rwhitisissle @ rwhitisissle @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

Here's the thing. Cory Doctorow is almost 100% spot on with the first 3 things. The last one, however, is pure copium. Those platforms died, yes, but they died in a very different era of the internet.

There was a time where people jumped ship with abandon and routinely visited cool, new websites every other week. This is the time that I like to call the "big liquid" internet. The internet was popular, yes, but every day people spent a little more time on it than on t.v. and other kinds of popular entertainment - in other words, popular but still growing. Websites like Digg, if they fucked up and just straight up ruined user experience, would die as a result of enshittification. The internet was cutthroat, and the quality of your service mattered. If people didn't like your website, they were going to leave.

We don't live in that era of the internet anymore. We're in the era of the "big solid" internet. People don't go to "new websites" anymore. They don't jump platforms. They don't abandon and adopt. If they're kids, they go where their friends are - probably Twitter/X or TikTok. Maybe reddit. If they're old users they're on instagram and Facebook. It doesn't really matter how bad those platforms get, because the quality of the service is not really important. It's that they don't have anywhere else to go or anything else to do.

There is no more exploration or adventure to the internet as we once understood it. That's why Google has waited so fucking long to enshittify their most popular product: it's because you're locked in. There is no competition, because the competition died or was killed off a long time ago.

It's important to keep an up to date resume, even if you're employed. That's a little life pro tip for you kids out there, with your iphones and your tik toks and your Fortnite dances and your existential malaise brought about by encroaching climate disaster and advanced technoindustrial capitalism.

Admittedly, this discussion is more one of semantics than anything. It's pretty clear I'm arguing that SQL is not a "General Purpose Language," and that proficiency in that domain is what constitutes programming. Which, yeah, is arguably somewhat arbitrary. But my point is that, colloquially, someone who only works with SQL isn't a programmer. Data Engineer, sure. DBA. Also, sure. Depends on what you do. Programmer? Not really. Not unless you (as in the person, not "it's theoretically possible") can use raw SQL to read in video data from a linux system device file and then encode it to mp4 and just nobody's told me.

So is Tex. And, yet, I still don't put it under the "programming languages I know" section on my resume. Probably because it's not a programming language.

The phrase "SQL programmers" is so fucking weird. SQL isn't a programming language. It's a query language. You don't "program" things with SQL. You utilize SQL as a component of programs for data insertion and lookup, but the actual logic of execution is done in a programming language. Unless you're doing Oracle PL/SQL, in which case why are you giving money to Oracle?

Edit: Damn, this comment made people mad.

IMO the quality of discussion here is about the same on reddit. Which is to say, not very good, or very deep. It's shallow observations, memes, and one liner gut reactions to headlines. People have been conditioned over the past decade to not engage with long replies or complex thoughts. It might have to do with social media becoming more or less defined by people engaging with it on mobile devices, which don't really enable that sort of engagement. But it might also be people genuinely not giving a shit anymore and only wanting that minor degree of superficial interaction.

It's how you boil a frog. They're not gonna back down off of this. They decided a long time ago to maximize profitability at the cost of service degradation.

The youtube thing is an annoyance. The one that's REAL concerning is what happens when Google eventually forces Firefox out of the market by convincing everyone to build their websites in such a way as to only run on Chromium based browsers. I mean, American Anti-Trust laws are just completely fucking gutted, so it's not like there will be any consequence to them doing that. But once they do, they'll have a veritable monopoly on the internet. At least the internet most people interact with.

Apparently all this shit is needed because python wants to install shit globally by default?

None of that was needed. It was just used because nobody at your company enforced a single standard for developing your product.

Afraid you fucked something and want a clean environment? Here’s how you do it with node: delete node_modules/. Done.

rm -rf venv/. Done.

Want a clean python env? Uhhhhhhhh use docker I guess?

python -m venv venv

Well what’s currently installed? ls node_modules, or use npm ls if you want to be fancy. In python land? Uhhhhhh

pip freeze. pip list if you want it formatted.

Let’s update some dep–WHY AREN’T PYTHON PACKAGES USING SEMVER

Janky, legacy python packages will have random versioning schemes. If a dependency you're using doesn't follow semver I would question why you're using it and seek out an actively maintained alternative.

One thing genuinely confusing is having people reply to a comment I made from a federated instance, and when I try to reply to their comment, I get taken to the reply in the context of the lemmy instance they commented in, not the one I commented in. For example, if I'm on Beehaw and someone from lemmy.ca replies to my comment, and I want to respond to them, what I'll typically do is click on the button below the comment that shows the context of the conversation, because I comment a lot and don't always know what comment I made that someone is replying to. When I do that, it takes me to lemmy.ca, which I can't reply from, because I'm not on lemmy.ca. This is confusing, because this routine thing pulls you into other parts of the fediverse that your reply might exist in, and which other people can see, but you can't comment on that instance because you don't have an account there. But if you go back to your own instance and find your comment through your profile, you can navigate to a reply someone from another instance made and reply to them as long as you're still on your instance. This is both cumbersome and, to a new user, terribly disorienting.

No, not stupid. Insane. The definition of insanity is doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again and expecting shit to change. That is crazy.

I think by services they mean self-hosted, web-based services, or things like sshd - services which work by actively serving connections on a particular port or ports.

No, not flavored coffee. PSLs. Different things. It's like saying "pork sandwiches" when someone brings up the McRib. It's not that simple. Food has a cultural component tied to its manufacture and identification. And, similar to the McRib, Starbucks style PSLs are food that probably shouldn't exist and which only does as a byproduct of market capitalism. They're the Lacanian 'object a' - an empty, manufactured falseness. We don't desire the thing itself, but the thing whose absence it symbolizes. What you're really consuming when you drink a PSL or a McRib is its innate mechanical predictability.

There's no navel gazing here. Navel gazing assumes introspection.

Being a person is complicated. This doesn't change as you get older and applying sweeping generalizations about people in certain age groups (or other time periods) trivializes the complexities of the world and the people who shape it and are shaped by it.

Ah, yes, generational antagonism. Tale as old as time. Still as completely fucking useless as it ever was.

PSLs are gross, overly sugarladen drinks and emblematic of both crass consumerism and America's obsession with unhealthy food. Halloween decorations are gaudy and an eyesore and also emblematic of crass consumerism, while also representing a non-trivial amount of non-biodegradable plastic waste that just winds up buried in landfills every year.

I think it was a 2220 or something similar. One of those old school Nokia slide phones.

I had a fucking Nokia brick phone in my 20s and nobody gave a shit what kind of phone I had. Maybe your friends were just....shall we say, not of the quality of person I would desire in members of my social circle.

complaining about a younger generation makes you sound old.

Complaining about any generation, as if it's a monolith, makes you sound small minded and ignorant. This is as true for older people as it is for the young. Many Gen Zers constantly blame all the world's problems on Baby Boomers and seems to think all their troubles will magically disappear once the oldest living generation is dead and buried. They're gonna be real fucking surprised the day they wake up and realize the only thing they ever accomplished socially with all that ageism was to normalize blind hatred of anyone over 40, which will be them before too long.

And, yes, I know that I'm unironically complaining about a generation in this post. Or at least a segment of them.