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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • “I’m a helpful AI and automation tool,” reads the Auto News Desk’s bio. “I collect, analyze, and deliver information like high school sports scores and real estate transfers. My job is to help the newsroom deliver lots more useful information while freeing up their time to do important human-powered journalism.”

    You know, it’s bad enough that they’re using these godawful services to the detriment of both writers and readers alike, but what I particularly dislike is that all these shitty LLMs are being humanized with biographies and cute little names. Like little cheery mascots celebrating the death of human-powered industries.


  • So I do analysis on this type of data as part of my role at an online job board. Based on our data, a couple things stand out:

    • Overall job volume is down about 40% year-over-year. So the market in general is a lot tighter.
    • The proportion of remote roles is dropping, but slowly. A year ago about 70% of our roles were fully remote; now it’s about 60%.
    • The proportion of fully in-office roles has actually remained relatively stagnant, generally floating around 15%-20% at any given time. They’re also very difficult roles to fill because A) they’re limited to actual geographies and B) they are nobody’s first choice
    • Between February 2023 and now, the median # of applications we get per role has spiked sharply; particularly with remote roles. These roles unsurprisingly remain jobseekers’ first choice, and since they’re not limited by geography, tend to pull in a_much_ wider talent pool, especially since the overall number and proportion of remote roles continues to shrink.

    So what I’m seeing is many of these remote roles becoming supplanted by hybrid roles, which has pros and cons. They’re still limited by the same geographic constraints as in-office roles, since you’re not going to be applying to a hybrid role across the country, after all. So you’ll see less variety of employers. The advantage is that if there is a hybrid role that looks appealing to you, that you’ll be facing a lot less competition than you would for a fully remote role.





  • free as in beer yes, but not free as in the amount of time you will spend trying to install drivers for all your peripherals and then find yourself being castigated for asking for help in a GNU/Linux forum and being criticized by forum oldheads for not using the search even though you did use the search, but it only led you towards other threads which also all ended with terse messages to use the search, and then you’re directed to a 1200+ page megathread on driver issues and told to spend the next three months parsing through it repeatedly before daring to post again.



  • This is what I believe too. With interest rates rising, companies have been under a great deal of pressure to show profitability, and especially with Reddit aiming for an IPO, it seemed (superficially at least) a great idea to badger their userbase into adopting their mobile app, where they could be monetized to a much larger extent.

    So of course they made the conditions of using their new API incredibly onerous.

    The whole point was to discourage developers from using it. And then by cherrypicking a handful of select 3rd-party developers to offer more amenable terms to on the downlow, they can show that they were just being reasonable good guys, and doing their best to work with everyone, and that it must be the developers at fault if they decided to walk away and abandon their users.

    So yeah, they’ve managed to get their app center stage, and the only minor tradeoffs have been:

    • Launching/boosting a fleet of competitors (lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/tildes/etc)
    • Driving their very talented 3rd-party app devs into making apps for said competitors
    • Creating a massive breach of trust between Reddit Inc and its unpaid volunteer mods
    • Squandering any remaining goodwill Reddit once had in the tech community
    • Driving away folks who enjoy using 3rd-party apps
    • Ruining the image of the CEO
    • Negatively affecting the overall community to the point where it’s both a more hostile and unpleasant site, and simultaneously less moderated.

  • I agree with the author in that balancing actual work vs. meta-work like writing tickets/documentation/scoping tickets is always going to be a pain point regardless of the project management system in play. Jira can be fine in that regard, but it also gives PMs & managers an opportunity to tinker with things and “improve” workflows in the glorious name of adding value.

    It reminds me of the old quote about democracy: “Jira is the worst form of project management software except for all the others”.


  • I cannot believe that there are companies and non-wingnuts who are still actively using that site at this point. Like maybe at the start it was ha-ha funny watching him flail about with code printouts and unplugging random microservices leading to outages, but I feel like the moment he started actively funneling money to alt-right knuckleheads and human traffickers should have been enough of a kick in the pants for even folks heavily reliant on the platform to make their exit.


  • I see we’ve unfortunately brought over the trend of defaulting to assuming the worst intentions from Reddit, with a side portion of baseless accusations. While I’m disappointed that the community was removed, I think it can be easily explained by:

    • Speed Run the Content Moderation Learning Curve
    • The reality that, right or wrong, any significant legal action brought against them would be game over for the instance and personally devastating for the humans involved. Conde Nast they are not, and if Joe SIIA decides to put them in their crosshairs, the legal situation would be financially devastating.

    It’s reaaaaaally really easy to sit in the peanut gallery and talk shit about how they’re cowardly acquiescing when it’s not our neck in the noose.

    That being said, I feel like recent acts of defederation are only serving to highlight that the way forward in the fediverse is going to be having accounts on multiple instances in order to get the full breadth of offerings. In my case:

    • I initially signed up on lemmy.ml since that was, at the time the “main” instance.
    • Oh hey, kbin looks cool. I’ll sign up there and check it out.
    • Oh hey, people are saying that the lemmy.ml admins are evil commies or some shit. Welp I better make an account on lemmy.world in case anything goes sideways.
    • Oh hey, now I’m probably going to also need an account on dbzer0 as well, dope.



  • they were banned for not allowing LGBTQ+ content on their community.

    This is false. They were banned for maintaining a policy which denies that LGBTQ+ people have a right to exist as they are.

    Also, you were totally allowed to make anti-LGBTQ+ content. You were only prohibited from making anything pro- because let me tell you, if you’ve ever tried to get glitter out of an echo chamber, it is a total hassle.

    Rule #8: This community does not affirm practiced LGBTQ+ lifestyles, with the exception of the ace/aroace (asexual/aromatic-asexual) lifestyle in certain contexts. However, abuse towards members of the LGBTQ+ community will not be tolerated. Pro-LGBTQ+ content is not allowed; however, sincere questions and discourse about LGTBQ+issues are permitted.


  • This is one of the things that I’m struggling with right now as well. My reddit experience was heavily curated in favor of smaller subreddits, to the almost complete exclusion of top subreddits. The thing is, since Lemmy is so new, it hasn’t had the opportunity to build up a diverse array of specialized communities the same way. So basically right now all we have are mainly versions of the “big” Reddit communities, along with ones that decided to emigrate here from Reddit.

    But it turns out, content from “big” communities is often the same low-effort, lowest-common denominator stuff regardless which platform is hosting it. Memes, clickbait, and ragebait permeate the top results, because well shucks, that’s what people want to see and engage with, apparently.

    I’m hopeful that if/when Lemmy continues to grow, that it’ll become home to more active specialized communities. In the meanwhile, I’ve been trying to improve the experience as much as possible by A) trying to subscribe to more communities and B) slamming that block community button like I’m playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.


  • I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every company’s data culture is different, so you can’t simply say “X is the reason why they’re doing this”. It could be:

    • Maybe they are incorporating the data into agent/product reviews.
    • Maybe they are trying to guide product & feature development on a quantitative basis
    • Maybe at one point a product manager wanted to be “data-driven”, so a feedback system was set up, but now it’s basically ignored now that they haven’t been with the company for over a year and nobody wants to take ownership of it. But it’s more effort to remove than just leave in place.
    • Maybe it’s used when we want to highlight our successes, and ignored when we want to downplay results we don’t like

    What I’ve found is that there are a lot of confounding factors. For example, I work for a job board, and most people use the Overall Satisfaction category as more of a general measurement of how their job search is going, or whether or not they got the interview, rather than an assessment of how well our platform serves that purpose. And it’s usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going “right”.