by billion dollar companies.

This very post may soon help train a model that will decide to kill a human being. I think about that a lot.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
benjamineskola@hachyderm.io wrote:

@glyph my title got unexpectedly upgraded to ‘senior’ when I started at my current employer, after trying and failing to get promoted at the previous job. I’ve got ~10 years more experience than some coworkers who had the title before I did. But they had several years more experience with parts of the tech stack (and conversely I’ve done a bunch of other stuff that not everyone else has, which is useful too).

It’s at least taught me not to set too much store by the adjective, anyway.

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

Three sentences that sound similar but mean different things:

Monday, right

Monday, right?

Monday; right!

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
tante@tldr.nettime.org wrote:

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116239395175554368

So yeah. I am kinda looking for a new job that allows me to make our digital world meaningfully better. If you have any leads or thoughts, ping me.

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

this implements the new feature detection i wrote that blogpost about (the first cut turned out to be completely broken but i'm hopeful about this one).

oh and i added IFUNC support for aarch64 while i was at it.

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

aaaaand that's everything done, aarch64 included.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
chrisjrn@social.coop ("Christopher Neugebauer") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@CodenameTim/116238965755866425

This touches on a number of thoughts I've been having about the interaction with LLMs and specialist work: LLMs produce "median" work, but no significant functionality in a framework should ever be "median": it's a problem that should be solved once so that multiple people benefit. There will be no prior art; no need for pattern matching.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Ultimately in our culture we need to have ways to calculate what people are compensated, and I do not fault anyone for participating in the process of this type of ranking. Some number needs to be written on the offer letter and if you don't have a process for determining that as fairly as you can, then it will be entirely based on implicit biases. So people will have titles and titles will have pay bands. But that's the real, final difference between "junior" and "senior": about $100,000.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

"Juniors" can be more than you expect and "Seniors" can be less. A senior engineer who has been in an environment that provides psychological safety, good tools, constant clear feedback, a culture of mutual respect, and strong technical challenges will probably be amazing to work with. Someone who has worked just as long and just as hard in a backbiting constant corporate turf war will be bitter and jaded but will not have the technical chops to match that.

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.