Yes, reading this I was thinking about how many of these problems go away with a nix environment. Certainly not all of them, but it’s a great way to get a reproducible build environment that includes direct specification of system dependencies.
5,129 karma · joined April 5, 2019
This has not been my experience with my fellow engineers IRL on average, but I do feel like there is a significant contingent of us who are ready and raring to yield engineering in its entirety to the LLMs.
But if you fundamentally disagree with a system, trying to avoid contributing to it in any way makes sense! Whether it’s making the algorithm or addictive more farming out moderation to underpaid contractors or building a cool open source library for frontend coding or whatever, you can choose not to do it.
Or you can say, my contribution is not meaningful enough to the broader organization for me to worry about my place in it. Or you can say, I will siphon money out of the beast and use it for good. You are still contributing to it, but how you feel about it is up to you.
Meta’s business is enabled by (practically) everyone who works for them, otherwise they wouldn’t pay them to work there. The storage compression algorithms are enabled by and contribute to the mission of the company.
If you’re comfortable knowing that your job is paid for by destroying society, and that your work makes that destruction a little more efficient, that’s fine. Storage algorithms are pretty low on the spectrum, and at least they may have some other uses if open sourced. For me, I wouldn’t do it, because I don’t want to contribute even in a small way to what Meta does. But others obviously can and do feel differently.
At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere, devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. At the other end is, let’s say, the cleaning staff. Meta would suffer if either group outright refused to work for them, but their mission is affected more by the engineers, they are harder to replace, they have many more options in terms of alternative employment, and they have greater knowledge of the impact of the business. Thus, they bear (much) higher relative moral responsibility. Compare to the cleaning staff, who, because of their relative lack of standing, agency (they likely work for some other company that Meta contracts with), or other options, bear negligible moral responsibility, even though their absence would likely make Meta’s offices uninhabitable.
Everyone working there is somewhere on that spectrum. They can make their own judgements about the degree to which they bear any moral culpability, but it’s not unfair to say that someone working on open source at Facebook still contributes to the overall mission by oss-washing facebook’s reputation, promulgating the brand into the engineering consciousness, etc., even if they are not directly contributing to giving girls depression.
I think most of that was because I didn’t understand emacs itself very well, and doom or whatever is an entire extra layer of code and idioms on top of that. Start adding in any custom packages you’ve installed and things get well outside of the realm where a beginner can comprehend them.
Like you, I also now have a pretty large number of packages, and rarely run into issues on update, with any issues that do occur being easy enough to fix. However, I think a lot of that comes from at this point having built my own emacs from the ground up, so I understand what all the components are doing, mostly…
Anyway, I hope the community continues to make the onboarding process more welcoming and easy. Personally, I am hopeful that guix will really take off at some point, because even though I get it now, I’d way rather read lisp than nix.
The (relatively) poor quality and difficulty of hooking my laptop up to the TV for criterion eventually pushed me to get one just for that, since there’s no word on if criterion has any plans to release an app for PS
The only thing I use but isn’t on there is criterion.
The thing about keeping your personality in your writing is that you will have to be prepared for it to rub some people the wrong way, even while some people (like me) like it much better: the only writing that no one dislikes is writing that no one likes, either.
Anyway, fight the corporate blandness, have fun in your writing, and keep it out there! That at least is my opinion.
PS if you add RSS I would gladly add your blog to my feed, based on this article.
Stuff: cast iron cookware (my favorite pans are circa ~1910-1920), acoustic guitar, knives, pen and paper
Anyway, obviously cultural identity isn’t inherent: you know what you grew up with. And it can easily turn toxic when we move from appreciating our own culture to putting down others’. But my life would be a lot poorer without it.
Yes, Austin is not like rural Texas. But also, the state legislature is in Austin and loves nothing more than voting down or making illegal any progressive measure Austin tries to take. While I was there, we voted pretty overwhelmingly for a solid plan to add some trains, but the state leg then made the method of funding illegal. Same on the plastic bag ban. Same on regulating uber and lyft.
And, much more critically, same on abortion and other issues that directly impact people’s fundamental rights. Not sure if Garza is still DA, but his power to selectively enforce state law is limited, and people can still be denied lifesaving care because of regressive state laws, or prosecuted for having a suspicious miscarriage. Any kind of care for trans people is similarly handicapped.
The state politics also mean that public nature access is not great. The few nice places in the vicinity of Austin are usually overcrowded, and there are far fewer state or national parks compared to other large states.
I am glad to have moved out, and I would never move back while the state politics remain what they are.
Also “reasonable weather most of the year” is a stretch. Reasonable if you love summer, I guess, but six months of brutal heat is not fun.
I can’t help but feel like it is all enabling a level of developer surveillance with which I am deeply uncomfortable, though.