Louis Ingenthron @LouisIngenthron@social.cleverlibre.org
Software engineering contractor/consultant in Florida specializing in .NET C# #WebDev, plus #Indie #GameDev in #MonoGame, #Stride, and #Godot.
I like complex simulations and enjoy writing procedural generation algorithms for fun.
#Pilot in training. Burgeoning fan of #Aviation in general.
Fan of #1A jurisprudence and the kind of #FreeSpeech that applies to everyone equally.
Pro-Democracy. Pro-Rights. Pro-Freedom. In that order.
He/Him 🏳🌈
High risk of rants, especially with the lack of character limit.
Joined Nov 2022
Louis Ingenthron
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It's funny how giving each window a dedicated title bar is considered an intolerable waste of space on a 3840 × 2160 high pixel density display, when everyone lived with that just fine when the cutting edge display was 512 × 342 with a whopping 80 pixels per inch
Louis Ingenthron
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One way the myth of tech as a meritocracy is being demolished is that tech employees can see how you could be good at your job but your CEO & CFO are bad at theirs but you’re the one that gets laid off.
The executives get to say “Oops, we over hired” and are rewarded with 📈
@jeffjarvis Or because Max actually killed the "HBO Original" label that had built up so much prestige over the decades?
@misc The trend chasers do exist, this is true, but mostly on the business side.
On the technical side, however, there are tons of developers who never touched crypto, because they saw it for the scam it was, who are now excited about the possibilities of AI.
This is normal, though. The idiots with the money will always flit around chasing the buzzwords while the rest of us slowly grind the gears to turn it into something useful.
Louis Ingenthron
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Louis Ingenthron
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Your yearly reminder that ‘layoff season’ is an American invention that infected the rest of the world.
Layoffs cost a company 35% more than retaining a core staff over 3 years.
The only purpose is for inflating investor reports.
Layoffs in tech immediately degrade the product, reduce security, create safeguarding issues, and inevitably destabilise the future of a given product.
@mentallyalex Yeah, or YouTube and Twitch got too full of millenials and was therefore de facto uncool and Tik Tok just achieved critical mass among teens first.
@mentallyalex I think you technically could, but the audience there has a pretty short attention span, so shorter content tends to thrive.
That said, I'm only relying on third-hand tales from the generation ambassadors; I haven't been there myself.
@mentallyalex From what I understand, it's YouTube for the youngs, kind of like how The History Channel is YouTube for the olds.
Louis Ingenthron
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Louis Ingenthron
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(reposting from @ianbetteridge@writing.exchange instead of reblogging because mastodon don't feel great about quote reblogs)
Back in late 2021, when I was still working for Automattic, the Chief of Money Things presented the revenue goals for 2022+ his team decided based on a forecast they spent months working on. The goals were incredibly ambitious, because they were based in the growth the company had experienced during 2020 and 21.
Back in the day it didn't make any sense to me, basing the goals of the company on the results of a year where, because of COVID, all the online products were experiencing 2 or 3x more growth than any other year before seemed incredibly stupid. But I told myself "Javi, there may be a hundred different factors you don't see and these people do: it's not your field, this seems dumb , but trust those who know".
But time passed. People stopped being locked at home for 23 hours per day. And surprise surprise: online activity went back to normal levels. Who could have guessed uh? Well, not the C-suite of most tech companies. Not the C-suite of my company.
Flash forward to early 2023: we are told that it's clear we are "underperforming", so the company needs to go into "antifragile" mode (a term from one of those self-help for businessmen books the CEOs like so much): benefits start being cut down, salaries get frozen, the CEO tell us that working 40 hours/week is now considered below the bare minimum expectations, and the execs announce the hiring is frozen and the new goal is to make the company "lighter" by "managing people out". Mind you, the company was making more money than ever (except for 2020/21). The revenue was growing, handsomely. But it wasn't growing as much as the investors were promised, so we were underperforming.
Did the people responsible for setting stupid goals based on inane ideas admitted responsibility and suffered any consequences???
Of course not! They just blamed it on "execution issues". Because hey, admitting that they took some decisions so dumb that any average 13-year-old would find them laughable, would mean that maybe it's not justified for them to earn millions per year.
Every year it becomes more clear that success in the business world and being smart, or even competent in your job, are totally unrelated variables.
So yeah, there are a lot of not-too-bright but incredibly confident people in positions of power in the business world, taking absurd decisions that end fucking thousands of workers, and never suffering for and kind of repercussions themselves.
The system is entirely broken.
@PunaisetPimpulat Yep. If you see someone from a server you don't like, click the three dots next to their name and then click the option to block their entire domain.
@PunaisetPimpulat Why would there be?
You can block them if you want.
@carnage4life It's also reasonable when you consider that LLMs are fancy pattern matchers and diagnosing symptoms is exactly pattern matching.
@strypey When your argument is just repeating the word "sophistry" over and over (do you even know what that word means?) instead of actually engaging with the ideas presented, yeah, I think we are done here.
@strypey Nobody is forcing or coercing anyone to fire their employees. Nobody is forcing or coercing anyone to silence.
They're criticizing them, and those people are (sometimes) bowing to criticism. They don't have to, and some don't!
That's the free marketplace of ideas in action.
"Free speech" doesn't mean that you don't have to face any consequences for what you choose to say. It just means you won't be imprisoned or physically harmed for them.
@strypey You keep equating criticism with coercion. These things are not the same.
Believe it or not, you can just ignore criticism and go on with your day.
@strypey No, they can't. All they can do is criticize. Only the person's employer can fire them from their job, if they agree with the criticism. Again, all free speech.
That welfare here sucks doesn't make speech less free.
Grassroots is not systemic.
Proposal: A package delivery service that slightly increases the priority and speed of your package every time you refresh the tracking page.
Software engineering contractor/consultant in Florida specializing in .NET C# #WebDev, plus #Indie #GameDev in #MonoGame, #Stride, and #Godot.
I like complex simulations and enjoy writing procedural generation algorithms for fun.
#Pilot in training. Burgeoning fan of #Aviation in general.
Fan of #1A jurisprudence and the kind of #FreeSpeech that applies to everyone equally.
Pro-Democracy. Pro-Rights. Pro-Freedom. In that order.
He/Him 🏳🌈
High risk of rants, especially with the lack of character limit.
Joined Nov 2022
