dumpsterlid @ dumpsterlid @lemmy.world

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674

Joined

2 yr. ago

Gimp and Inkscape are my two trusty revolvers and I am a lone cowboy

ACAB but especially the NYPD

But just like in any profession, the “professionals” are able to handle the complex tasks that others can’t/don’t want to do

thank you for opening your heart for me and giving it a go!

take a pizza for your travels 🍕

waait fuck there is a rat down over there in the corner by the barrels quick GET THE PIZZA BEFORE THE RAT GETS IT.

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That’s the same thing

Please please please open your heart and listen to me a second.

It is not the same thing. There is a lot of research on this and it turns out it is not as simple as one person winning means another person losing (or 5…). The reason the world is currently set up this way is a choice made by an economic class of people to mortgage the entire future of another economic class of people, into a doomed construction of decay that can only ever collapse in flames.

That is the crux of literally this whole miserable slush of suffering we are in.

The only truly zero sum game here is between the ruling class getting to own everything and the rest of us getting to live a decent quality of life.

If you don’t listen to anything else I say, fine, I mean I can be insufferable as fuck, but consider the truths in that point alone outside the context of my nonsense.

That being said, software engineers EVERYWHERE are earning “a living wage” at least. We are way overpaid, in fact, compared to social workers or teachers. A company with hundreds of thousands of employees relocating some positions to other countries is just mundane.

Who said violence and class warfare can’t be mundane in practice?

We are way overpaid

No y’all aren’t, the problem is rather that everybody else is way underpaid

You know how most of the software engineers in India feel? Like they are even more micromanaged, overworked and deprived of agency in the work place than US tech workers.

I want software engineers and India and Mexico to earn a living wage just as much as I want software engineers living in my city to earn a living wage and have a workplace that treats them with decency (and doesn’t try to treat humans like robots).

I am sure most Indians and Mexican software engineers feel that way about software engineers from other countries too.

The only zero sum game here is between all of us and the ruling class and if you don’t see that now I hope one day in the future that thought will find you with an open mind.

Thank you!

Such a long rant about something so old and so universal as *outsourcing

*Class Warfare

FTFY

no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities

Ahahahaha right, I love how you just accept the legally defined rights of what a union can do and what it can’t as if those laws in any given country aren't just a record of the battlefield between the working class and the ruling class. A union can do whatever the fuck a union wants to do, and the law will attempt to constrain it in favor of the ruling class and capitalists to the degree that is politically tenable in a given environment. Sometimes it will be successful, sometimes it will fail, but unions fundamentally exist outside of capitalism because they have a level of legitimacy that capitalism and the idea of owning other people's labor will never have.

It hardly needs to be said that like libraries, if unions didn’t already exist as a concept there is no way they would be legal at all if they were developed in this day and age. Unions are only ever temporarily legal along limited contexts under capitalism.

Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.

high five solidarity my friend, even when you insult my intelligence you are still far more my friend than my boss will ever be

First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.

"There are several ways that unionization’s impact on wages goes beyond the workers covered by collec- tive bargaining to affect nonunion wages and labor practices. For example, in industries and occupations where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, nonunion employers will frequently meet union standards or, at least, improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have provided if there were no union presence. This dynamic is sometimes called the “union threat effect,” the degree to which nonunion workers get paid more because their employers are trying to forestall unionization.

There is a more general mechanism (without any specific “threat”) in which unions have affected nonunion pay and practices: unions have set norms and established practices that become more generalized throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce. This has been especially true for the 75% of workers who are not college educated. Many “fringe” benefits, such as pensions and health insurance, were first provided in the union sector and then became more generalized—though, as we have seen, not universal. Union grievance procedures, which provide “due process” in the workplace, have been mimicked in many nonunion workplaces. Union wage- setting, which has gained exposure through media coverage, has frequently established standards of what workers generally, including many nonunion workers, expect from their employers. Until, the mid-1980s, in fact, many sectors of the economy followed the “pattern” set in collective bargaining agreements. As unions weakened, especially in the manufacturing sector, their ability to set broader patterns has diminished. However, unions remain a source of innovation in work practices (e.g., training, worker participation) and in benefits (e.g., child care, work-time flexibility, sick leave)."

https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/

https://files.epi.org/page/-/old/briefingpapers/143/bp143.pdf

i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.

You are not a union, you cannot stop a business from doing anything, together with your fellow workers however you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.

And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now.

Why should an industry bother innovating to increase dividends to shareholders with expensive and risky new technological ventures when it can just keep slashing labor costs and crushing employees under their foot? There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don't have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.

Feels like the automotive world is in utter chaos.

I think maybe a whole lot of rich and powerful people in the automotive industry are beginning to realize that most of the automotive industry is going to be “commodified” and entirely eradicated by shockingly affordable relatively small electric vehicles from China (and hopefully elsewhere too! If places elsewhere don’t just thumb their noses and say “that’s what CHINA does”) that not only displace their fossil fuel counterparts but more broadly destabilize the focus of the car as the center of modern life in a way that I don’t imagine anybody fucked up enough in their heart to make it to the top of the automotive industry can really accept.

Especially since people are further beginning to realize that EV cars aren’t the story worth really paying attention to in terms of urban futurism, EV bicycles are.

The kinds of people who would like to think they are the visionaries and titans of the automotive industry (especially in the “west”) are taking out their frustration on EV development that everybody is collectively beginning to realize a realistic vision of futurism not only doesn’t include cars, a lot of what defines futurism both from a perspective of aesthetics AND policy making is a conscious rejection of cars as the basis of our society.

You have to understand, these people really believed the future was through cars evolving into the Next Big Future Thing or at the every least the Next Big Future Thing was going to be intimately related with cars. Whether the Next Big Future Thing was self driving cars that would magically fix? traffic and congestion or a far future vision of sci-fi with futuristic cities that you can tell are futuristic because the flying cars are stuck in sky traffic…..

sigh

It really is a disease of ideology.

Let the death of the programming industry as a respectable professional job be a warning to centrist workers in other industries what happens when you don’t unionize and just assume your personal talent will always be rewarded by the ruling class.

It won’t.

Also let the rhetoric computer programmers use to defend the intrinsic value of their livelihood be a lesson to all of us. They talk in terms of raw productivity, in terms of securing a living wage through being more savvy than people who are dumb and take manual labor jobs. They speak about the threats of automation with COMPLETE confidence it will only be used by their bosses to create more jobs for people like them.

Finally, let it be a lesson that the confidence of programmers who look at AI/LLMs and think “they can never replace me with that, it would be a disaster” totally misses the point that it doesn’t matter to the ruling class of the tech world that replacing tech worker jobs with shitty automation or vastly more underpaid workers won’t work longterm. The point is to permanently devalue and erode the pride and hard fought professionalism of programming (Coding Bootcamps have the same objective of reducing the leverage of workers vs employers).

^ Programmers make a classic person-who-is-smart-at-computers mistake here of trying to understand business like it is a series of computer programs behaving rationally to efficiently earn money

I have met a nauseating amount of programmers who truly believe that tech companies would have to come crawling back to them if they fired tech workers in the industry en masse and everything began to break. What these programmers don’t understand is yeah, they will come back, but they will employ you from the further shifted perspective that you are an alternative to a worthless algorithm or vastly underpaid human when they do. That change in perspective, that undercutting of the “prestige” of being a skilled programmer is permanent and will never revert.

Shit is dark… but also damn if I don’t have a tiny bit of schadenfreude for all the completely unfounded self confidence and sense of quiet superiority so many people who work with computers project when doing something like teaching a classroom of 20 kids or fixing someone’s plumbing problem is way fucking harder any day of the week.

Getting someone to switch anything major in the workflow/toolset of their lives is nearly impossible most of the time, it is process highly likely to cause headaches and only provide counterbalancing benefits down the road once the painful learning curve of acclimation is overcome.

However, in the same token there are plenty of Linux distributions that have perfectly understandable desktop UIs that many Mac or Windows users wouldn’t event notice wasn’t windows. Especially with Windows changing shit every 5 seconds and stuffing useless crap into menus everywhere, I think it isn’t a stretch to say the UI of many Linux distributions is more user friendly than Windows and in many cases Mac.

The real problem is the moment someone has to fuck around with headaches with drivers for basic computer functionality like Bluetooth or other hardware. If that stuff is generally covered pretty well then most people aren’t going to give a shit.

At this point Linux is like making coffee with a French press, people who aren’t coffee nerds think using a French press is way more complicated than using some stupid keurig machine with completely unclear buttons and a camera inside just to check you are using brand name keurig cups that you have to fool by slipping in an old k-cup lid from keurig over the top of the off-brand one….

…peoplenwho do know coffee well on the other hand shake their heads confused when people jump through 1000 hoops to use other coffee brewing methods when a French press conceptually and mechanically is only one step away from just literally dumping your coffee grounds in hot water and then drinking it.

If Linux can’t do that then it’s not good enough yet as far as they are concerned.

Linux can do that, see The Finals, Halo Infinite, Apex Legends or any number of other games. It’s just the anticheat companies are sketchy and often uninterested in doing even a little bit of work to add Linux support.

The day Linux says all video games are compatible with their OS is the day I finally switch from Windows for good.

I mean Wine and steamOS’s Proton are that though? Sure compatibility isn’t perfect but the vast majority of games I have tried worked all the way from current AAA games to games like Steel Panthers WinspWW2, a DOS game from the 90s that barely functions on a modern windows computer but yet runs perfect on my Deck. Because the deck is using a virtual environment to emulate a windows OS it actually arguably creates a more stable platform to run windows software than windows itself running the program normally.

Pretty much the only obstacle left is stupid super invasive anticheat/spyware software that doesn’t bother to cover Linux in competitive multiplayer games.

Honestly I think windows is so fucked in terms of market share and it seems like they are kind of just pre-emptively ceding the battle to linux intentionally or not.

Yeah people have been waiting for years for linux to eat windows for lunch and it hasn’t happened yet but I am convinced that linux becoming massively more practical and easy to use for gaming (Steam deck being a good catalyst) in the last couple of years has pushed things past a tipping point. Gaming might not make up the outsized chunk of desktop usage, but gaming is where people experiment, try new things, learn software inside and out and it is where people are most inspired to contribute and build and polish out the annoying little details of complex systems.

Yeah Microsoft will have its walled moats around entire sectors of business indefinitely into the future, and that probably is where most of the consistent money is, but I think Microsoft shitting the bed with Windows 11 so hard is creating the rosiest forecast for the future of Linux desktops I have ever seen in my life.

These twin factors converging has got me bullish af on Linux in the near to mid term.

Let’s fuckinnn gooooooo

Sure why would I question the wisdom of taking a mysterious pill offered to me by user TubularTittyFrog?

It’s monkey-brain thinking taking over

This is far more needlessly cruel than nature, monkeys are highly evolved for an extraordinarily challenging, diverse landscape with many threats and opportunities. They are not primitive enough to have their minds broken by cancerous ideologies that make them behave against the survival of themselves and their species.

What we are talking about is not primitive behavior, it is a hostile contagion composed of ideas rather than bacteria or viruses.

Lemmy Flood Gates right now.

The control room has alarms going off and on the main screen it just says “LET ‘R RIP” in blinking red letters.