Mastodon Feed
We have previously understood that there is a presumption of good faith amongst the software developer community, that most people on Github, on PyPI, on NPM are not trying to ship you malware. Even the flashy "supply chain attacks" that have shown up over the last decade are the exception not the rule, xz can happen to anyone, but probably xz isn't going to happen to *you*.
Mastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
Mastodon FeedWhat does this have to do with our present apocalyptic hellscape discourse? Well, coding agents like to run tools, too. Every coding agent is a random die-roll away from running `rm -fr` on your entire project, maybe your entire production database.
Mastodon Feed2 years ago I gave a talk which is, in part, about how Python virtual environments are unsandboxed by default. They don't run in containers. This is true of every other programming language's development environments, too; `npm install`, `cargo run`, all do vaguely the same thing at this level. https://pyvideo.org/pybay-2024/when-arbitrary-code-execution-is-working-as-intended-what-code-is-python-supposed-to-execute.html
Mastodon Feedif this is all too abstract and airy then let me ground it in an extremely concrete example that is not a particularly Hot Take but nevertheless deeply impacts our current moment
Mastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
Mastodon Feed"please tell me how I can quickly address your objections so we can meet our KPIs, I have a hard stop in 45 minutes" and "you are a human being with a heart and a mind in community with other humans who must give each other grace and time and enough mutual recognition that we can ever possibly have enough safety margin to allow for us to make mistakes" are not really mutually intelligible discourses
Mastodon Feedthe conversation just ends up between one person who is trying to guess the password to push their commit, get to the next commit, get to the next feature, the next milestone, go go go, what are the rules for using this tech that can make us FASTER, you can't just say "no", you gotta let me know what form to fill out so this is OK
and another person who is trying to say "slow down, this whole system CANNOT work at this speed, you have to understand the thread of human frailty that joins us all"
Mastodon Feedwhen 1000 faceless github accounts crowd into your PR queue all at once, slinging slop, desperate (for what reasons I cannot quite understand) for some shred of clout that comes from an accepted commit on a high-profile open source project, even if every single one of them is a Real Human Being and they are all still doing their best to pay enough attention, but they are also all staring directly into the Not Paying Enough Attention beam, you can't just give it a pass because it's worked before
Mastodon Feedlike, it was always bullshit, but the bullshit kinda worked well enough because we were all doing our best and using tools that were simple enough to understand even their second-order effects, and everybody more or less had enough time and space to do the kind of thinking necessary to actually understand stuff and take responsibility for things at a social / community level
Mastodon Feedit makes it hard to talk about, particularly this fad in OSS of everyone being "responsible" or "accountable" for slop they submit, as a way of laundering responsibility for said slop. ultimately the root of the problem is that our whole system is predicated on the idea that all your contributors will be honest, work hard, and believe in themselves. it was always bullshit. even the word "guarantee" Is _supposed_ to imply that some formal methods were deployed, and we mostly don't do that
Mastodon Feedthere's so much load-bearing good faith embedded in the structure of the work. for example, the "guarantee". the only source of authority for something like a database commit claiming that it's "guaranteed" not to lose data is that a human abstractly and *very carefully* understood some whole-system properties and asserted, based on that understanding, that they believe this property should hold under some set of implicitly stipulated conditions (like "your hard drive did not catch fire")
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
limebar ("Lime Bar") wrote:
I am a little shocked at the lack of solidarity I see between artists working in different mediums wrt genAI.
Musicians who would never use it to make music use it to make cover art
Graphic artists reach for it to make music over their videos
Writers use it to illustrate their articles
And, considering software development an art, many use it to create web sites or apps to host their art.
None of this is necessary. All of this is harmful to the other artists.
Collaborate ffs.
Stop it.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
davidgerard@circumstances.run ("David Gerard") wrote:
the robot mall cop story saved me trying to write up the tedious vibecoding plagiarist (the "Dark Hours" nonsense) who i still can't figure an actually interesting, let alone impactful, angle on
i suspect the lying plagiarist is not interesting or impactful really
he fooled John Gruber!!! which is not the highest of bars. that's the limit of his actual impact
plagiarist plagiarises plagiarist, fools giant bugs bunny cartoon lollipop with an apple logo
spammers lie? but is there any other moral takeaway from this fable for children
Mastodon Feedone of the horrifying things about watching the software developer community's slow-motion collapse is realizing just how many coders (and managers, for that matter) have been understanding loose metaphors and allusions as literal truth.
if a system provides a "guarantee" you can't actually get your money back. if developers are "accountable" for their changes you can't actually have them arrested and convicted for making a mistake
Mastodon FeedBoosted by neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:"):
phillip@social.lol ("Phillip :usa_distress:") wrote:
RE: https://social.lol/@phillip/117061432689860232
The postmortem of the hack on my Forgejo instance is here! I had fun investigating and writing it, so I hope y’all enjoy reading about it :)
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
brooke@bikeshed.vibber.net ("Brooke Vibber :neocat_cofe:") wrote:
i shouldn't say "productivity" because what it really helps with is *executive function*
this has a *work productivity* result in that i can do software engineering tasks more effectively
but also helps with "making dinner" or "sitting down and watching a movie with my wife"
adhd is a crippling thing, it isn't just work that you don't get around to :)
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
littlefoxone@tech.lgbt ("wolf ***rika :verifieddemigirl: :therian: :wlfBlep: :fluffytail:") wrote:
author: ok here is a character that looks cool and mysterious and badass but there are a lot of implications that they are probably a bad person
me (failing any media literacy): wow so cool and mysterious and badass. I wish i were her :neofox_floof_sad_reach_ears_down:
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
tef wrote:
if you don't get one of my jokes or posts, don't worry about it. you are unburdened with the relevant knowledge and should choose to remain in bliss
Mastodon Feedcstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen") wrote:
I was recently reminded of Jeff Wayne's musical version of "War of the Worlds" from 1978. It's definitely worth a listen (I'm unfamiliar with tracks 14, and 15, but they appear to be from a later release).
(This is the best version of "War of the Worlds" in my extremely unimportant opinion...)
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
sakhavi@aoir.social ("Sasha Akhavi") wrote:
I must be unusual in that sometimes I find a book hard to read because of how *good* it is. E.g. when so many sentences send me off in a million directions with connections / correlations / inspirations that it takes me a half-hour to finish a page. @grimalkina 's The Psychology of Software Teams is officially in this category.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
gvwilson ("Greg Wilson") wrote:
"Developers and AI Coding Agents: Who Does What?" https://will.understan.de/you/index.php/875116 is a short survey from Lutz Prechelt's team at the Free University in Berlin - if you can spare a few minutes, they would be grateful for your input.
Mastodon Feedneatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:") wrote:
UPS’s remaining fleet of MD-11 cargo jets have been grounded since November 2025, when one crashed into the area surrounding the airport here in Louisville, KY. These five MD-11s have been parked outside of the Worldport maintenance hangar, largely untouched the whole time.
(Photo by me.)
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
NanoRaptor@bitbang.social ("Nanoraptor") wrote:
Wake me when an ai “breaks containment”, gets into HR, finds 7500 employees illegally misclassified as contractors and files their paperwork with the local departments of labour and/or employment for years of backpay.
Mastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
the young rabbit who hangs out in & near our backyard is getting pretty tame
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:
Mo' babies, mo' babies, mo' babies.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/08/10/fecundity/
Mastodon Feeddysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:
did anybody actually ever make the chess cheating anal beads?
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
djsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology ("DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-lab") wrote:
Come for the Talking Heads vs Bob Marley, stay for the nods to Chicago and Zappa
Umphrey’s McGee - Life During Exodus
Mastodon Feeddysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:
incidentally they don't say ACAB in poland, they say put a dick up the police's ass (CHWDP) .
don't do that, bastards don't deserve gay sex.
Mastodon Feeddysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:
Criminal charges against the protestors were dropped and a probe characterized the case as "deeply flawed", "insubstantial", and lacking credible evidence in support of the claim that "ACAB" is a gang.