Yeah, this was an easy one to call. It’s repeated in other countries as well.

One other factor that they don’t mention is that the surge in street opioids corresponded to a crackdown on doctors writing opioid prescriptions. I saw this coming when I was doing policy analysis and looking at unintended consequences in complex systems. I don’t remember much about what degree of a surge we saw in prescriptions, but I do remember all of those “pill mill” headlines. That always struck me as a pretty manufactured crisis - but even if not, the crackdown certainly didn’t improve the situation.

I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.

First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.

That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.

Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.

Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

TFW when all of your bugs are like cockroaches that run away from the light but hide in the dark where you can’t see them.

Yes, my employment agreement restricts my extracurricular activities.

That’s an Android only app, right? I’ve been tempted to pick up an Android device just to check it out. I am not allowed to be involved in any app development myself but my understanding is that sync is the high water mark for clients right now.

Honestly, this is the kind of thing that should be hidden behind the UI. I’ve been on the internet long enough that I remember when we had to use a similar approach for addressing emails - where you essentially had to put routing information into your address field, rather than letting the servers figure it out.

Apollo, for instance, had a feature like autocomplete for /r links. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped.

The fragmentation of similar/identically oriented communities is a strength in some ways but at the same time presents a fragmented user experience. While I recognize the challenges on the server side if there’s not an aggregator, I think the client should be able to allow users to designate what would essentially be a multireddit consisting of all of the news.whatever communities, and offer further aggregation that the seven different posts linking to the same article into a single post. There’s a few different ways replies could be handled, but that’s the general idea.

We want to make sure we keep the strengths of federation while hiding things like duplication from users.

The main part you need to pick up is being able to establish the mental hooks around the ideas that are central to programming. Do you know how you can watch a choreography session and see the dancers just pick up the moves as they’re described/demonstrated? That’s because they’ve learned the language of dance. It’s an entire (physical) vocabulary. It’s the semantics of dance.

What you need to do is do that with programming. There’s a number of getting started with books and videos, but you’re going to want them to learn the fundamentals of not just a language but of programming.

If you’re talking about using other people’s functions (like in an api), then the function name should give you a clue about what it does. The cool thing about functions is that you don’t have to know how they’re doing their thing, just what they’re doing. If you have the source code, you will find you remember more if you use comments to make notes for yourself (it engages more of your brain than just reading).

If your problem is writing your own code using functions, start out more slowly. Write a program that’s just a giant block of linear code. Once that’s working, then take a look as to how to break it down into functions. If you have a block of code that sorts a list, for example, and you had to copy and paste it into three different areas, that would mean it should be a function.

Use comments very often as you’re going. Before you write a block, write a comment about what it’s supposed to do. You’ll start to see some generalities, which will be you learning programming, not just a language.

This could see tens of thousands dead, 90% of which will be Palestinian and most of whom had nothing to do with the attacks. It could also be the last hurrah for Hamas.

I honestly don’t understand this one, and I used to do this for a living. Terrorist attacks frequently make sense. 9/11 successfully engaged the US in a “global war on terror.” It resulted in a massive burning of resources and an engagement lasting far longer than anyone anticipated. It failed in that al Qaeda has effectively been rendered inoperative, there was no pan-Arab or pan-Islamic movement that rose up to strike down the current world order, and the leadership did not generally get to retire to a life of quiet reflection. But at least it was comprehensible.

This is looking more like the equivalent of the Charles Manson Helter Skelter attack, where some psychotic thought he could ignite a national race war with an incomprehensible slaughter.

If it were not so big, I’d think it was a red flag operation. It’s just that stupid and the consequences are just that dire. This is handing Bobo exactly what he needs on a silver platter.

Haven’t they lost about 2/3 of their value since announcing their intent to IPO? I can’t remember the exact number, but I do remember their valuation cratered and that was before the whole API thing.

They really should pull the IPO. Right now it just looks like the stakeholders are trying to cash out at any valuation because they know the service is heading into the trash heap.

The snail’s not that intelligent. It voted for Trump twice, has a thin blue line punisher sticker on its shell, and thinks immigrants and The Gays ™ are responsible for its social ills.

I love TES. I played so much Daggerfall that I almost failed out of my undergrad program, and that was one of the most bug-filled games I ever played. I loved Morrowind and I very much got into the lore by playing underclass characters with a chip on their shoulder. I didn’t like the console-inspired simplifications in Oblivion, but again I eventually let that go and got into the game. That goes double for Skyrim. With each release, Bethesda simplified the game and removed functionality that really added to my enjoyment, but I still ended up logging uncountable hours into the games. There’s 2080 hours in a work-year, and I’ve probably spent at least a few of those on Bethesda games, with about half going into TES.

That said, I am waiting on this one. I’ve mostly moved over to playing PC games on the steam deck, and I’ve heard nothing great about that. More than that, it looks like this one whipped with much less functionality than it should have had. Again, that’s typical of Bethesda, but I have too big of a backlog to worry about paying to be their beta tester. They can fix bugs while I finish BG 3 and Stray, and if it looks good at that point I’ll dive in.

I’m at a point in my life where spending $50 or $100 on a game isn’t a tough decision, and I’ve even had to become comfortable with the fact that, even having done that, I might never fire it up. That’s one reason I bought the deck, actually. But I’m not at the point that I’m going to buy a game that I know I’ll find unplayable (by my current standards) just to be one of the multiple millions of people who get to see it “first.”

Yeah, my client crashed when I was trying to edit it. Thanks for the reminder!

There should be a full write up from a lawyer - or, better yet, an organization like the EFF. Because lemmy.world is such a prominent instance, it would probably garner some attention if the people who run it were to approach them.

People would still have to decide what their own risk tolerances are. Some might think that even if safe harbor applies, getting swatted or doxxed just isn’t worth the risk.

Others might look at it, weigh their rights under the current laws, and decide it’s important to be part of the project. A solid communication on the specific application of S230 to a host of a federated service would go a long way.

I worked as a sys admin for a while in college in the mid-90s, and it was a time when ISPs were trying to get considered common carriers. Common carrier covers phone companies from liability if people use their service to commit crimes. The key provision of common carrier status was that the company exercised no control whatsoever over what went across their wires.

In order to make the same argument, the systems I helped manage had a policy of no policing. You could remove a newsgroup from usenet, but you couldn’t any other kind of content oriented filtering. The argument went that as soon as you start moderating, you’re now responsible for moderating it all. True or not, that’s the argument made and policy adopted on multiple university networks and private ISPs. And to be clear, we’re not talking about a company like facebook or reddit which have full control over their content. We’re talking things like the web in general, such as it was, and usenet.

Usenet is probably the best example, and I knew some BBS operators who hosted usenet content. The only BBS owners that got arrested (as far as I know) were arrested for being the primary host of illegal material.

S230 or otherwise, someone should try to get a pro bono from a lawyer (or lawyers) who know the subject.

Edit: Looks like EFF already did a write up. With the amount of concerned people posting on this optic, this link should be in every official reply and as a post in the topic.

Reddit’s valuation is down from $15B when they closed their last round of pre-IPO funding. They were hovering in the $5B neighborhood before the APIpocalypse, and I find it hard to imagine that they’ve gained significant value since then. That’s a loss of 2/3 of the investments from their institutional partners and VCs. I hardly think they’re feeling like they deserve a victory lap.

The only reason why you wouldn’t pull an IPO due to a company’s value cratering by 2/3 is because people are looking to get whatever cash they can out of it before it completely collapses. If reddit were a healthy company, the valuation tanking would never have happened. If they were a survivable company, they would have pulled the IPO and made the organizational and policy changes necessary to restore at least some measure of value.

Spez is Musking the site because, like Musk, he is watching his business crash and burn and he has no idea what to do beyond making people pay him to be allowed to create and moderate content he can then resell.

The effects of the decisions being made will not be immediately obvious, especially when reddit doesn’t publish KPIs that show they’re hemorrhaging value. Twitter is notorious for releasing clutching-at-straws metrics in order to not have to address that the company Elon paid $44B for is now worth about $20B and falling.

Firing the mods and replacing them or bringing them to heel is at best a pyrrhic victory because they have not yet figured out how to stem the bleeding, and spez idolizing Musk’s moves at twitter shouldn’t instill a lot of confidence.

Yep, that helps!

Of course, Georgia is expecting to make an announcement by the end of the month.

I totally get that. I watched in real time when MS tried to kill Netscape by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and used their “embrace and extend” business model to try to reserve the web for their proprietary browser. Ot didn’t work, but there was a lot of pushback both legally and socially.

I think that we don’t have to worry about MS coming in for a while. I am interested to see how Facebook makes things work if and when they integrate Threads, but afaik no one is in an analogous position in terms of making a commercial, reddit-like experience tied to the fediverse.

I mean, reddit’s model isn’t that great. They filed for an IPO on Dec 21 for $15B and since then have been marked down to about $5B, and that was before the APIpocalypse. That means that a) all of the current institutional and VC investors lost about 2/3 of their money and that spez and company have similarly seen their ineptitude slash their dreams of Musk-like wealth, and b) value-wise, they’re heading back to 2019 when they were smaller. It’s a terrible time for them to try doing an IPO. The fact that they haven’t pulled it makes it feel like they know the game of musical chairs is winding up and they just want to get out with even a quarter of what they expected.

My go-to analogy is Usenet. Back when usenet basically was the internet for a lot of people, you’d have access to a usenet server through your school, isp, or with a separate subscription to a usenet provider. Usenet itself was free and there were open source implementations of the client and server side components. There were also commercial implementations. The important thing was that net news ran on an open protocol that no company owned. Companies and individuals were free to do what they wanted.

I would not hesitate to buy a client that achieved the functionality of Apollo, or even Alien Blue. I didn’t really start using reddit until I had a good client, and I can see client-side issues being a hurdle to lemmy adoption. I’d prefer paying for a client over ad support. Still, the free and open source client community should be core going forward. I can even see the potential for a commercial server, once the community reaches critical mass in terms of content.

I’ve been involved with the foss community since my first linux install back in like 1994 or so. I remember when rms and esr were household names, so long as your household was a dorm room with cs majors. Like with linux (gnu/linux?) commercial and foss apps can co-exist, and like with linux there should remain a foss purist option in addition to the mixed mode option.

I don’t think the fediverse is facing a threat of commercial takeover - certainly not the lemmyverse. If anything, the threat is not onboarding enough people to be competitive with whatever reddit clone manages to launch in the next year or so, and which has the commercial backing to drive users to the service and have stable, scalable, and production quality code.

I’ve lost track of the number of indictments. I think we’re at about 80-ish? I’m really hoping we can get it to a nice round 100 if we can get additional charges for perjury, violating court orders, and the like.

But Georgia is on my mind.

It’s certainly going somewhere, and I am in no way, shape, or form saying that Trump’s lawyers are true and worthy of their wealth. I am saying I’d rather a Trumpy lawyer spend the money on another boat than have that money go into the campaign to re-elect Bobo or MTG. It’s like watching Steve Bannon’s friend use the money they grifted from the MAGAs to crowdfund The Wall instead a) spend the money buying himself a yacht and b) openly boast about ripping the MAGAs off in order to buy the boat. I’d rather the money go to a worthy cause, but if we can’t have that I’m happy they’re setting fire to it rather than putting it into elections.

I think it depends on how you’re counting. I think the number of charges he’s been indicted on is nearing 80. There’s the NY fraud case, the stolen secret documents case, and now this election interference case. I’m not sure what else is pending.

But you also have another defamation case for E Jean Carol, who successfully sued him a few months ago after which he doubled down. I think I remember a few other cases going forward. On the other hand, cases he tried to bring against companies like CNN have been dismissed.

It’s good he’s getting his fans to pay for his legal fees under the guise of still being able to win the 2020 election, because every dollar Trump puts into a lawyer’s pocket is one less that goes to elect republicans to congress or state office. He’s basically setting piles of GOP money on fire while they watch.