I have been in software for 20 years and I never had trouble finding work until this past year. All of a sudden it’s a lot harder. I’m just one data point but this time feels different for me. The job market feels a lot more disjointed and full of spoofs and fake listings.
There’s little evidence that Tinkerbell or similar fairies exist, so I can only conclude that we’re below the existential belief threshold for fairies. Probably below threshold for Rule of Law too, at least in pockets… I wonder if the fairy threshold is similarly localized, or a universal ratio of unbelieving:believing consciousnesses. Maybe a strong enough localized belief in fairies can spontaneously instantiate them, but only for a small fraction of a second before the thought changes and the fairies slip back into the void of nonbeing.
Rule of Law is like Tinkerbell: it exists if enough people believe in it.
Current guy Carney, last guy Trudeau, before that, hmm. Wait, the guy who… smoked crack, I think? Doug Ford. Don’t remember what office he held.
That was close. I don’t know if I could manage any other country. Putin, Medvedev (if he’s still alive, would have to look it up), and… Dang I know the name of the head honcho of Chechnya but I can’t call it to mind.
What I’m saying is, it’s not as simple as them being willfully ignorant. The Republicans in my life (all poor) have been trained from birth to distrust any information not endorsed by an approved Republican news source. They are trained from birth to understand that anyone who isn’t an Upstanding Christian™ is inherently suspect and and dissonance between what they say and what an Upstanding Christian™ would say is proof that they are ignorant or lying or both. The ecosystem establishes itself as the sole arbiter of truth. That’s why they resist outside viewpoints, they’ve been programmed. And they have to be deprogrammed.
No, not in all cases. There are two types of people in a cult: the people who make money, and the people who don’t. The former are truly ghastly people who largely do know better, so they’re not actually ignorant. I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the latter type of cultist: the marks. They are the targets of a massive, concerted information attack designed to make them trust the cult and distrust anyone outside of the cult. They get hit with it from birth, and it molds them into a uniformly manipulable population and it is really really hard to see outside of it when you’re in it. It really is all-encompassing and grand-scale in a way that’s hard to describe if you haven’t seen it.
And it’s very, very important to distinguish between the people who are willfully blind (the money-makers) and those who are blind by design (the marks). As someone who was born and raised a mark, I have seen the difference and I have seen how failing to see the difference actually reinforces the groupthink of the cult. I think if we want to defeat the cult we need to see them clearly, and part of that is understanding why marks behave the way they do. It’s not because they’re evil and it’s not because they’re stupid. Those are thought-terminating cliches.
How did they get blind though? It seems like a foregone conclusion that everyone in the MAGA cult is just naturally stupid and willfully ignorant, and they aren’t. They are stupid by design and ignorant by design, and the cult weaponizes that judgement in service of keeping cultists from forming connections with people outside the cult. “The Democrats think we’re all dumb hicks when we’re just everyday folk trying to get by, can’t we all agree that they’re wrong and also probably lying about us to serve their own nefarious ends?” This question gets asked in a million variations on a 24-hour propaganda firehose and the obvious conclusion is “Yeah, they are wrong. They probably are lying too!” I have seen this play out in my life and once it’s been trained into a person it is extremely durable against outside influence. I see it in my family, a lot of them are deep in the MAGA verse. They aren’t dumb, some of them are genuinely brilliant, but they are in a cult that prevents them, by design, from seeing outside the bubble.
TW: discussion of suicide
I got out via a series of lucky breaks, and if those hadn’t gone my way, I don’t know if I would have been able to pull myself out. A lot of the people who feel the effects of the problems of the system, but are rendered blind to the true nature of them (and are therefore unable to effectively address them), kill themselves. It happens a lot and discussion of it is culturally suppressed. It’s seen as shameful. So it becomes another epidemic problem that goes undiscussed and unaddressed. I probably would have been one of the statistics if a few things in my life had gone a little bit differently. It was a relatively near miss as it is. Suicide happens for a lot of reasons, but in my experience, one of the big reasons for suicides among poor people is that they have intolerable problems and they can’t see any way to address them. They can’t see it by design. The system is designed to prevent certain things from being seen clearly, and it works.
I don’t mean to single you out because this is a common reaction but holy fuck am I tired of seeing it. Experiences are not universal. What is obvious to you may be completely invisible to millions of people through no fault of their own, and they need to be told. Again and again, until it sinks in. Until they learn it, they won’t be able understand the scale, nature, or origins of the problems they and their fellow humans face.
American Republican culture relentlessly reinforces the idea that personal struggles are personal, shameful problems; that most people are stable and well-off, and if they aren’t it’s because of laziness, addiction, gayness, or some other moral failing. So, everyone hides their suffering from their peers, all the time. They don’t know how other people are really doing because the entire cultural and informational ecosystem is built to suppress and obfuscate the prevalence of suffering. If you are in that ecosystem, it’s really hard to see outside of it. Articles like this are the first step in the pipeline out, and they need to be as obvious as they need to be. They need to exist, and they need to be perpetually written and re-written as long as the problem exists, no matter how obvious the problem may seem to someone on the outside.
Sorry for shouting.
Cutting internet access is a crime against humanity.
🎷 Ba-dum bum bum
Don’t entrust your data
to a massive corporation.
They don’t care about your people,
They don’t care about your nation!
They’ll sell you for a song,
it never takes too long,
Don’t give your data away.
Don’t! Give your data! A-waaaaaaay!
I could have worded that more clearly. I’m not saying consoles are themselves profitable, but that shipping consoles is the first step in building the captive audience that buys the games, accessories, live services, etc. that make consoles profitable. That vendor lock-in allows console makers to then milk buyers for the entire lifetime of the console.
If consoles were more like PCs i.e. anyone could play any game from any studio that cared to publish for the platform, console makers would have to focus on making their hardware stand out on its own. Which is particularly funny because, at least back when I was buying console gear (xbox 360 / beginning of the xbone was about the era I fell away from consoles) Microsoft was actually making really good peripherals. I still have my 360 controllers and I break them out for PC games whenever I have a bunch of people in the same room. they’re nice to use.
Instead, we get profit-maximizing tactics like taking a game that people want and putting it behind a several-hundred-dollar paywall, forcing people to either pony up for another 99% redundant console, or not playing the fun game everyone else has. No judgement to those who choose the latter, I bought the original xbox because Halo looked fun and my friends were playing it and guess what? It is a really fun game. I still play it from time to time. I just like it a lot better now that I don’t have to buy another expensive hunk of proprietary hardware.
This may be my favorite party game of all time. Exceptional concept, exceptional execution. Really solid balancing mechanics that don’t feel artificial because they’re (mostly) not. Really well designed graphics that still read pretty well when the screen is overcrowded, which happens often in this game (by design). Also, super cute graphics, I think. I main raccoon but I love all of them.
It’s set the standard of “casual couch / voicechat multiplayer” for me.
Because console makers make money by selling consoles, and exclusive titles are bait meant to entice players to buy into the platform? It seems like it lines up really well with how Xbox makes its money, but I don’t see how players benefit at all.
I’m not saying every comment is fake; I’m sure some people on that forum genuinely feel strongly about Halo or whatever remaining an Xbox exclusive, but that can’t possibly be their number one most important thing they want Xbox to do. I don’t have any evidence but my gut says there’s some skullduggery going on. I don’t think it would be too hard for Microsoft to manipulate a forum they control either, and the incentives seem pretty clearly aligned with Microsoft. It’s just very convenient for them that this article exists.
This reeks of manipulation. Console makers have an interest in making exclusives look attractive to studios. Players are interested in exclusives because… why? If you already have an Xbox why do you care if a title is exclusive or not?
I don’t trust it.
Whether software development is about improving anyone’s life is up to us. I used to do OSS development because I like making fun software, now I do OSS development because I am intent on permanently ruining the value prop of predatory capitalist software shops. Their tragic flaw is that they must always seek profit above all else, and it will be their undoing because I don’t want to get rich. I want them to get fucked.
When I was laid off I marked it on LinkedIn, and I noticed an uptick in “recruiters” that were funneling laid-off software devs into MTurk style gigs where they graded LLM responses for a set payout.
Pretty good way to shift your developer labor force from FTEs with benefits and labor law protections to gig workers with zero job security or bargaining power.
Accidentally elevating an extension with Backup Contributor to cluster-admin seems like a hell of a security boundary violation to me. Seems like the kind of thing a recently laid-off, possibly disgruntled admin could do a lot of damage with if they had a mind to. Like, company-exploding damage. I would think twice about trusting a vendor that sweeps this kind of thing under the rug.
Friends don’t let friends trust proprietary software.
On another note:
CERT/CC had initially scheduled public disclosure for June 1, 2026, but that disclosure never happened.
Is this a typo or is bleepingcomputer reporting from the near future?
people aren’t going to believe the TVA lied to them - they’re going to believe some evil left wing conspiracy is poisoning them.
They don’t believe the truth because they are the targets of a sophisticated, orchestrated information attack, designed to saturate the information environment with enough disinformation and misinformation that diverts attention away from the truth and toward an endless cycle of meaningless culture war bullshit. My parents were immersed in it their whole lives, and it hurt them their whole lives, and they went to their early graves not understanding why the system wouldn’t reward them for their loyalty. They just thought they hadn’t worked hard enough or been smart enough, or just weren’t lucky enough. Or that the Muslims, or the queers, or the blacks, or the socialists had by some poorly-defined contrivance, damaged society enough that the honest hard-working folks like themselves couldn’t live without constant acute anxiety about food and housing safety. They were so confused, and sad, and angry their whole lives. I wish I could have saved them from that. Still trying to save the living.
I didn’t mean to imply that whipping up anti-queer sentiment for political purposes was harmless, it is really bad, especially for queer folk in Iran. Just that it feels cohesive with their broader “geopolitical shitposter” posture.
Yep. Actually ran the rollout for Cursor at my last job, right before I got laid off lmao. I trained a bunch of devs on what do and what not to do. A bunch of my recent interviews have incorporated variations of the question “Do you think you could manage an LLM orchestration that would replace our junior devs?” and, I could but I don’t think I can muster the enthusiasm for it that people are looking for. Maybe that’s why I haven’t made it through the interview gauntlet. So much senior hiring right now seems to be looking for people to be the scapegoat for LLM bullshit and I ain’t looking for that kinda work.