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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • To be able to quit a job if they wanted you to do something that would contribute to making someone else’s life worth is a place of privilege, most people are living paycheck to paycheck

    But uh, that shouldn’t apply anywhere near as significantly to a software dev for YouTube, as compared to a person making shit tier wages at all call center or McDonalds or something.

    The software dev is getting paid a whole lot more, has a whole lot more pre-existing wealth, has a resume that would enable pursuing other, similarly though perhaps slightly less lucrative jobs in the same line of work, that don’t feed the beast as malevolently.

    The beast that disproportionately feeds upon the objectively less well off and more victimized lower wage workers.

    I used to work for MSFT. Large Intl. Import Export Firm.

    Then I realized I could not stomach the guilt.

    Took a voluntary paycut and worked a similar job for a Non Profit helping the homeless.

    (Software Engineer, DB Admin, Data Analyst, Root Cause Analyst, BI Reporter/Analyst, blah blah blah.)

    I am not holding software devs with huge salaries to any higher moral standard than I hold myself to.

    Of course many, many people are basically stuck in a position where they have no realistic alternatives.

    I very well understand the economic and societal factors that play into why people stay at jobs they hate, why people will not typically voluntarily risk their job for a moral stance.

    It would be very stupid and shortsighted to say that everyone working paycheck to paycheck ahould commit noble economic seppuku out of protest.

    But this thread is about Software Devs for one of the largest and best paying Software companies in the world.

    They could protest. They could quit. They could afford that.

    MSFT just fired a bunch of people who didn’t want to work on projects or for a company which is directly aiding and abetting the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

    The truth is most of these well off software devs do not have the moral backbone to do anything other than develop a self loathing complex, if they even care about anyone other than themselves at all.

    Most of the people that I knew, the corpos, they took their high incomes and immediately became AirBNB or traditional landlords or house flippers.

    They only cared about their net worth, all while basically pantomiming, Patrick Bateman style, concern and sympathy for all those affected by the problems they know they are excacerbating.


  • Yep, the classic dilemma of software devs with YouTube on their resume:

    Keep working for YouTube, or never work at any other software company or non profit organization or any other employer that wants software devs, or any other kind of job, and just starve to death.

    Its truly a shame the software dev’s decisions are so binary.




  • Yes sacrifice your livelihood so that someone else can implement the feature anyway.

    Yes, that’s called having a backbone, aligning your actions with your own moral code.

    This is the same logic as ‘well if I had quit my executioner job, someone else would have done it, therefore I am a morally blameless and non hypocritical executioner who is against the death penalty.’

    Just use an ad blocker.

    Obviously this is the easy solution for yourself personally. Costs you nothing, benefits yourself, allows the systemic bad practice to continue.

    The actually accurate analogue would be to contribute toward actually creating or maintaining a free and widely usable adblocker, an alternate platform, to do something that helps other people overcome the problem.



  • I’ve worked a number of tech jobs and quit all of the ones that involved me directly contributing to or outright directly performing an immoral act.

    I have no respect… pity, sure, but no respect for anyone that knowingly contributes to making the world worse for other people.

    You are trying to form a union, that is commendable, an actual step toward positive change.

    Most people?

    They knowingly contribute to systems that make the vast majority of people worse off, and then bitch about other people doing the same thing in another field.

    Or they don’t know or care about any harm their work causes, but still bitch about everyone else doing the same thing.

    First, do no harm is apparently too difficult to apply to one’s own life.

    If we all keep acting as cogs in the machine that makes everything worse… everything will obviously get worse.


  • In the long run, its not that different.

    We’ve already seen how the mass proliferation of targeted advertisements on corporate social media platforms promulgates mis/disinformation, radicalizes and stupifies and enrages society … to the point that all they understand is pathos, and then they vote for a fascist.






  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldElmo fanboys
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    4 days ago

    You are apparently unaware of the literal tens of thousands of youtube/twitter/media people who basically did/do nothing other than promote Elon and everything he does.

    Elon Musk Can Multitask Better Than You.

    Elon’s new Hyperloop will revolutionize transit in America!

    Tesla’s stock price will be $42,690 per share in 5 years, here’s why.

    Its about a million times less obnoxious than people pointing out that Gabe actually knows what he’s talking about.

    You can go outside and strike up a conversation with any random person, and they will almost certainly know who he is, and most people will still think he is some kind of genius real life Tony Stark.

    You can go outside and strike up a random convo with any random person about Gabe, and chances are 98% of people will have no idea who you are talking about, unless you are at some kind of nerd/geek type outing like a video game convention, and even then, people under 20 - 25 are not likely to know who he is.


  • In theory, yes / kind of.

    In practice, no, not really.

    It uses a different protocol (AT protocol) than the Fediverse ActivityPub protocol, which is what lemmy and mastadon and pixelfed are all built on, so it is not natively interoperable with ActivityPub based Fediverse.

    To do that you have to use bridging software of some kind.

    Also, as others have pointed out… even if you do make the approximate equivalent of your own instance, a PDS… all of these still go through ‘Relays’, which BlueSky controls.

    So… it is technically federated in the sense that it allows for anyone to make their own instance/PDS… but ultimately it is actually totally centralized.

    Instead of a web or weave of many to many connections of independent admins/maintainers, the structure much more resembles a top down hierarchy that is ultimately all controlled by a profit driven corporation.

    If the Relays go down, everything goes down.

    If BlueSky decides they don’t appreciate your instance, they have unitary power to delist or block it, from everyone.

    As compared with the Fediverse, where many different instances and communities can all pick and choose for themselves which other instances and communities they do and do not federate with, and where an outage particular to one community/instance only bricks that particular community/instance.


  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzMarine Scientists
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    5 days ago

    This will sound like a joke, or out of the Red Alert series, but the US does literally train dolphins and other sea mammals to patrol Naval bases, search for naval mines, attach torpedo homing beacons to enemy ships, aid in search/rescue and equipment recovery…

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_marine_mammal

    I do not know of a recorded instance of an actual man on man underwater fight… it would likely be absurdly classified by at least one, if not both sides.

    Frogmen usually do things like sabotage of underwater assets like infrastructure (internet trunk lines, oil and gas pipelines) or plant or remove sonar beacons… or infiltrate into enemy territory to then later sabotage something just under the water line, or a bit inland.

    The aggressor would not want to admit they were there, and the defender would almost certainly not want to admit their security perimeter had been breached, or would be unable to definitively assign blame unless they had very conclusive evidence, like a dead or captured frogman, or some kind of unnassailable, traceable materiel remnant.

    Most aquatic guard units would be attacking an underwater commando team from the surface, using some kind of non human detection method to search for and locate underwater aggressors.

    AFAIK nobody really maintains like a 24/7 underwater patrol of human divers to patrol sensitive areas. But I could be wrong.

    I guess uh, email Jesse Ventura rofl, maybe he knows more?


  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzMarine Scientists
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    5 days ago

    I know the joke is that guns are pointless in the hadal zone because cthulu lives there, but…

    A gun being wet or immersed in water rarely makes it totally incapable of firing at least once.

    Many modern firearms will fire a projectile at lethal (to a human) velocities while underwater, though range and accuracy will be greatly reduced.

    Getting a gun wet does not make it ineoperable.

    The primer and gunpowder combust and deflagrate without the need for external atmospheric oxygen, they contain their own oxidizers.

    The main problem is that if the gun’s barrel is full of water, this provides significantly more resistance than a barrel full of only air.

    The cartridge will fire, but the bullet’s velocity through water will be much lower, the weapon might not cycle its action properly (meaning you may have to manually do so)…

    … and the overpressure will cause significant damage to the weapon, possibly leading to it explosively dissambling itself after sustained overpressure usage.

    Which is actually comparable to running a bunch of overpressure, magnum + rounds through a firearm above water.

    There exist firearms and specialized cartidges (flechettes or otherwise) that are designed differently to operate consistently while underwater, as well as ‘amphibious’ firearms that work decently well submerged and not submerged, used on ambibious vehicles or by waterborne commandos like the Navy SEALs.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_firearm